In a stilted, wide-eyed address to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, PayPal co-founder and Trump delegate Peter Thiel made one thing clear: America owes a great deal of its role as a global technology leader to the government.
In 1968, the world’s high-tech capital wasn’t just one city … all of America was high tech. It’s hard to remember this, but our government was once high tech too. When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the internet. The Apollo Program was just about to put a man on the moon. … The future felt limitless.
Indeed, ARPA spending on national network infrastructure undoubtedly gave America a head start that resulted in Silicon Valley’s ascendant place in the global hardware and software economies — you know, the same thing that allowed Peter Thiel to walk onstage and boast about his success from PayPal and Facebook. This message about how federal spending fuels large-scale innovation, delivered before an audience of GOP faithful for whom privatization and government shrinkage is a near-religious priority, was a lovely (and perhaps inadvertent) moment of honesty.
But Thiel did touch on the private sector, touting his native Silicon Valley as an example of a properly functioning community:
Where I work in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to see where America has gone wrong. …
We don’t accept … incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.
Of course, even the briefest survey of Silicon Valley reveals a culture that is rife with incompetence, where the basic rules you’d follow running a lemonade stand — taking in more than you spend, for example, or adhering to basic quality standards — are discarded in favor of explosive growth and runaway valuations. (Thiel used the dreaded B-word, but not to describe his own back yard: “Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees.”)
Thiel neglected to mention that Silicon Valley is also in the midst of a serious slowdown, where the bubble inflated by venture capital firms like his own Founders Fund — not Wall Street — shows sign of popping, or at least deflating.
But we knew Thiel’s speech wouldn’t have to necessarily make sense, or cohere with the GOP. Thiel is at this point the only relevant and interesting person to speak at the convention, short of Trump himself. His gift to the Trump/Pence campaign was to get people whooping and tweeting and envisioning billions, and in that he succeeded.
Thiel: “”instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East” (USA! USA! USA!!!!)
Government incompetence?
Color me confused? Didn’t Obama appointed Covington & Burling’s Eric Holder to contain the situation of the banksters’ predation, otherwise it would have come out in court proceedings that all the MERS-related fraudclosures (and all the credit derivatives and credit default swaps based upon them) were illegal from the get-go and that it was Covington & Burling which was the legal overseer to MERS, as well as representing the banksters which founded it?
And that Covington & Burling has a long strategic partnership with Kissinger Associates (Henry Kissinger, right-arm man to David Rockefeller) and that the former CEO of Fannie Mae, James Johnson, who promoted the mortgage securitizations on the government side, has had a long relationship with David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger as Johnson has been the business contact for American Friends of Bilderberg, Inc. (directors: David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, et al.), and that it was the Blackstone Group which purchased many thousands of homes thanks to those fraudclosures and became the number one landlord in the USA in 2013 and that Jami Mascik, the president and vice-chairman of Kissinger Associates was appointed by Obama to his Intel Advisory Board?
I can’t understand how the American electorate can feel any sort of attachment to ANYONE in its politcal process – when I work and pay tax dollars I want those taxes spent back on ME. I don’t want them spent on a useless military that bullies foreign nations so that foreign people hate me and Big Corporations get richer, and that leave enough arms “lying around” in Iraq and elsewhere so that a major terrorist organisation can “suddenly” spring out of nowhere, oops. I don’t want them spent on secret police organisations that spy on me and add my name to lists for being pissed at them for doing to me the very thing they claim to be keeping me safely from some crazy foreigners doing to me, and smuggles drugs into the country to keep some insane War on Drugs going, and that detains and tortures people illegally but its ok because we say it is all for national security. I don’t want them being paid on subsidising Big Corporations whose insane profiteering undermines my ability to set up businesses, pays me poor wages, inflicts crippling low supplier prices that force more tax dollars to be spent to keep those suppliers alive, pays for universities to become their very own R&D departments, and which operate a revolving door-come-legal-graft policy for the politicians who should be serving me. I don’t want them spent so that Big Pharma can prevent me from having a health service that represents a quarter-of-a-billion customers rather than meek and voiceless individuals. I don’t want them spent on a police force that kills and imprisons more people than the terrorists and thugs they claims to fight. ANd I don’t want to spend it on a judiciary that protects everyone who wants to legally rob me and exploit me and has put 25% of the Earth’s entire prison population behind bars in supposedly the freest nation on Earth.
It is like every thing that can be rotten is rotten, not one thing decent and right and good for everyone. How do you not spit in the faces of these politicians and curse every word they utter? And why has NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON stepped forward to denounce this insanity and use the democratic process to bring about change?
