While airport-stranded travelers from an apparently arbitrary list of Muslim-majority countries were being kept in handcuffs as a result of President Trump’s stunning immigration ban, the leaders of America’s most powerful tech firms stared at their feet and mumbled. Maybe this weekend’s milquetoast statements shouldn’t have come as a surprise — and there were a few Silicon Valley voices willing to castigate Trump — yet the failure of so many of the U.S. economy’s most influential players to say anything of substance or actually do anything at all to back up their words of dissent was still a great letdown.
The likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook have (like any large corporation) refused to oppose head-on Trump’s widely outrageous, often-illegal agenda. But unlike most other large corporations, Silicon Valley has long draped itself in language of principle, to Make the world a better place — Facebook’s mission statement remains the effort to “make the world more open and connected,” and one can almost remember a time when Google was proudly associated with the phrase “don’t be evil.”
Immediately after Trump seized Election Day, CEOs yearning for a friendly tax repatriation policy lined up to wish him the best, tentatively supporting the new president in tones of Well, let’s just wait and see, while some offered their services to the man directly. Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and SpaceX/Tesla CEO Elon Musk all have formal advisory positions with the Trump administration.
In a long Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg said, “I’m concerned about the impact of the recent executive orders signed by President Trump,” while adding, “That said, I was glad to hear President Trump say he’s going to ‘work something out’ for Dreamers,” and “I’m also glad the President believes our country should continue to benefit from ‘people of great talent coming into the country.’” Zuckerberg concluded, “I hope we find the courage and compassion to bring people together and make this world a better place for everyone.” This is a statement inoffensive to the point of meaninglessness. A Facebook spokesperson later added, “We are assessing the impact on our workforce and determining how best to protect our people and their families from any adverse effects.” The fact that PayPal founder and Trump adviser Peter Thiel sits on Facebook’s board was not addressed.
This concern for immigrants insofar as they are employees but not insofar as they are humans was echoed by other companies: Microsoft said, “We share the concerns about the impact of the executive order on our employees from the listed countries, all of whom have been in the United States lawfully, and we’re actively working with them to provide legal advice and assistance.” Google did the same: “We’re concerned about the impact of this order and any proposals that could impose restrictions on Googlers and their families, or that could create barriers to bringing great talent to the U.S. We’ll continue to make our views on these issues known to leaders in Washington and elsewhere.” Only six years ago, Google changed the design of its homepage to protest a controversial anti-piracy bill, and urged visitors to petition Congress.
In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed his own economic anxiety: “As we’ve grown the company, we’ve worked hard to attract talented people from all over the world, and we believe this is one of the things that makes Amazon great — a diverse workforce helps us build better products for customers.”
Elon Musk issued perhaps the most polite statement of protest in history:
The blanket entry ban on citizens from certain primarily Muslim countries is not the best way to address the country’s challenges
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2017
Apple’s memo to employees, obtained by BuzzFeed, was perhaps the most galling. In it, Tim Cook essentially makes the case that a ban on Muslim immigration isn’t wrong because it’s wrong, but because “Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we do.”
Payments startup Square also made the amoral economic case, saying, “We are concerned about the impact the recent executive action could have on our employees and our sellers,” and adding, “The contributions of our immigrant-owned small businesses play an important part in our economy and demonstrate the best of this country’s values.”
Sam Altman, CEO of the gold standard startup accelerator Y Combinator, published a blog post titled “Time to Take a Stand,” wherein the glaring fact that Thiel works at the firm was not mentioned.
But the backlash king of Trump’s first full weekend was without a doubt Uber, the transit company that’s never shied away from doing things that make people hate it (or its CEO, Kalanick). In an email to his employees later posted on Facebook (subject line: “Standing up for what’s right”), Kalanick defended his and Uber’s relationship with Trump:
Ever since Uber’s founding we’ve had to work with governments and politicians of all political persuasions across hundreds of cities and dozens of countries. Though we share common ground with many of them, we have had areas of disagreement with each of them. In some cases we’ve had to stand and fight to make progress, other times we’ve been able to effect change from within through persuasion and argument. …
… I understand that many people internally and externally may not agree with that decision, and that’s OK. It’s the magic of living in America that people are free to disagree. But whatever your view please know that I’ve always believed in principled confrontation and just change; and have never shied away (maybe to my detriment) from fighting for what’s right.
Uber engineer Eric Butler immediately accepted Kalanick’s invitation to dissent:
. @travisk says OK to disagree so I'll just say this publicly: Resign from advisory group & categorically denounce Trump and these policies. https://t.co/qOiDPE1Och
— Eric Butler (@codebutler) January 28, 2017
Although Kalanick claimed his company, which employs many immigrants in cities across America, will compensate drivers who are affected, it’s important to keep in mind that he is a chief executive who has so far refused to recognize his employees as anything more than independent contractors, and has allowed drivers to make so little they have to sleep in parking lots. When Uber advertised its services to JFK airport in the midst of a New York taxi strike protesting the immigration ban, “#deleteuber” began trending on Twitter.
