When the Silicon Valley Frat Cartel Tried To Bury Outsiders, They Discovered That They Were Seeds

When you bury a seed, it blooms, and blooms and blooms and millions like it fill the fields...

As American streets are flooded with protests so large that they have changed the course of history, eyes are now turned towards the exclusionary, misogynist, money-laundering, bribery-based, hooker-trafficking frat boys that run Silicon Valley.

In the latter half of the 19th century, before the advent of income tax, there existed a class of millionaires in this country who used many unscrupulous means to gain immense wealth, separating themselves from the working class of the country by previously unheard-of multiples.

The Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Carnegies, the Mellons, the Rockefellers and numerous other “industrialists” (today, we would call them globalists) were able to amass great fortunes and live like royalty, with much of their power enabled through the workings of the politicians they influenced via graft.

In their day and age, they were known as “robber barons,” after the wealthy lords of aristocratic Germany, where landowners charged commoners an illegal tax for passing over their land.

Historian Hal Bridges wrote that the robber barons were “business leaders in the United States from about 1865 to 1900… a set of avaricious rascals who habitually cheated and robbed investors and consumers, corrupted government, fought ruthlessly among themselves, and in general carried on predatory activities comparable to those of the robber barons of medieval Europe.”

Many students of history argue that America’s robber barons were only tamed by the introduction of antitrust laws such as the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act of 1890 and 1914, respectively, as well as the introduction of income tax in 1913 and the stock market crash of 1929. Until that time, the power of these business titans was left mostly unchecked.

Many politicians — especially in large cities like New York — were bought off by their riches and voted for (or even created) laws that would favor and broaden these men’s empires. Regulations, agreements, waivers and amendments were passed that allowed many of these wealth-hoarders to assemble legal monopolies that would almost certainly be outlawed today.

In fact, if one took the wealth of some of these men (like the Rockefellers) and adjusted it for inflation into today’s dollars, their riches would surpass those of even Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.

But it’s these latter figures who now belong to today’s equivalent class of men that can be considered the “robber barons” of our own era — the billionaires of high-tech Silicon Valley.

When the Internet boom first occurred in the 1990s, Silicon Valley was quick to tell Congress that Internet sales should not be subject to taxes and that the Internet should not be regulated, lest this burgeoning marketplace be trampled to death before it could fully blossom.

But that was then. In the interim, fortunes have been made, and a very small number of players (Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, Craigslist, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber) have dominated specific product niches and made certain savvy players such as the aforementioned Bezos and Gates — along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Brian Chesky, Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison, among others — insanely rich.

In fact, these people’s extreme wealth, along with the relatively unregulated and untaxed industry that gave them that wealth, has convinced many of them that they have the innate right to tinker with markets and monopolies without undue fear of being legislated against or taxed as other industry leaders have been.

In many cases — Bezos, Zuckerberg and Gates being some of the most notorious examples — they’ve been falling all over themselves to enter still further niches — automated cars, robotics and drones, for example — in order to dominate those markets also by using their tremendous fortunes to either acquire the leading players in these industries or to drive them out of business through ruthless competition.

Along the way, the enormous power their market monopolies have given them in terms of the data they’ve been able to compile and the information they’ve been able to acquire on ordinary American citizens has enriched them even further — some would say dangerously so.

In many ways, these men (there are virtually zero women among their number) are the proper inheritors of the “robber baron” title today; they’ve become so wealthy, most often through unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities of timing and markets, that the rest of us can’t ever hope to come anywhere near their gargantuan fortunes.

Their companies have a permanent presence in Washington, D.C. and rank among the very top retainers of lobbying firms. Left unencumbered, these “masters of the universe” could have a very real potential of ruling over the lives of nearly everyone on the planet in some way for the rest of our lifetimes.

Even now, rumors have been floated that tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Cuban might want to run for president in 2020 or 2024. Nearly all of these men are large contributors to the Democratic Party and have met with Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris both one-on-one and in groups.