I can’t even start to begin to understand how Americans can have one ounce of pride in their nation – it is entirely and relentlessly geared towards robbing them of every dollar and freedom. And they haven’t even started the full-on fracking yet…
Corruption and Greed only work whilst people buy into them and fail to confront them, but after that they fall over quite easily. The hard part is making sure they stay gone, but the games aren’t that difficult to spot and end. Trouble is, it seems EVERYONE is Greedy & Corrupt…
Ditto!
The last sentence is incorrect. Theil’s “gift to the Trump/Pence campaign” was to place on center stage a Republican gay person to counter the horrid record of Gov. Pence against LGBTQ persons. And it allowed Trump later that evening to say LGBTQ; as Seth Myers said in his “A Closer Look” it sounded like it was the first time Trump had ever said “LGBTQ”. “It sounded like he was giving the letters to Pat Sajak on The Wheel of Fortune.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8rVfTAwi_M (this part begins at 5:15 but listen to the entire monologue!)
That’s almost funny.
One thing this speech showed is that Peter Thiel is clueless on basic internet and computer security issues. In particular, this line:
Considering that Silicon Valley contractors like Endgame Solutions (financed by CIA/NSA outfit Paladin Capital, and with ties to Israel’s Mossad) used thumb drives to infect the Iranian nuclear program with Stuxnet, isn’t it obvious why nuclear bases rely on hard-to-replicate old floppy disks?
Right around the time Stuxnet was being developed, the Air Force was plugging up all the USB sockets on Air Force computers with epoxy so that no thumb drives could be inserted. This was done to avoid potential viral infection.
So why would Peter Thiel use this line? Well, he’s trying to flog the $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program that Obama has been promoting, no other reason. He’s also an advocate for more nuclear power plants, grossly expensive compared to wind and solar, but a huge cash cow for the military-industrial sector.
I’m glad you highlighted this one bit in the headline – much more interesting news than the tiny little this-would-have-been-interesting-20-years-ago bit the media is fixated on.
Mr. Biddle, I think you’re jumping through too many hoops here to rack up your word count. Most of Thiel’s speech was about government incompetence, plain and simple. It’s true that Thiel is less opposed to increased taxes than most Republicans, but he is fully in favor of scaling back the regulatory state.
didn’t actually read the article, did we
Or if he did, he thinks Biddle wrote about the “wrong” part of the speech. Marris would rather not discuss Theil’s love of corporate welfare.
A lot of Thiel’s speech was utter BS, for example this gem:
No, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its bloated military-industrial budget, the gross corruption involved in those programs, and its idiotic invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Funny, some similarities to the United States these days – particularly the bloated defense contracting budget that has given Peter Thiel his billions, right?
stick to investigative journalism
Biddle’s never done a day of that in his life.
There’s a frequently used term on Wall Street for when manipulation drives a stock down enough weaker hands finally give up on it and sell, it’s called “capitulation.” Thiel’s not some insulated putz oligarch too stupid to recognize there’s already a strong federal spending program – currently attempting global domination, and it’s more likely he’s selling JFK-type moon mobilizations because he somehow envisions a line of future billionaire presidents. I can’t help thinking Peter Thiel believes Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are a sign of capitulation by American voters, and he’s just getting in line behind Donald to take advantage of – whatever comes next. Go Bilderbuggers!
My, I do wish The Intercept would maintain their focus on investigative journalism/government corruption and leave the ideological tabloid hit pieces to rags like Salon.
Mr. Biddle, your personal axe-to-grind against Mr. Thiel is transparent, whiny, and utterly unbecoming for an adult man. Two days on the job and two character assassination pieces passed off as journalism. Tsk tsk, shame shame on you sir.
^^^^ this times 90 billionz!!!!
A pretty good speech, short and to the point. Also, probably not plagiarized.
I hear Trump’s speech was a bit long.
It’s axiomatic that nothing intended to be substantive that you can say will ever promise to be as interesting as what Thiel substantively has to say; more so in cases where both discourses are less than substantive.
Clearly he’s a flaming pervert.
Being part of a small group of the greediest on the planet, and helping to fuck everyone else, has everything to do with being sociopathic and nothing to do with being gay.
Of course Thiel likes big government. He co-founded a CIA-funded equity firm. Get a clue, Biddle.
Yeah, there’s enough big government there to boot the freewheelers right out of Palo Alto and take it over for this guy’s company: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/12/the-cia-backed-start-up-thats-taking-over-palo-alto.html Reimagine Silicon Valley – as a landscape reserved for government-paid spies looking through your data. There’s your moon shot for you.
Hillary nobody cares, you are the most lying corrupt witch I have ever seen. You will NEVER win, America hates you!
Bernie People: Hillary stole your voice and your votes. You know it- she did it in-your-face.
Her media Press-titutes think they can con you,
but you know who and what they are.
Don’t enable this despicable behaviour with your vote.
Don’t let her steal from you again.