This column is Part 2 of a 3-part series. Read Part 1, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” and Part 3, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3)

PAYPAL HOLDINGS, Inc, is an indispensable, American, global corporation, without whose services, financially transacting online is difficult. The company is worth $16.929 billion.

The worthless Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center, that has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially. People like Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson the ADL deems to be mired in white supremacism. What next?

The ADL and PayPal have conspired to ferret out “bigotry and extremism” from the financial industry, by which they mean ban thought crimes.

“Racism—systemic or other—remains nothing but thought crime: impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written or preached. Thought crimes are nobody’s business in free societies.”

In response to this particular collusion against thought crimes, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has vowed to stay chipper. This is not sufficient a solution from so powerful a persona as Mr. Carlson.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ Solution

The requisite and fitting noblesse oblige comes from Justice Clarence Thomas.

As one of the few public intellectuals to grasp the gravity of social and financial excommunication by Deep Tech (to denote Big Tech’s enmeshment with The State), and for proposing a way to prohibit wicked social and financial ouster of innocents—Justice Thomas is my hero.

To blabber on about simply finding alternative outlets to Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, PayPal and other banking facilities is asinine verging on the criminal. Coming from political representatives, such advice ought to guarantee loss of face, even political expulsion.

The ordinary guy or girl (check) is told to go up against economic and political entities whose revenues exceed the GDP of quite a number of G20 nations combined.

“It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information,” inveighs Justice Thomas:

“A person could always choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

I’d go further. It would hardly be hyperbole, in driving home Justice Thomas’s ingenious point, to put it thus:

With respect to financial de-platforming, barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes. “Sure, some options remain for you to explore, you hapless loser. Go to it!”

Thomas has argued in favor of the “two legal doctrines” that “limit the right of a private company to exclude”:

The first doctrine, he explained, involves “common carriers,” such as railroads and telegraphs, which have historically been required “to serve all comers.” The second involves “places of public accommodation” or amusement, such as inns, restaurants, and theaters, which have generally been forbidden from denying service to certain categories of people. “The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of accommodation,” Thomas wrote, “may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms.” (Via Reason.)

Republicans, especially the tenured motormouths on TV, have refused so much as to grapple with Justice Thomas’ outstanding assessment of Big Tech and his attendant legal recommendation.

Too complex?

**
Next Week: Part 3, “Mercer & Mystery Man’s Big-Tech Solutions.”

Part 1: “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” (The Problem).

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 12
Townhall.com, August 12
Unz Review, August 12
CNSNews.com  August 13
The New American, August 13
Quarterly Review, August 16

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Donald Trump went into a gathering of special interests, on March 6. It was comprised of Goldman-Sachs Democrat Ivanka Trump, American multinational CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and assorted Chamber of Commerce lobbyists.

The president of the United States (POTUS) then emerged with assurances to all those lowly American workers sick of rising wages and growing employment opportunists. He was now fully committed to the importation of still more foreign workers to “give … to large companies.” Yes! He listened! Deplorables were getting sick of winning.

Ivanka, who clearly calls the shots on the un-American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, sermonized blithely about retraining American workers (who don’t have daddies to hire them).

Last year, when the same kind of cabal tried to make Trump dance to its drums, POTUS responded with his notorious “shithole countries” epithet. He was not bringing in people from, well, you know the rest.

All this made me long for the time Gen. John Kelly, formerly White House chief of staff, was present to stop first daughter Ivanka from, as the general put it, “playing government.”

Nostalgically, I traveled back in time to survey the Trump “shithole countries” designation—and destinations. Was he proven right in his aversion to accelerating the tipping point in our own country?

Haiti is located in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba. The country is forever convulsed by political or natural disasters.

In January of 2010, this, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere—where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT)—was struck by a massive, magnitude-7.0 earthquake.

The rescuers, spokespersons, geological surveyors and geophysicists; the missionaries, medicine and military men and women; the aid-deliverers—most all were Westerners. Without the West, Haitians would no longer be hobbling along in their post-apocalyptic zombie land.

In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, the gravest danger was an epidemic; the greatest danger in the wake of the Haiti disaster was a crime wave worse than the one ongoing.

Southwest of Haiti, bounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, is the Republic of Chile.

Only on CNN did they attempt to dispute the fact that Chile had coped swimmingly with what was “one of the most powerful earthquakes in history.”