High among their concerns are that immigrants keep flowing across the country’s borders in order to keep their biggest costs — intelligent labor — low. Quick to outsource to foreign countries and even quicker to leave profits offshore to evade taxes, these billionaires are extremely adept at using the law and corrupt politicians to their advantage.

For most of them, the concerns of the common man (the users of their properties) rank far beneath whatever it is that will further expand and perpetuate their empires. The gap between their ilk and that of the working class has multiplied in the last two decades, at the expense of America’s middle class.

Like the robber barons of old, these men are addicted to money, and they can never have enough of it to satisfy their own egos. To them, the laws of the United States are just a tool to access more wealth, and whatever political levers and switches they need to throw in order to get their way are simply a means toward an ultimate end.

After more than 20 years in many cases, it’s now long past time to put the regulatory brakes on these people’s ventures and business power grabs before we turn into a society ruled by technology and a few men behind thin, oversized flat-panel displays. Companies that have too much power and too much wealth concentrated in too few hands may need to be broken up just as the railroad concerns, oil cartels and steel companies of the original robber baron days were by Washington.

Trent Lapinski says: "Silicon Valley is run like a cartel, and they are essentially modern day robber barons....

Bill Snyder of globally published InfoWorld Magazine says: " Silicon Valley: Land of the 21st-century robber barons...

Zuckerberg, of course, had not conquered Gaul. He had not scattered the German armies nor subjugated Britain, nor crossed the Rubicon and become first consul. He had not visited death and terror upon a continent, nor brought an end to an old republic, setting off a chain of intrigues that would birth the mightiest empire in the history of the world. No. Mark Zuckerberg had made a shit ton of money.

By April of this year, Facebook stock was worth more than $116 a share, up from its initial offering of $38. The social network had made its early investors even richer than they had ever anticipated. That same month, The Economist put Zuckerberg on its cover for the second time but now without detectable irony. His face appeared on a marble statue of Augustus, seated in cape and laurel crown beside a tiny globe. “IMPERIAL AMBITIONS” roared the headline. Mark’s outstretched arm gave the imperial thumbs-up. He liked it.

The press enjoys excitedly praising tech titans by comparing them to fantastical and mythical figures. Zuckerberg is Caesar. Elon Musk, a wizard. Peter Thiel, who believes that he lives in the moral universe of Lord of the Rings, is a vampire. I do not know if these men believe that they have the supernatural powers the media claims. Maybe they do. I do know that they do not mind the perception, or at least have done nothing to combat it, even among those critics who believe that they’re cartoon villains.

This might not be so bad if the phenomenon were limited to daft profiles by fawning magazine writers. But this Hegelian fan fiction is nowhere more potent than from the mouths of the Disruptors themselves. Mark Zuckerberg speaks in the voice of God. Shane Smith, by his own account, is the Stalin of Vice. Silicon Valley investor Carl Icahn was called “evil Captain Kirk” by fellow billionaire Marc Andreessen, before he was himself dubbed Dr. Evil by Rod Dreher, who has evidently not absorbed a cultural reference since 1999. When Elon Musk worries that Larry Page is hurtling toward AI without a sufficient appreciation of the risks, he calls it “summoning the demon.” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky, a typical case, says his food delivery application for depressed millennials is “disrupting the paradigm” by showing people that “the era of the paper menu” is over. AirBnB’s mission statement laments “the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century,” which “displaced” “feelings of trust and belonging”; their mission is to turn the world back into the “village” of simpler eras by encouraging longstanding residents of gentrifying areas to rent out their homes to monied travelers. Some firms are more modest: HubSpot, a marketing and sales platform, is merely on a mission to make the whole world “more inbound,” which is to say, more reliant on their blogging tips for small businesses.

Even President Obama speaks of Silicon Valley as if it were an industry for madcap geniuses alone, a land of such earth-changing potential that it’s somewhere he might find himself once he’s left the Oval Office. When he chides citizens of the Valley, he chides them like a Dr. Frankenstein warning his monster about hubris: “Sometime we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense that we just have to blow up the system or create this parallel society,” he told the Frontiers Conference last October. The president believes that sense is wrong, of course, but where did he get the idea that tech CEOs were capable of these feats in the first place?

