THE COVERT CRIMINAL CARTEL OF THE SILICON VALLEY MAFIA
The Cartels of Silicon Valley - They Rape, Steal, Lie, Bribe, Black-List
and Abuse Society With Impunity
by Dean Baker
Mark Ames published an article (
http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/
) that should forever destroy any connection between the Silicon Valley
tech billionaires and libertarian worldviews. The article reports on a
court case that alleges that Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley
powerhouses actively conspired to keep their workers’ wages down.
According to documents filed in the case, these companies agreed not to
compete for each others’ workers dating at least as far back as 2005.
Workers in the industry have filed a class action suit that could lead to
the payment of billions of dollars in lost wages.
This case is striking at many levels, the most obvious being the effective
theft of large amounts of money by some of the richest people on the
planet from their employees. This is pernicious, but not altogether
surprising. After all, the boss stealing from the workers is as dog bites
man as it gets. Few would be surprised that rich people were willing to
break the law to get even richer.
The real news here is how the Silicon Valley barons (
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/books/review/book-review-railroaded-by-richard-white.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
) allegedly broke the law. The charge is that they actively colluded to
stifle market forces. They collectively acted to prevent their workers
from receiving the market-clearing wage. This means not only that they
broke the law, and that they acted to undermine the market, but that they
really don’t think about the market the way libertarians claim to think
about the market.
The classic libertarian view of the market is that we have a huge number
of people in the market actively competing to buy and sell goods and
services. They acknowledge the obvious — some actors are much bigger than
others — but there is so much competition that no individual or company
can really hope to have much impact on market outcomes.
This point is central to their argument that the government should not
interfere with corporate practices. For example, if we think our local
cable company is charging too much for cable access, our libertarian
friends will insist that the phone company, satellite television or other
competitors will step in to keep prices in line. They would tell the same
story if the issue were regulating the airlines, banks, health insurance,
or any other sector where there is reason to believe that competition
might be limited.
They would tell the same story on the labor side. If we are concerned that
workers are getting low wages then the answer is to improve their skills
through education and training rather than raise the minimum wage. If
workers were worth more than the minimum wage, then the market would
already be paying them more than the minimum wage.
They have the same story when it comes to requiring family leave, sick
days, or other benefits. Libertarians would say that if workers value
these benefits they would negotiate for them and be willing to trade off
wages. There is no reason for the government to get involved.
This story about the wonders of the free market is simple in its appeal
and it has the great implication that nothing should be done to keep the
rich from getting ever richer. However the Silicon Valley non-compete
agreements show that this is not how the tech billionaires believe the
market really works. This is just a story they peddle to children and
gullible reporters.
If they really believed the market had a deep sea of competitors in which
no individual actor could count for much, then their non-compete
agreements would serve no purpose. If Google, Apple, Intel and the other
biggies agreed not to hire each others’ workers, it really wouldn’t affect
their pay since there would always be new upstarts ready to jump in and
hire away underpaid engineers.
The fact the Silicon Valley honchos took the time to negotiate and
presumably enforce these non-compete agreements was because they did not
think that there were enough competitors to hire away their workers. They
believed that they had enough weight on the buy-side of the market for
software engineers that if they agreed to not to compete for workers, they
could keep their wages down.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the Silicon Valley billionaires really are
not libertarians. After all, much of their fortunes rest on patents and
copyrights, both of which are government granted monopolies: the opposite
of a free market.
But for some reason, seeing the tech whiz-kids forming a cartel to keep
down their workers’ wages seems an even more direct violation of any
belief in libertarian principles. This is the same sort of cartel behavior
that we associate with the cigar-chomping robber barons of the late 19th
century. It turns out that the biggest difference between the tech
billionaires of the Internet Age and the high rollers of the railroad age
is the cigars.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and
Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble
Economy.
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Is Silicon Valley’s Immigration freak-out actually about cutting off the
supply of young Asian boys for the tech pervert CEO’s?
Is Silicon Valley’s Immigration freak-out actually about cutting off the
supply of young Asian boys for the tech pervert
CEO’s? By Ashely
Fin Silicon Valley and San Francisco
tech oligarchs have a Gay Tech Industry Mafia.