Perhaps sensing an opportunity to draw a contrast between itself and its strike-breaking competitor, Lyft issued a strongly worded statement on Sunday morning condemning the ban (emphasis theirs):
This weekend, Trump closed the country’s borders to refugees, immigrants, and even documented residents from around the world based on their country of origin. Banning people of a particular faith or creed, race or identity, sexuality or ethnicity, from entering the U.S. is antithetical to both Lyft’s and our nation’s core values. We stand firmly against these actions, and will not be silent on issues that threaten the values of our community.
As well, Lyft says it will donate $1 million to the ACLU (which already successfully sued to halt a portion of the ban) over the next four years. This is what “standing up” to something looks like, even if it’s also good press. The company declined to comment on its relationship with Thiel, who is an investor.
To their credit, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston all condemned the ban. Twitter, well, tweeted about it.
Twitter is built by immigrants of all religions. We stand for and with them, always.
— Twitter (@Twitter) January 29, 2017
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky was one of the few, alongside Lyft, to propose meaningful action beyond angry (or tepid) words, vowing to provide free housing for refugees and others affected by Trump’s executive order. Prominent venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Chris Sacca both announced generous donations to the ACLU in the wake of the ban. This will help, but not enough. We know Trump respects, among little else, money and attention. For executives with so much money and influence to be willing to sit around a gleaming boardroom table and smile with Trump, to pay lip service to justice but show zero willingness to stick their necks out one iota, is a form of complicity. Their unwillingness to immediately rule out helping construct a national Muslim registry is a form of cowardice. If the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Google — which collectively hold 23 percent of all non-financial corporate cash in the United States — mean anything they wrote this weekend, they will use their immense political and economic power, not issue statements. And yes, that might mean, for a flicker of his attention span, making Donald Trump unhappy.
Maybe Elon Musk is less aligned morally with global millennials like myself than I had previously thought. I already had serious issues with many of his past political statements (e.g. Praising Reagan as one of the best U.S. Presidents despite the fact Reagan helped the apartheid in South Africa), yet I let Musk slip by because of his commitment to moving this planet off fossil fuels. It just sucks that we have to be put between a shallow rock & a hard genius.
It’s probably best if the United Nations looks elsewhere, and maybe more towards redesigning institutions & adhering to values rather than pushing a specific human. Who cares about pushing humanity to Mars in a decade when we’re looking straight face at a soon-to-be global religious war that could quickly escalate into insanity within months, if not sooner. Trump’s war on Islam is dangerous for humanity and will only push the radical religious leaders further into violence.
Get away with what… The Intercept worked as hard as any with their partner The Kremlin to insure Donald J. Trump got elected
Excellent.
Please keep it up, lest anyone forget who you and others who spread this libel are really like, and what your “vision” of society would bring.
No one can adford to be complacent, not in the face of this. It is much later than we think.
It is NO coincidence that these people are seated 1 token woman, 4 men, 1 token woman,4 men, 1 token woman, 4 men…?
I am sick of this!
You may not like the seating arrangement, but I wouldn’t call these powerful and elite women “token”.
Elite women?
Why would Isabelle Huppert, Helen Mort, and Aude Lancelin be at this meeting?
Not sure if you’re attempting a joke here, but the three women you listed were not in attendance. See this link for a seating chart:
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tech-meeting-ridiculous-2016-12
Not at all. I am dead serious.
I don’t accept your definition of “elite.” Of course you might not believe that.
The monied folk you described that way have accumulated quite a bit, of money. As a consolation prize, of course.
It’s not as though they will wake up tomorrow and be able to do what Arundhati Roy can do.
I used the word “elite” as defined by a dictionary. The Trump attendees are the corporate elite of Silicon Valley, excluding Ivanka, and (therefore) in the elite 1% of wealth. The four women you mention are the elite of culture and Fine Arts.
The four women of culture and Fine Arts you mention may be members of the financial, elite 1%, too.
And I may be from Mars.
Who knows, it could happen.
Seriously though, you don’t know who they are, do you? One of them was recently fired, another spent time in jail for her writing and political activities. Fundamental civil rights and civil liberties were at stake in both cases.
Of the other two, one is working class and became a poet, and now teaches. She is best known for “Division Street” and “Scab.”
The other acts, for a reason other than to make blockbusters. Quite the opposite.
(Are you sure “corporate elite” isn’t some sort of a contradiction? You are so funny.)
(Also of course, you didn’t choose to describe the corporate women in the photo as “elite.” The dictionary was decisive.)
Follow the money. The CEOs of Silicon Valley are worried about their precious H1-B visa program. If they cared about fake news, they had plenty chances to rectify the situation during the Bush and Obama administrations.
In reality, Facebook is fake news. I posted an article on the Hawaiian protests against Mark Zuckerberg’s estate and they immediately took it down. This was real news that was erased by Facebook … thus they are fake news.