Let us state the obvious: None of these men are Roman Emperors, and they haven’t got the wherewithal to “blow up” anything but a stock market bubble. They are not Lex Luthors or Gandalfs or Stalins. Their products do not bring about revolutions. They are simply robber barons, JP Morgans and Andrew Mellons in mediocre T-shirts. I have no doubt that many are preternaturally intelligent, hardworking people, and it is a shame that they have dedicated these talents to the mundane accumulation of capital. But there is nothing remarkable about these men. The Pirates of Silicon Valley do not have imperial ambitions. They have financial ones.

The vast majority of Silicon Valley startups, the sort that project lofty missions and managed improbably lucrative IPOs despite never having graced the cover of The Economist or the frontal cortex of the president, work precisely like any other kind of mundane sales operation in search of a product: Underpaid cold-callers receive low wages and less job security in exchange for a foosball table and the burden of growing a company as quickly as possible so that it can reach a liquidation event. Owners and investors get rich. Managers stay comfortable. The employees get hosed. None of this is particularly original. At least the real robber barons built the railroads.

Like all slim ranks of oligarchy, the Silicon Valley billionaires hate and fear nothing more than ordinary people. This manifests itself in mundane ways, in their open, cartoonish class spite (why, they ask, must Innovators in San Francisco be burdened by the existence of homeless riff-raff?); it is revealed in their most contemplative moments too. Peter Thiel has said that when the history of the 21st century is written, René Girard will be remembered as one of its greatest intellectuals. Girard is best known for the contention that all human desire is mimetic, that not only aesthetic taste but even hunger and lust are modeled on the desires of others. Perhaps this is why Thiel does not believe that capitalism and democracy are compatible. We know which side he’s chosen. So long as he and his fellows can continue to exploit that same mimetic tendency to persuade people that they are superhuman and essential to their flourishing, his side will continue to win.

The sins of the prestige firms are no less mundane. While each at least can claim a real and viable product, their evil is nothing so spectacular as the demonic. As The New York Times, Guardian, and others have reported, even the well-compensated white-collar workers of companies like Amazon and Facebook face notoriously brutal labor conditions. For the warehouse workers and contract laborers required to keep those companies running, matters are even worse. “When you’re in shipping and they double or triple their workforce over the winter holidays, you’re working at times in below zero temps INSIDE the warehouse,” one Amazon warehouse worker wrote to Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan in 2013. Efforts to unionize employees have been met with duplicity beyond ordinary managerial resistance. Quartz reported in February on sinister attempts to thwart organization at Uber. Not content to resist their own employees’ efforts to unionize, Uber has also worked to undermine other labor guilds, including illegal operations in cities that have led to the destruction of local taxi businesses.

AirBnb, despite its Keatsian mission, has mainly succeeded in ravaging the housing market for low-income families. Seamless hasn’t disrupted the “paper menu world” half so much as it has disrupted tipping standards and wage prospects for its delivery workers.

The racist hiring practices of Silicon Valley prestige firms are an open secret, with only 5 percent of technical roles held by black or Latino workers. (“We are not where we want to be,” their diversity reports intone with all the sincerity of a Soviet bureaucrat adjusting potato projections down again). Their collusion with federal spy agencies, assisting in surveillance efforts and voluntarily turning over FISA-court-approved user data in exchange for cash, was a secret, until it wasn’t. Peter Thiel did not use magic to destroy Gawker; he used money.

In 2010, the Department of Justice exposed what it called an “overarching conspiracy” to suppress wages among companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, eBay, and Pixar. The Silicon Valley supermen were aware as far back as 2005 that what they were doing was illegal. “[Google’s Eric] Schmidt instructed his Senior VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact secret and only share information ‘verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?’” reported Mark Ames. “At times,” he said of the Disruptor’s behavior, “it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those [anti-trust] laws. Today’s inequality crisis is America’s worst on record since statistics were first recorded a hundred years ago — the only comparison would be to the era of railroad tycoons in the late 19th century.” Although Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos takes only $81,000 in salary every year – barely more than the average Facebook intern! – he has managed to accrue a net worth in excess of $65 billion. Perhaps he really is a wizard.