When you pack all of those elite white boys into snot-nose … Continue
reading Is Silicon Valley’s Immigration freak-out actually about cutting
off the supply of young Asian boys for the tech pervert CEO’s? (
https://newyorknewssentinal.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/is-silicon-valleys-immigration-freak-out-actually-about-cutting-off-the-supply-of-young-asian-boys-for-the-tech-pervert-ceos/
)
Tagged Elon Musk, Facebook, Gay Mafia, Google, ladyboys, larry page, nick
denton, queer mafia, Reid Hoffman, Silicon Valley Billionaires, Silicon
Valley Cartel, silicon valley gay mafia, Trump vs. Silicon Valley
================================================
Silicon Valley Cartel Convinced Hillary Clinton They Could Manipulate The
Election For Her To Win: THEY BLEW IT
Dems don't want Hillary Clinton to run again, ever, according to poll
(mic.com) The DNC's Google, Twitter, Facebook, Ebay, Linkedin Cartel sold
the Clintons on their belief that they controlled psychological warfare
technologies that could gaurantee her win, like they did when they rigged
the election … Continue reading Silicon Valley Cartel Convinced Hillary
Clinton They Could Manipulate The Election For Her To Win: THEY BLEW IT
https://newyorknewssentinal.wordpress.com/2016/12/23/silicon-valley-cartel-convinced-hillary-clinton-they-could-manipulate-the-election-for-her-to-win-they-blew-it/
=================================================
SILICON VALLEY CARTEL TAKE-DOWN PLAN SHOWS UP ON WEB
https://newyorknewssentinal.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/silicon-valley-cartel-take-down-plan-shows-up-on-web/
Who is In “The Silicon Valley Cartel”? Who are these folks we hear so much
about?: Gilman Louie- Creator on In-Q-Tel and NVCA James Breyer- Creator
of In-Q-Tel and NVCA Joe Lonsdale – VC, charged with rape Larry Summers-
White House, charged with organizing "skims" of DOE cash to intermediaries
Larry Page- Google, In-Q-Tel Lachlan Seward- … Continue reading Who is In
“The Silicon Valley Cartel”? Who are these folks we hear so much about?:
https://newyorknewssentinal.wordpress.com/2016/08/28/who-is-in-the-silicon-valley-cartel-who-are-these-folks-we-hear-so-much-about-4/
The big dirty players in the Silicon Valley Mafia Cartel are: Amy Pascal;
Bill Daley; Bill Lockyer; Brian Goncher; Daniel Cohen; David Axelrod;
David Drummond; David Plouffe; David E. Shaw; Dianne Feinstein; Elon Musk;
Eric Holder; Eric Schmidt; John Zaccarro, Jr.; Frank Giustra; Nick Denton;
Harry Reid; Haim Saban; Hillary and Bill Clinton; Ira Ehrenpreis; Jay
Carney; James Comey; Jared Cohen; Jeffrey Katzenberg; John Doerr; Harvey
Weinstein; Yasmin Green; Jonathan Silver; Ken Brody; Lachlan Seward; Judge
Stewart M. Bernstein; Larry Page; Google; Alphabet; YouTube; Facebook;
In-Q-Tel; Amazon; Twitter; WordPress.Org; The Law Firm of Perkins Coi;
Mark Zuckerberg; Martin LaGod; Matt Rogers; Marc Benioff; Michael Birch;
S. Donald Sussman; Pierre Omidyar; Rahm Emanual; Raj Gupta; Ray Lane; Tom
Perkins; Robert Rubin; Rob Friedman; Reid Hoffman; Richard Blum; Robert
Gibbs; Robert Shwarts; Roger Altman; The Law Firm of Covington and
Burling; Sanford Robertson; Steve Jurvetson; Steve Rattner; Steve Westly;
Steven Chu; Steve Spinner; Susie Tompkins Buell; George Soros; Warren
Buffet; Tom Steyer; The Clinton Foundation, Tim Draper; Valarie Jarrett;
Jeffrey Epstein; Vinod Khosla; Michelle Lee; The law firm of Wilson
Sonsini Goodrich and Rosatti; Lawrence Summers; Marc Andreessen Sheryl
Sandberg; Yuri Milner; Fenwick & West LLP; James W. Breyer; McBee
Strategic; Mike Sheehy; Nancy Pelosi; Gilman Louie; Thomas J. Kim; Ping
Li; Greylock Capital, Accel Partners; Jim Swartz; Bank Menatep; Alisher
Asmanov; Marc L. Andreessen; Peter Thiel; Clarion Capital; Richard
Wolpert; Robert Ketterson; David Kilpatrick; Tesla Motors; Solyndra;
BrightSource; IDG Capital Partners; Goldman Sachs; Morgan Stanley; State
Street Corporation; JP Morgan Chase; Lloyd Blankfein; Jamie Dimon; Steve
Cutler; Rodgin Cohen; Sullivan Cromwell, LLP; Jeff Markey; Steve McBee;
Michael F. McGowan; Toni Townes-Whitley; CGI Federal; Todd Y. Park;
Frank M. Sands, Sr.; Robin Yangong Li; Parker Zhang; Jonathan Goodman;
Gawker Media; Jalopnik; Adrian Covert, John Herrman; Gizmodo Media; K2
Intelligence; WikiStrat; Podesta Group; Fusion GPS; Think Progress; Media
Matters; Black Cube; Debbie Wasserman, The DNC Executive Committee;
Correct The Record; Stratfor; ShareBlue; Sid Blumenthal; David Brock;
Barack Obama; Sen. Robert Menendez; Jerry Brown; Ken Alex; Susan Rice;
Kamala Harris; Bruce Ohr; Nellie Ohr; and other names to be identified in
court...