They will be known as the new fascist collaborators
I love how your backup plan after being perfectly fine with a Trump victory is repeated appeals to the benevolence of Corporate America, albeit the ‘edgy’, disruptive branch of that institution that develops internet technology.
Would you have been perfectly fine with a Hillary victory? She is a racketeering war-criminal.
So we had only a choice between a corrupt racketeering war criminal, and a corrupt racketeering crypto-fascist? Not much different than every election since at least Shrub/Darth.
No, there were other alternatives, including write-in votes.
Who even is Darth in your example? Al Gore? Do you even have a point of view outside of your glib echo-chamber nonsense?
@Justin Runia:
Darth would be Dick Cheney in Che’s example, I reckon. That was not a hard one.
Uh, yeah, I would have. This is a no-brainer, you literally have to invent reasons, like nonsense accusations of racketeering, to justify a course of action that leads to Donald Trump taking office. But we’re in the right place for that right? The essentially-libertarian Intercept has no room to discuss tax policy, or health care policy, or anything outside of the narrow interests of a bunch of white guys concerned about their civil liberties and the prospect that the government could take their property. To an editor that’s slightly to the left of Rand Paul, the only issues worth talking about are those that affect your prospects of forming your own break-away country; god forbid the idea that the state has done anything worthwhile in the past 100 years that needs defending, the only way forward for Glenn Greenwald is perpetual escape from the state and all of it’s messy failures toward that perfect land of ideology (fare still paid in Yanqui dollars, until we get that Bitcoin situation sorted out.)
Why are there so many innumerate people in the United States? The chance of being murdered by refugee terrorist attack in the United States is one in 3.6 billion. The chance of being murdered by anyone is 1 in 14,000. In other words, the chance of being murdered is 253 times as great as dying in a terrorist attack committed by a foreigner on U.S. soil. Even CATO (Koch Foundation) thinks Americans xenophobia is overinflated. And why is it commoners never seem to fathom the concepts of legal precedent or unintended consequences?
An instagram meme I saw today:
“How is banning a religion from entering the country going to stop terrorism, when most attacks in the US are by white kids with bowl cuts”
Seperating Trump (a polarizing figure to be sure) from policy and the mass hysteria is simply not justified.
The order itself is reasonable and very restrained in what it actually does
I don’t think anyone here is trying to separate Trump from policy…Trump’s fascism is the policy…that’s what the uproar is about.
And then there is this:
http://www.globoble.com/news/uber-drivers-bleakly-sleeping-in-parking-lots-just-to-get-by
The low-wage workers, eg janitors, bus drivers, in-house restaurant staff, that provide services to Apple, Google, Facebook, et al, sleep in their cars, too.
Most of these CEOs seem only concerned about how this will impact their abuse of the H1B visa program.
Seems to me that Apple’s and Twitter’s responses were quite similar, so I don’t get the different takes…
The balance between CEO and Wallstreet thieving and profiteering and, public affordability with lower debt and higher return on productivity, has been destroyed and the thieves who upset the balance havent figured out how to restore that balance – not that they want to.
Gutless wonders every one of them.
What, exactly, do you expect them to do, Sam?
If all you care about is the muted response of these companies’ CEOs and spokesmen, without necessarily advocating for a material change in policy, then you’ve fallen into the same trap of substanceless appearances that all mainstream liberalism – and all of American society – has fallen into.
If, on the other hand, you want these companies to heavily lobby and use their $$$ power to somehow overturn, soften or hinder an executive order, then congratulations! You’ve just pushed us one step closer to unmasked and unashamed corporatocracy. The legitimate structures of state power be damned – these Silicon Valley Barons speak the right words and spout the right slogans, they’ll be our saviors! If the unchecked power of corporate interests led the American Right to put their trust in a crypto-fascist strongman, perhaps the unchecked whims of a crypto-fascist strongman will cause the American Left to put their trust in corporate influences (if they haven’t already!).
Or, perhaps, thirdly, and most sinisterly, you wish for some of these companies to exercise their undeniable influence as the operators of the world’s largest social media networks in a massive cultural engineering attempt? Excellent choice either way.
Thanks. Eloquent argument with merit.
The fact is, as he stated, these companies have massive influence and power in our country. If you’re asking whether he’s advocating for a corporatocracy, the answer to me is an obvious no: We’re already living in one. He’s just asking some of the most powerful, who also love to talk about their commitment to human rights, to put their money where their moth is.
In other words, he wants them to exert their power. Armstrong hit the nail on the head.
A great tragedy of Trump’s rise: that we (left leaners) are begging the people we used to excoriate (CIA, FBI, Corporations, etc. etc.) to save us. Talk about (the most over-used term at present) “normalization”.