The cultivation of power requires the projection of power in excess of its reality. When Julius Caesar – the real one – made up his mind to annihilate the German tribes who had once again invaded Gaul, he ordered his engineers to build a bridge over the Rhine as wide as a two-lane highway, big enough for 10 soldiers to march across side by side. He wanted the Germani “to experience fear… when they realized that the army of the Roman people was both capable of crossing the Rhine and brave enough to venture it.” It worked. When the bridge was finished, the Roman army marched across it as if on parade in the streets of Rome. They went slow with their horns blasting and their flags aloft, led by cavalry draped in ceremonial colors. They found no army on the other side. Terrified of the Roman engineering feat, the Germani had fled in terror, and for 18 days they cowered in the forest while Caesar pillaged every defenseless village he could find. When he was done he marched back to Gaul and ordered the bridge torn down.

If your enemies can convince you that they are an unprecedented species of madman, you will convince yourself that you need unprecedented weapons to fight back or that you may be better off just hiding in the forest. But you are not.

The rigged contracts and wage suppression, the racism and surveillance collusion (soon to be playing voluntary footsie with Donald Trump’s NSA, with further chicanery to follow), all these sins of Silicon Valley have come about and been overcome before in the short history of American capitalism. They require only the same weapons as before. Organization and agitation. Strikes and labor laws. The ordinary practice of radical politics. Some of these efforts have begun already, with militant organizing and unionization drives beginning to organize Silicon Valley laborers against their exploiters. But these movements require national and popular support, support that cannot begin until the pretense and terror of world-conquering wizards is abandoned and the truth is laid bare: These are only rich assholes, the same as they ever were. All that superman bullshit is just the cheap propaganda of the powerful, propaganda so thoroughly saturated in the American mind that its own inventors might believe it.

This fall, Silicon Valley Shakespeare (“Innovate • Illuminate • Inspire”) staged Julius Caesar for the first time in the company’s 16-year history. The press release promised that audiences would have a chance to “see this classic political thriller set in a modern world, showing the power and problem of the mob mentality, and how far people will go to rule a nation.”

This summary is instructive. To the entertainers of the Valley, Julius Caesar is a play about “mob mentality,” the dangers of unruly herds who upset the proper order of the world. This is an assessment that might surprise anyone who has read Shakespeare’s history and noticed that with the exception of a soothsayer and a single servant, every character in it is an aristocrat. But more than that, it is remarkable because as any high school student can tell you, Julius Caesar is not a play about the dangers of the mob; it is a play about the dangers of ambition and power. It is about hubris. You do not see the crowds that Brutus and Antony address because the crowds do not matter. They only exist to cheer the rivals as they sort out the pretense of the coming war. The fault that was not in their stars but in themselves has been corrected. They are underlings no more.

Julius Caesar is about a man believed to be a God, a man who cultivated divinity so well that he believed it himself. It is about a man who believed it until the mid-March afternoon when he discovered to his great surprise that even Caesar can be overthrown with old and ordinary weapons.

Silicon Valley has become the largest assemblage of douche-bags and yuppie frat boy criminals in human history. Theranos is not the exception, it is the standard. Tesla, Google, Theranos, Wework, Facebook are lies backed by famous political insiders to protect their insider trading and covered-up by fake news operators. They are also fronts to fund political campaigns via the ill-gotten profits from their endeavors.

When the bad guys, and their lap-dog politicians, attack you because your products are better than theirs they are proving that they are frat boy scumbags, from Stanford and Yale, that operate in a little pack, like dogs! Their Sandhill Road operation should be raided by the FBI! The best thing that could come from the COVID pandemic is that they all are forced into bankruptcy!