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Cartels, Collusion and Price Fixing in Silicon Valley
- The intrigue behind Michael Arrington's new bombshell
John Hudson
Michael Arrington has a history of breaking big news stories for his
technology site, TechCrunch. His modus operandi is "to bust the door down
and clean the mess up later." Today--he's got a big mess to clean up.
On Tuesday night, Arrington published a sizzling bombshell about powerful
Silicon Valley investors seemingly engaged in collusion and price fixing.
The story begins when Arrington is tipped off to a secret meeting of 10
"super angel" investors at a wine bar in San Francisco. Arrington says
these investors account for "nearly 100% of early stage startup deals in
Silicon Valley." When he walks in on their meeting, the silence is
"deafening" and he says he's "never seen a more guilty looking group of
people."
After an awkward exchange, he leaves the meeting but manages to speak with
a handful of investors afterwards to find some damning testimonies.
According to Arrington, the super angel investors were colluding against
both entrepreneurs and traditional venture capital firms. They wanted to
act together to "keep traditional venture capitalists out of deals
entirely" and "keep out new angel investors" from entering the market and
driving up valuations. They also kept an online wiki to coordinate their
ideas. A handful of attendees said they were "extremely uncomfortable"
with the manner of the discussion and Arrington explains why:
What's wrong with this? Collusion and price fixing,
that's what. It is absolutely unlawful for competitors to act together to
keep other competitors out of the market, or to discuss ways to keep
prices under control. And that appears to be exactly what this group is
doing.
This isn't minor league stuff. We're talking about
federal crimes and civil prosecutions if in fact that's what they're
doing. I had a quick call with an attorney this morning, and he confirmed
that these types of meetings are exactly what these laws were designed to
prevent.
Hold On, Give Arrington Some Credit Here, writes Henry Blodget at Business
Insider:
In other industries, such behavior is known as "price
fixing" and "collusion" -- and it's illegal.
We... want to tip our hat to Mike for his story (it's
great) and his, well, balls. It's this sort of work that makes this new
form of journalism so valuable and fun. It's also the type of work that
would make the tech industry barely notice if the mainstream media just
rolled over and died.
As Mike observes, many of the folks he calls out for
this meeting are friends and sources, some of whom will undoubtedly be
furious at him for exposing their little game.
It takes balls to lob a grenade at your friends like
that. It also takes finesse and skill (and power) to do it and still have
many of those folks rushing to call you after the meeting to preserve
their relationships with you.
I'm With Arrington, writes Mike Masnick at TechDirt:
While there are plenty more angels in Silicon Valley
than just 15, it is true that, these days, companies getting investments
from some of the "top" angels is seen as the ticket needed to move up the
chain to big name venture capitalists as well. So hearing that a group of
these investors may be colluding to effectively fix pricing is bad news
for the supposed "meritocracy" of funding in Silicon Valley, and should be
seen as a pretty serious problem.
Along those lines, I should say kudos to Arrington for
publishing such a story. While he doesn't name names, these investors are
the key sources for many of his stories, so publishing this story is
probably burning some bridges with sources. It's good to see that he
wouldn't let that get in the way
http://www.abeldanger.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/The-Silicon-Valley-Mafia-Update-4.2-1.pdf
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons
Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal
wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians
in their pockets.
By Joel Kotkin
A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and for
many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional
business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their
pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring,
risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better.
Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are
something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control
our future politics, media, and commerce seem without limits. Amazon,
Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber may be improving our lives in many
ways, but they also are disrupting old industries—and the lives of the
many thousands of people employed by them. And as the tech boom has
expanded, these individuals and companies have gathered economic resources
to match their ambitions.
And as their fortunes have ballooned, so has their hubris. They see
themselves as somehow better than the scum of Wall Street or the trolls in
Houston or Detroit. It’s their intelligence, not just their money, that
makes them the proper global rulers. In their contempt for the less
cognitively gifted, they are waging what The Atlantic recently called “a
war on stupid people.”