The irony was that there was a perfectly mundane way to prevent this; settle for the candidate who was only offering 75% of the policy goals that appealed to comfortable white guys who write the majority of ‘left leaning’ think pieces like Biddle. But 75% wasn’t enough, there was always the possibility that those moderates and neo-liberals would come crawling back to their moral betters after 4 years of Trump, so 2016 was jam-packed with snark (‘Member snark, guys? How important it was?) and negging and general shit-talking about someone who definitely wasn’t going to institute a ban on Muslims a week into office. But here we are, pleading to our corporate masters for relief, because oops, those distinctions have already reached heights that are uncomfortable for even the employees of Pierre Omidyar.
Certainly an analysis worthy of considering. Of course it could be exactly on target.
But what about this? Maybe the whole point of the article is that these corporate behemoths will never be on the side of the vast majority of humanity. This is just one more example of how and why they are not. In other words, the article is not really directed at them. They are going to do what they do.
As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.
Benjamin Franklin
“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken
away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”
Benjamin Franklin
Silicon Valley does not ride into town and save the day? I’m shocked.
Easy solution. Democrats should start a movement to ban all H1b visas. The large high tech companies import low wage indentured servants. Hell there are immigrant lawyers teaching companies how to get around laws and regulations involving the issuance of those visas. This will get the profit-oriented CEOs attention big time. Stop the ban when they force Trump to open up borders to war refugees.
No. This is a grave matter of constitutional law and the core principles and values that are supposed to be at the center of the American experiment. It is not an opportunity to play political tit-for-tat.
It is essential for the courts, if not also the Congress, to shut down this travesty as rapidly and as firmly as possible. Anything less would constitute a disaster for the most fundamental of constitutional precepts and protections.
India has a mammoth Hb1 visa outsourcing industry
Yes, I know. That’s not the point here. It’s another subject, entirely.
I’ve often thought that cutting back (or banning H1b visas) and making companies actually pay fines for hiring workers here illegally would go a long way toward helping American workers. It’s almost like our representatives don’t really want to do something that would work. Shameful
That’s not the point here. It’s another subject, entirely.
Why Elon Musk did not resign over the Trump immigration policy?
Trump is a narcissistic megalomaniac, so is Elon and most of these SV gurus of naked greed.
It’s a mad house up there in SV. Exponential ponzi schemes fueled by sick Wall Street jokers spread across all technological fields and replaced solid American based R&D with feeding frenzy off the great plastic faces, fashionable pretenders who know nothing.
Elon is one of them.
After government subsidized electric car ongoing fiasco, useless and ridiculously expensive battery con, another rocket toy play from apartheid boy is dully subsidized entirely by taxpayer money via NASA contracts.
Boy, Elon and Co., earned every badge of SV technology psychedelic gurus. And his incoherent utterances only confirm already common knowledge that he is a ZIRP fueled Wall Street crony boy trying to realize his sick dreams and we are paying for it. Also by firing American engineers and hiring foreigners for pittance, a common race to the bottom among all other “greats” of SV filth covered under their touchy-feely immigrants loving attitudes and utterances for show while filled with utter disdain to people who work for living.
Now they are dead silent since their bottom line is at stake and they are all willing to throw under the bus their phony “progressive” credentials.
Is Elon or Zuker somebody we ordinary people can trust to save our jobs and care about holding on to a decent standard of living? Just consider this, who are those people, do they even are able to hear us in their torpor of grandeur:
These are some answers to Elon’s documented claims about reality.
No Elon, we are not cyborgs. You are.
No Elon, we are not living in fake digital reality that you hired people to escape. You are.
No Elon. We should not be able to launch people [to Mars] in 2025.” You should be able to launch yourself to Kingdom come any day now.
No Elon. Right now you’re not trying to maximize Earth-based revenue, you are trying to exploit earthlings and move on to another planet for spread more carnage, so your shrink says.
And hell no. No UFO blew up your rocket toy, paid by US taxpayers. It was your stupidity megalomania and greed.
Are those people that can be counted on to fight equally psychotic Trump in anything.
I know that it takes one to know one but where it leaves us ?
Excellent!
Elon is insufferable. Having worked with white South Africans before – the sense of entitlement and immaturity is mind blowing.
Elon, sadly, is not an anomaly.
Elon Musk was born in South Africa, educated in Canada and have has lived all his adult life in America. Hardly an example of a real South African.
Glad to hear you are such an expert on white South Africans. I have worked with many Americans and I am happy to report that they are on the whole interesting intelligent people, who don’t base their opinions about millions of people based on a few work colleagues.
Maybe they all thought you were insufferable as well?
Well, not really a letdown since I don’t expect them to for anything that isn’t in their corporate self interest, given the track record.
This was passed by Congress and signed by Obama in 2015 and no one said anything, nor protested. Glad people are waking up to U.S. crimes. Why are refugees fleeing? Because we’ve been bombing & droning the hell out of them. Obama ran out of drones in Syria. He bombed 7 countries, all for profit. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/158
Why do leftists hate Uber so much? It’s just a networking app that connects drivers with riders. It involves no coercion, is purely consensual, and provides millions of people with jobs and services they both want and need. What could possibly be wrong with that?