When your Senator holds stock market shares in companies that exist to profit on the backs of consumers, via corruption, then it is impossible for that Senator to ever do anything but be corrupt! We have reported this in writing to winklerm@sec.gov, sanfrancisco@sec.gov and 30+ other federal officers but have yet to see our whistle-blower rewards...or any action! Do you wonder how big politician insider stock trading is? Take a look at how many TRILLIONS of dollars pass through the stock markets annually and then look at the reported, AND UNREPORTED, securities holdings of famous U.S. Senators and government agency staff. That is what Seth Rich and the people in the "In Memory Of" section, below, were disclosing. These are massive crimes!

What kinds of people were some of these high tech oligarchs? Read their divorce Court Records about their Jeffrey Epstein, NXIVM sex trafficking; Andy Rubin and Goguen sex slaves; tax evasions; money laundering; intern abuses; misogyny; racism; political insider-trading stock market bribes to U.S. Senators; a 'Silicon Valley Tech Mafia' and other horrors.

What would you do if you found out that Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergy Brin, John Doerr and other dynastic elitist insider Stanford frat boys were running a mob-like Cartel? Over 60,000 engineers in Silicon Valley took the problem to Federal Court!

Ask Christopher Wray, John F. Bennett, Craig D. Fair and the other senior officials at the FBI, DOJ, SEC, FTC and other major federal investigation agencies: Organized crime in Silicon Valley is getting a harder look these days!

The defendants, in the first case, included Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, all high-technology companies with a principal place of business in the San Francisco–Silicon Valley area of California where they collude together to harm competitors. It is a well documented fact that Facebook, Google, Netflix, Linkedin, etc. use sophisticated psychological testing on each applicant in order to filter out all but the most radical devotees of the founders ideologies. These companies then maintain an echo-chamber resonance, throughout the company, to reinforce their ideological message, much like Scientology does. In these companies one must praise Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and hate those who the founders target. The founders target their competitors, in violation of anti-trust laws.

Additional cases are planned for filing. Formal complaints have been filed with The SEC, The DOJ, The GAO, The FBI, The FTC and The U.S. Congress. Active investigations into 'Angelgate' and related collusion and anti-trust matters are known to be under-way by federal, news outlet and private investigators as of 2020. U.S. Senators, and other politicians, who covertly own stock in these Silicon Valley companies, have been delaying enforcement against these corrupt companies. Consumer rights groups have pledged to take down each and every politician who owns these corrupt stocks and protects these corrupt companies!

Our alliance of investigators and agency staff have FBI-level investigated: Steven Chu, Larry Page, David Dummond, Lachlan Seward, Andy Rubin, Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk, Nicholas Guido Denton, Harvey Weinstein, Eric Schmidt and the rest of the RICO-violating "Club" and had them fired or removed from their positions. They will remain under public surveillance for the rest of their lives and their case files will be added to monthly via submissions to federal agencies and news entities.

When you run the following query on the stock market volume for a single day, ie: "Select sum(Close*volume*0.001), count(*) from myTable where date = '9/27/2017'."..you get the following result: 7300 stocks were traded, Total Money flow: $271,072,334,824. This is how much was traded on that day.

The Silicon Valley Cartel Hires Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik,
Black Cube, Fusion GPS, etc. to run "hit-jobs" on those who report their crimes!

When the Silicon Valley Frat Cartel Tried To Bury Outsiders, They Discovered That They Were Seeds

Trent Lapinski says: "Silicon Valley is run like a cartel, and they are essentially modern day robber barons....

Apple, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebook, Google, and the other technorati believe someone else should pay taxes, hire Americans, or support the society they sell to

Google faces $5 billion lawsuit in U.S. for tracking 'private' internet use. Google WILL pay for their crimes or be killed off as a business because of their corruption!

The Hit Job

Silicon Valley's No-poaching Case: The Growing Debate over ...

Steve Jobs was 'central figure' in Silicon Valley's 'no ...

The robber barons of Silicon Valley | SocialistWorker.org

Barons of the Valley - Jacobin

Silicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Barons

Today's Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons

Hanson: Silicon Valley billionaires are modern robber barons

Silicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Barons ...

Silicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Barons ...

Silicon Valley Robber Barons Are Using Government As a ...

Silicon Valley: Land of the 21st-century robber barons ...

Silicon Valley Robber Barons Are Using Government As a ...