I had friends of mine who attended MIT back in the 1970s tell me they used
to call themselves “tools,” which told us us something about how they
regarded themselves and were regarded. Technologists were clearly bright
people whom others used to solve problems or make money. Divorced from any
mystical value, their technical innovations, in the words of the French
sociologist Marcel Mauss, constituted “a traditional action made
effective.” Their skills could be applied to agriculture, metallurgy,
commerce, and energy.
In recent years, like Skynet in the Terminator, the tools have achieved
consciousness, imbuing themselves with something of a society-altering
mission. To a large extent, they have created what the sociologist Alvin
Gouldner called “the new class” of highly educated professionals who would
remake society. Initially they made life better—making spaceflight
possible, creating advanced medical devices and improving communications
(the internet); they built machines that were more efficient and created
great research tools for both business and individuals. Yet they did not
seek to disrupt all industries—such as energy, food, automobiles—that
still employed millions of people. They remained “tools” rather than
rulers.
With the massive wealth they have now acquired, the tools at the top now
aim to dominate those they used to serve. Netflix is gradually undermining
Hollywood, just as iTunes essentially murdered the music industry. Uber is
wiping out the old order of cabbies, and Google, Facebook, and the social
media people are gradually supplanting newspapers. Amazon has already
undermined the book industry and is seeking to do the same to apparel,
supermarkets, and electronics.
Past economic revolutions—from the steam engine to the jet engine and the
internet—created in their wake a productivity revolution. To be sure, as
brute force or slower technologies lost out, so did some companies and
classes of people. But generally the economy got stronger and more
productive. People got places sooner, information flows quickened, and new
jobs were created, many of them paying middle- and working-class people a
living wage.
This is largely not the case today. As numerous scholars including Robert
Gordon have pointed out, the new social-media based technologies have had
little positive impact on economic productivity, now growing at far lower
rates than during past industrial booms, including the 1990s internet
revolution.
Much of the problem, notes MIT Technology Review editor David Rotman, is
that most information investment no longer serves primarily the basic
industries that still drive most of the economy, providing a wide array of
jobs for middle- and working-class Americans. This slowdown in
productivity, notes Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of
Chicago Booth School of Business, has decreased gross domestic product by
$2.7 trillion in 2015—about $8,400 for every American. “If you think
Silicon Valley is going to fuel growing prosperity, you are likely to be
disappointed,” suggests Rotman.
One reason may be the nature of “social media,” which is largely a
replacement for technology that already exists, or in many cases, is
simply a diversion, even a source of time-wasting addiction for many.
Having millions of millennials spend endless hours on Facebook is no more
valuable than binging on television shows, except that TV actually employs
people.
At their best, the social media firms have supplanted the old advertising
model, essentially undermining the old agencies and archaic forms like
newspapers, books, and magazines. But overall information employment has
barely increased. It’s up 70,000 jobs since 2010, but this is after losing
700,000 jobs in the first decade of the 21st century.
Tech firms had once been prodigious employers of American workers. But
now, many depend on either workers abroad of imported under H-1B visa
program. These are essentially indentured servants whom they can hire for
cheap and prevent from switching jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs in
Silicon Valley, and many corporate IT departments elsewhere, rent these
“technocoolies,” often replacing longstanding U.S. workers.
Expanding H-1Bs, not surprisingly, has become a priority issue for
oligarchs such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a host of tech firms,
including Yahoo, Cisco Systems, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, firms
that in some cases have been laying off thousands of American workers.
Most of the bought-and-paid-for GOP presidential contenders, as well as
the money-grubbing Hillary Clinton, embrace the program, with some
advocating expansion. The only opposition came from two candidates
disdained by the oligarchs, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Now cab drivers, retail clerks, and even food service workers face
technology-driven extinction. Some of this may be positive in the long
run, certainly in the case of Uber and Lyft, to the benefit of consumers.
But losing the single mom waitress at Denny’s to an iPad does not seem to
be a major advance toward social justice or a civilized society—nor much
of a boost for our society’s economic competitiveness. Wiping out cab
drivers, many of them immigrants, for part-time workers driving Ubers
provides opportunity for some, but it does threaten what has long been one
of the traditional ladders to upward mobility.
Then there is the extraordinary geographical concentration of the new tech
wave. Previous waves were much more highly dispersed. But not now. Social
media and search, the drivers of the current tech boom, are heavily
concentrated in the Bay Area, which has a remarkable 40 percent of all
jobs in the software publishing and search field. In contrast, previous
tech waves created jobs in numerous locales.