Ask Uber drivers.
Why do idiots use the term, “leftists,” so often when there is essentially no actual left in American politics? Answer: deep, possibly incurable, ignorance.
Which Uber drivers? The small minority of whiny malcontents who didn’t like working with Uber for whatever reason? Those Uber drivers?
The simple fact that millions of people choose of their own free will to work with Uber proves that the drivers both want and need the services being provided.
tax fraud, uninsured or inadequately insured drivers killing people, lawsuts against the cities that let these drivers operate by not holding them to the same standards as cab medallion owners.
Predictably, you concentrate on a few flaws in an otherwise incredible business model that has provided a service that millions of people want and need. And it’s questionable if two of the things you listed (not paying taxes and avoiding cab medallions) are even bad things.
Put another way, your desire for Utopia in the future is stronger than your desire to achieve realistic goodness in the present.
Oh, dear, you read Ayn Rand as a young person, didn’t you?
I have never read any of her books. I’m just a classical liberal who tends to view arbitrary authority with a health degree of skepticism.
And isn’t it ironic how the leftists who hate Uber find themselves allied with big businesses who want to maintain a state-sanctioned monopoly on transportation services, i.e., the cab companies?
What kind of a leftist would side with the cab companies and their monopolies over a networking application that helps working and middle class people get jobs and find affordable transportation?
Premise of leftist ideology: The social order should be more cooperative, horizontal, and democratic.
Uber makes an application that brings society closer to that ideal.
Leftists respond by endlessly vilifying Uber and siding with an entrenched corporate monopoly who doesn’t like the competition.
no it doesn’t, it uses a model that drives cab companies out of business because uber can avoid the taxes and insurance, which costs the community, and then it will increase prices once it attains a near monopoly. you’re a classic apologist for corporate malfeasance, which the people who wrote the consitution wouldn’t have any problem recognizing as a social cancer, given the severe limits on corporation at that time.
The cab companies are state-sanctioned monopolies who have been overcharging their customers for decades. And the only way Uber could obtain a monopoly is if people like you granted them one the way you did with the cab companies. In reality, companies like Uber and Lyft are subject to robust competition, so the threat of a monopoly is virtually nonexistent.
As for the men who wrote the constitution, they were almost without exception the most elite members of the financial, commercial, and industrial classes of their day. Read Charles Beard’s “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States” if you want to become more informed about history.
You’re going to have to do better than that. With each critique and analysis since the 1950s, the consensus among historians that Beardianism is wrong and, effectively, dead, has become more and more solidified.
Leaving your ongoing “leftist” shrieking aside, as it really adds no value, perhaps you missed my post in this thread relating directly to why this Uber business model is demonstrably bad for our society, for the reasons I stated there, and many more.
If you can find no empathy for the millions of Americans that have to settle for working in occupations like Uber that do almost nothing to improve their lives as a whole in exchange for having some income at all, than I suggest you are a major part of the problem here.
There are better solutions here, and Uber, the sharing economy etc. are simply stop-gap measures to keep Americans from further sliding into destitution, while making companies rich at their expense.
Your only objection seems to be that Uber is not perfect. On that score, we are in agreement. Uber is indeed flawed. But it’s better than many of the present alternatives, which is why millions of people choose to utilize Uber’s services. So as soon as someone comes up with a better way to allocate scarce resources than free markets and liberal property rights, let me know and I will jump on board.
Uber is not only not perfect, it’s part of the problem, as are the multitude of other band-aids that have been applied to try to keep a gasping capitalist economy from strangling its host to death.
It’s all about resource reallocation, and we actually have the money to do that, it’s just in the wrong hands at the moment. One option to address this is universal basic income. Others are universal health care, and o public works program that, you know, actually works.
The alternatives you and I seek are simply those resources that are being accumulated and not shared by the folks that already have more than enough wealth and property – to the tune of literally billions to one over their fellow human beings that inhabit the planet with them.
i desire not to get run over by a drunken uber driver who just got out of prison for vehicular homicide. realistically, that wouldn’t be a “goodness”.
Again, you’re fixating on an tiny fraction of Uber’s potential effect on society and acting like it’s representative of the whole. It’s not. The vast majority of times nothing bad happens when a person uses Uber. Every time I’ve ridden with Uber, the experience has been a positive one, for me and the driver. In Chicago, I’ve spoken to several Uber drivers were happy to have the job and the extra income. You want to pretend like those people do not exist or that their experiences are somehow outweighed by the fringe minority of misanthropes who hated working for Uber so much that they started a legal crusade against their business model.
Say, I have an idea.
Uber for private planes.
Uber for delivery drones.
Uber for substitute teaching.
Uber for child care.