This concentration has been two-edged sword, even in its Bay Area
heartland. The massive infusions of wealth and new jobs has created
enormous tensions in San Francisco and its environs. Many San Franciscans,
for example, feel like second class citizens in their own city. Others
oppose tax measures in San Francisco that are favorable to tech companies
like Twitter. There is now a movement on to reverse course and apply “tech
taxes” on these firms, in part to fund affordable housing and homeless
services. Further down in the Valley, there is also widespread opposition
to plans to increase the density of the largely suburban areas in order to
house the tech workforce. Rather than being happy with the tech boom, many
in the Bay Area see their quality of life slipping and upwards of a third
are now considering a move elsewhere.
Once, we hoped that the technology revolution would create ever more
dispersion of wealth and power. This dream has been squashed. Rather than
an effusion of start-ups we see the downturn in new businesses.
Information Technology, notes The Economist, is now the most heavily
concentrated of all large economic sectors, with four firms accounting for
close to 50 percent of all revenues. Although the tech boom has created
some very good jobs for skilled workers, half of all jobs being created
today are in low-wage services like retail and restaurants—at least until
they are replaced by iPads and robots.
What kind of world do these disrupters see for us? One vision, from
Singularity University, co-founded by Google’s genius technologist Ray
Kurzweil, envisions robots running everything; humans, outside the
programmers, would become somewhat irrelevant. I saw this mentality for
myself at a Wall Street Journal conference on the environment when a
prominent venture capitalist did not see any problem with diminishing
birthrates among middle-class Americans since the Valley planned to make
the hoi polloi redundant.
Once somewhat inept about politics, the oligarchs now know how to press
their agenda. Much of the Valley’s elite–venture capitalist John Doerr,
Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, and Google—routinely use the political
system to cash in on subsidies, particularly for renewable energy,
including such dodgy projects as California’s Ivanpah solar energy plant.
Arguably the most visionary of the oligarchs, Elon Musk, has built his
business empire largely through subsidies and grants.
Musk also has allegedly skirted labor laws to fill out his expanded car
factory in Fremont, with $5-an-hour Eastern European labor; even when
blue-collar opportunities do arise, rarely enough, the oligarchs seem
ready to fill them with foreigners, either abroad or under dodgy visa
schemes. Progressive rhetoric once used to attack oil or agribusiness
firms does not seem to work against the tech elite. They can exploit labor
laws and engage in monopoly practices with little threat of investigation
by progressive Obama regulators.
In the short term, the oligarchs can expect an even more pliable regime
under our likely next president, Hillary Clinton. The fundraiser
extraordinaire has been raising money from the oligarchs like Musk and
companies such as Facebook. Each may vie to supplant Google, the company
with the best access to the Obama administration, over the past seven
years.
What can we expect from the next tech-dominated administration? We can
expect moves, backed also by corporate Republicans, to expand H-1B visas,
and increased mandates and subsidies for favored sectors like electric
cars and renewable energy. Little will be done to protect our
privacy—firms like Facebook are determined to limit restrictions on their
profitable “sharing” of personal information. But with regard to efforts
to break down encryption systems key to corporate sovereignty, they will
defend privacy, as seen in Apple’s resistance to sharing information on
terrorist iPhones. Not cooperating against murderers of Americans is
something of fashion now among the entire hoodie-wearing programmer
culture.
One can certainly make the case that tech firms are upping the national
game; certain cab companies have failed by being less efficient and
responsive as well as more costly. Not so, however, the decision of the
oligarchs–desperate to appease their progressive constituents–to
periodically censor and curate information flows, as we have seen at
Twitter and Facebook. Much of this has been directed against politically
incorrect conservatives, such as the sometimes outrageous gay provocateur
Milo Yiannopoulos.
There is a rising tide of concern, including from such progressive icons
as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, about the extraordinary market,
political, and culture power of the tech oligarchy. But so far, the
oligarchs have played a brilliant double game. They have bought off the
progressives with contributions and by endorsing their social liberal and
environmental agenda. As for the establishment right, they are too
accustomed to genuflecting at mammon to push back against anyone with a
10-digit net worth. This has left much of the opposition at the extremes
of right and left, greatly weakening it.
Yet over time grassroots Americans may lose their childish awe of the tech
establishment. They could recognize that, without some restrictions, they
are signing away control of their culture, politics, and economic
prospects to the empowered “tools.” They might understand that technology
itself is no panacea; it is either a tool to be used to benefit society,
increase opportunity, and expand human freedom, or it is nothing more than
a new means of oppression.
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