What could go wrong? Anyway, we should at least give it an honest try rather than be so rigid and authoritarian — and if a fringe minority of habitual whiners, nay sayers, misanthropes, and basic LOSERS don’t like it, and won’t even let other people try it (!), we could have some Uber amateur boxers and sharpshooters have a little word with them.
Don’t get excited. They’ll just talk to them.
What could go wrong?
;^)
their model is to rip off society. their model is avoid regulation and taxes so they can drive the regular cab companies out of business. their model is to rip off consumers with “surge pricing”. and it’s not a fring of uber drivers that have realized what a ripoff it is for uber drivers, it’s a subtantial percentage.
you sound like somebody that works in the uber marketing department.
I’m curious how you managed to reduce Uber drivers who felt they had to seek a legal case against Uber (the validity of which will be decided by a judge, not you) as “fringe minority misanthrops.”
Of course, what really pisses off you corporate apologists, what really gets your gall, is forcing accountability and reponsibilty onto the company, especially when outsiders like lawyers, judges and drivers who feel they’ve been wronged–you know, misanthrops–start meddling in the model.
You claim to be a classical liberal. The 2oo year update of that utterly meaningless term today is “neonon,” emphasis on the con.
What will ruin these people is their bottom lines. What will hurt these businesses is when the American people, by the millions, stand up and take their government back from the corporate state and the war profiteers. BOTH PARTIES SERVE THE ELITES, Trump is the outcome to years and years of NEOLIBERAL policies that gave only lip service to populism but behind the backs of the American people, legislated against them and FOR the corporate state.
I’m ecstatic to see the protests because the more this government does to harm the people in this country and abroad, the more protests there will be as the collective outrage grows….
Business and commerce are so unrelated to politics that the velvet diplomacy with which CEOs address The Leader disgraces party apparatchiks.
Taking risks is what distinguishes entrepreneurs from the populace.
Americans feel so free they can’t stop using the word ‘leader’.
We need to start boycotts.
Uber coder Eric Butler’s tweet: “@travisk says OK to disagree so I’ll just say this publicly: Resign from advisory group & categorically denounce Trump and these policies.”
Butler, having found a moral footing in his tech profession, can now stop working for assholes, too.
They have nothing to lose. Most of these execs and such will not be affected in any material way by Trump’s actions. Their wealth and power and this privilege shields them from whatever potential repercussions his actions and EOs may have. The same goes for Democrats: most of them are millionaires and wealthy, Their wealth and privileges shield them from any negative consequences of Trump’s actions. Their jobs, retirements, health and futures arent on the line. And they are still beholden halfway to banks and millionaires so of course they are not taking a harder stance. Look at Liz Warren, she voted affirmatively for Ben Carson based on some absurd rationale and about a dozen Dem senators are expected to vote for the torture lover CIA nominee. What they should be doing is resist on all levels. The vote you cast is the final step, but resistance and push back are attitudes, mindsets, words. And here they are doing NOTHING. Obama asked even us to give the fascist demagogue Trump a chance and both he and Clinton attended the criminal’s inauguration. So it is easy for them to hold lofty speeches about peaceful transition of power and giving Der Fuehrer a chance. They got nothing to lose.
with an Umlaut on the u, and no e…
to be fair, are we all not complicit? aren’t we all letting the Don get away with it to some extent?
what happens when Trump has the courts stacked, when he’s able to issue these edicts and have the judiciary and legislature back him up? what is our responsibility then?
@TheColonel –
You picked up on what I thought was a great line…
I think we are, but because of their positions, I do think these CEO’s need to take more leadership… What of the future you ask. I just don’t know… The courts so far have been only so much protection, if the y get any worse… and I pray not… Congress probably won’t be much help… So I hope enough PEOPLE can rise, resist, and give some real pushback.
To be fair, no. No we are not all complicit.
http://chicagoist.com/2017/01/29/scenes_from_the_massive_protest_at.php#photo-1
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lax-protest-20170129-story.html
ok, cool.
anyway, as suggested earlier, protesting is like voting: it presupposes or is dependent upon a government that is in some way responsive to the will of the citizenry. so, not to repeat myself, but what happens when the federal judge the ACLU is petitioning upholds the executive order?
Let’s give a nod to the Silly Valley people who have taken strong stands:
And Google’s corporate statement was certainly weak sauce, but. . .
Who cares they voiced concern? Are they gonna do something about it? Are they gonna send money to refugees, are they gonna fund progressive grasroots movements and sponsor progressive candidates for senate and house seats? I dont need their empty words that cost nothing to type.
Don’t be an asshole and don’t be clueless. And don’t try to diminish the strength of the quoted statements by referring to them as “voicing concern.” They are, self-evidently, much more forceful than that.
If you think it costs American tech businesspeople “nothing” to speak out vigorously against a president, you don’t know much about how corporate-government relations work. Why the fuck do you imagine that Microsoft, Apple, etc. didn’t speak out forcefully?
And if you think speech is “empty,” you are very misguided.
Don’t let your appropriate anger at the situation make you stupid. Politics is the art of the possible and allies are where you find them — and their identities change rapidly and frequently, form one issue and circumstance to the next.
The only a/ssshole here are people like you making excuses of inaction and apathy. Words are cheap, they can shove it…
Yup, just words:
http://mashable.com/2017/01/30/google-crisis-fund-trump-immigration-refugee-ban/#oRHIiGme2Eqc
well, they might follow up with a sternly worded memo.
Great Lord! Did they!
… while listening to Trump pronounce “huge” as if his mother tongue was French
It says tomes about their moral character that they didn’t even giggle a bit!
RCL
To expand upon Tim Cook’s statement, the point made in the email was that Steve Jobs’ biological father was a Syrian immigrant; Cook is showing some empathy and understanding for individuals caught in an untenable situation, not merely employees.
Just follow the money.
Bribery and extortion are looping into one another.
I don’t know why everybody thinks these companies have any kind of “moral” values or ethics and expects them to take some kind of stand. Hell, Apple along with a host of other technology companies makes their products in China using what pretty much comes to slave labor. Massive corporations will only do what is best for their pocketbook in the short term or have we learned nothing from the 2008 financial crisis.
So spare me the platitudes and “don’t be evil” nonsense from these companies. You will see them do whatever they have to do to remain in the good graces of the government no matter how draconian the policies may be because if the refuse the penalties will be dire for their company. Those tax breaks and handouts both intellectual and monetary will dry up and they will find themselves ostracized from their fellow elites.
The good old computer industry. You know, train this immigrant and then you are finished. If you don’t no benefits none what so ever. But what the hell there will many, many Americans looking for jobs when the ACLU and our so called courts clean this up.
The cautious tone seems perfectly understandable. The tech companies want cheap labor, that’s all! They don’t really care where it comes from, except to the degree that sudden decrees cause chaos in daily operations. As long as Trump presents them with a big gift-wrapped batch of fresh H1Bs at the end of the day (and being a Republican, he believes in cheap labor too!), they’re not really going to care much what the fresh meat’s religion is.
Heck, the big shots might even feel a little safer around the office…
Just another example of the inevitable downward spiral and undermining of basic human rights that neoliberal policies have been responsible for for decades:
Prior to getting my ass handed to me in the 1990’s for daring to speak out in support of treating everyone pretty much the same with regards to meeting basic needs (the same health care coverage everyone else had, a living wage, reasonable employment assurances, etc…) our union members attempted to defend an example of what the agency I worked for considered an independent contractor.
We finally argued in front of an administrative law judge that a person who had to show up and work and stay at work at the employers address, use the employers tools, saw only the employers clients, and could not reasonably work for anyone else in the capacity assigned should not be considered an independent contractor, and should be afforded the same benefits as regular employees are; among them insurance coverage and the ability to participate in a pension plan and a union.
The ALJ decided for the employer and against the “independent contractor,” and, remarkable at the time, the statewide union representing the opposing position decided not to contest.
I din’t know at the time, but this was the shape of things to come.
This was the first step in that union abandoning its more rural chapters; deciding instead to save it’s resources and energy for more densely populated urban centers.
While there’s some merit to that argument, it underlies the real problem that pervades America here: when agencies and groups designed to protect and enhance basic human rights decide to abandon core principles and not enforce them everywhere (in any urban area they would have fought, and did, tooth and nail to protect against these types of gross violations) you inevitably end up weakening your entire group.
One can easily see how this applies to where we are now as a country, and how the Democrats, en masse, have slowly allowed the whittling away of core principles in regions of the country and among demographics that don’t negatively affect a large percentage of their members immediately and directly, to the detriment of us all.
@Sillyputty –
What a story. So many intricacies to the problems we face. Of course I wouldn’t let the GOP off the hook entirely, either… they’ve also done much to weaken unions.
Also, I have to add that it’s a part of the problem as well, that so many DON’T see that the real problems are the elites and that by working together we could start to make progress. I think some folks are starting to come around to this; there are many articles on Commondreams about coming together and forming various coalitions. And as I’ve said before, we have to wake people up to stop acting against their own interests. I’ve mentioned I’ve seen it myself first hand. The last union contract I voted on had a clause definitely NOT in the interest of the members, but they wouldn’t even table a vote for further study on it. And we were supposed to be some the most knowledgeable folks in our county!
Anyway, go figure. And maybe we should pray while we’re at it.
Did anything in the administration’s proposals on immigration say anything about H1B/H2B visas? Hi-tech/Silicon Valley relevant? No?
FYI; It’s a process..
Hope this helps..https://www.path2usa.com/h1b-to-green-card-process
Quoting:
“WHILE AIRPORT-STRANDED TRAVELERS from an apparently arbitrary list of Muslim-majority countries were being kept in handcuffs as a result of President Trump’s stunning immigration ban”
Sam, you should really stop with such broad opening statements, if you ever hope to be taken seriously by anybody else except the regular echo chamber SJWS.
Whatever criteria were used for the list, the list itself was there long before Trump became a President.
Also, there is nothing stunning about it. It was announced as coming long ago.
As for handcuffs, can you provide any evidence and context?
The story was in the NYT..whether it’s considered an echo chamber is up to the reader..that is , some who “READS”;,
A local Stanford graduate student who had been on a flight from Sudan to New York was detained at JFK for 5 hours . Nisrin Omer, 39yo said she had been briefly handcuffed.
..
Also, Tony, right-wingers’ use of the term “social justice warrior” as an insult demonstrates deep ignorance, and/or shameful disregard for a core American value: social justice.
To be a warrior for social justice is a fine and admirable thing. To be scathing, mocking and dismissive toward and of those engaged in the struggle for such justice is shameful and unAmerican.
To paraphrase bigots and assholes we’ve listened to for decades: “If you don’t like American values, maybe you should move to a country more suited to your own. You might like North Korea; I hear that you won’t be much bothered by ‘SJWs’ there.”
Love it or leave it, Tony.
People like you are the primary reason why even the term ‘social justice’ doesn’t sound anything more than propaganda.
Get used to the fact that your conception of social justice is not what majority in this country voted for.
Once you leave to fight for social justice in the 7 listed countries, I may change my opinion of you.
perhaps you could refer this majority to the Constitution.
Even the Europeans are wisening up, despite the ‘leaders’ paying lip service to popular generalities and dogmas that don’t oblige them much, but keep them looking good on Twitter
http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php
i’m not sure what your link is intended to show. i’m sure we’re all aware of the refugee crisis that the US has participated in creating….
as for Twitter hordes, in this case they would be correct about Trump’s unabashedly racist policy. i’d say this was a poor choice for deflecting accusations of racism, but then, do you really care if the policy is racist? or unconstitutional? it doesn’t seem like it.
If Tony could even find the Constitution, he wouldn’t be spouting this hateful nonsense.
But he doesn’t have time for quaint pieces of paper like that; he’s too busy playing the role of Virtual Brownshirt.
By now even saying that shit stinks would be considered racist by the hordes of Twitter SJWs.
What you purport to stand for is becoming meaningless because you don’t stand for anything.
I don’t use Twitter, you ignorant bigot, so you’re just babbling, irrelevantly.
You see that name just above this comment? That’s my name. I’m easy to find and I’ve been standing up for what I say and believe for more than 50 years.
What about you?
Ah, I see you’re buying the party line that Trump won the popular vote. Please tell me more.
And while you’re at it, help me understand why (even if your “alternative facts” were true) being on the side of a morally unjust majority means anything?
No, but I think two guys above can teach you something about the Constitution.
the majority of this country didn’t vote for anybody. clinton won a majority of the actual votes cast. and trump left the countries that are allegedly most dangerous to americans off the list. explain that.
the list which excluded, among others, saudi arabia?
We are not bombing Saudi Arabia. Excluding it, and Iran, we are directly and indirectly bomining the rest.
Not even entering the discussion on how we should have never be doing that in the first place, which just exposes the deep rooted hypocrisy, I don’t see anything shocking for the immigration from countries where the war is going on, to be stopped and under review by the new administration.
Trump wants to revise immigration policy. He was saying that for a long time. Now he is doing what he said he would do. Nothing more, nothing less.
and yet people attacking the united states are more likely to be from saudi arabia, but we give them a pass. he allegedly wants to stop terrorism via immigration restriction, but his actions belie the stated goal.
I’m certainly not going to argue that.
However, nowadays, at least when it comes to experiences in Europe (see unhc stats and map I posted above) massive emigration from Syria, which is what Trump primarily addressed, on top of DHS country selection done under Obama administration, is enough of concern to warrant review.
Terrorism nowadays is not just highly educated and motivated individuals like the 9/11 guys. It is a random radicalized guy or even a woman. Don’t you follow the news?
What’s the likelihood that crazed rednecks, with gun permits, would shoot you while hunting geese?
What is going on in Europe is not fun and games, and I fully support President Trump to try get us out of that predicament, before it is too late.
We don’t need Muslim-no-go European like zones any more than we need Chicago ‘gun safe’ zones that, in a decade, haven’t attracted more public protests than ‘Muslim ban’ airport protesters.
Protest, but don’t assume that hundreds of thousands of people from hundreds of other countries should be victimized because only you exist and everyone else is a racist.
What you think is going on in Europe is actually a fantasy story running through your head.
“What is going on in Europe is not fun and games, and I fully support President Trump to try get us out of that predicament, before it is too late.”
what’s going on in Europe is going on around the planet. it’s called a refugee crisis and Europe and the US haven’t had much problem participating in getting the world into that state. Trump’s response, that you support, is both racist and unconstitutional, leading me to one glaringly obvious question;
why do you hate American, Tony?
America, not American.