At the time of Chile’s March 2010 tremblor, the West’s malfunctioning media ran a lot of pieces about the little looting in Chile, following that disaster. It was as though activists at CNN, Anderson Cooper in the lead, had been hoping that Chile, who’d been subjected to aftershocks as strong as Haiti’s main event, would fare as poorly as did “the Africa of the Western Hemisphere.”

Not mine, that last reference is to Haiti (which, as mentioned, had undergone a massive event around the same time as did Chile). “A piece of Africa transported to the new world” is how David S. Landes described Haiti in a 1986 article for The New Republic, entitled “Slaves and Slaughter.” The article belongs to a time when scholars were more honest.

Our anchors-cum-activists at CNN penned derogatory blogs about Chile (dominated as it is, demographically, by conquistadors). One got the impression that had CNN let rip, the blog, “In Chile, looters are leaving the biggest aftershocks,” would have been titled “Chile Earthquake Proves White People Loot a Lot.”

But Cooper and company were destined for disappointment. The death toll in Chile was quickly revised down from about 800 to 452. Troops and firefighters galvanized. Chilean telethons were conducted without George Clooney. And Chileans were soon flying patriotic slogans such as “Chile Helps Chile,”  something you never saw in Haiti.

No doubt, non-“shithole countries” seem to recover quickly from disasters, natural or man-made. To wit:

In 2008, Iceland collapsed under the weight of its banking industry’s federal-reserve like excesses.

In 2018, Iceland has a red-hot economy. The highly able population has shifted from finance to technology and tourism. No bailouts—allowing the banks to collapse and a natural recovery to take place—had a lot to do with Iceland’s success. But brainpower and resolve were needed to arrive at that determination.

Likewise did Chile, but not Haiti, cope reasonably well with what was “one of the most powerful earthquakes in history.”

It’s nearly two decades since a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. The U.S. government granted Salvadorians a generous grant of privilege, in the form of a temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000. The American taxpayer did the same for the “Haitians who were stranded after the 2010 earthquake.”

To the din of protest, “the United States’ Department of Homeland Security has only recently revoked the longest of the “temporary” protection grants lasting nearly two decades.

“Shithole countries,” a Trump coinage, don’t seem to recover very well from disasters, natural or man-made, now do they?

Yet to the dilemma, “What makes a country, people or place?”, Chilean leaders have, alas, responded unintuitively.

Via the Wall Street Journal comes news that,

… one of Latin America’s richest and safest countries has opened its doors to some of the region’s poorest migrants in record numbers. … the most dramatic surge has come from Haiti. Last year, almost 105,000 Haitians entered Chile, compared with about 49,000 in 2016 and just a handful a decade ago, according to federal police that oversee border crossings.

Once a country transitions to “shithole” status, it is well-nigh impossible to make it great again.

And once a populist president takes dictation from his globalist daughter … well, you know the rest.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review
March 7

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“If the tax reform bill goes through, do you plan to increase your company’s capital investment?”

The question was posed to a sizeable group of CEOs at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, in the presence of White House economic adviser Gary Cohn.

A pitiful show of hands failed to wipe the smirk off Mr. Cohn’s face. But at least the knaves were candid. Tax cuts for American big businesses are unlikely to move corporations to deploy that capital to raise the wages of the little guy, the worker.

The repatriation deal planned for fat-cat multinationals is particularly sweet. But don’t expect the “one-time tax rate of 12 percent on cash returns and five percent on non-cash for corporate money repatriated from overseas” to spur investment in the U.S.

Ideally, policymakers would prefer, as Business Insider quips, for companies to “reinvest in their core businesses, as this holds the most direct bearing on economic expansion.” All the president’s men certainly preach it.

But President Trump’s plan to grant the multinationals, tech titans included, a tax holiday, is more likely to see capital used to tinker with share prices. Repurchasing shares, a share buyback, will boost stock prices and benefit large shareholders.

Where a multinational also traffics in human labor, globally—as do the likes of Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Qualcomm, etc.—a lower tax rate on their repatriated earnings is unlikely to redound to American computer programmers and engineers.

In the event these tax holidays encourage American high-tech to “reinvest in their core businesses”—it will not be an investment in employing American talent, which will continue to be replaced apace with foreign workers.

For accretion in employment among Americans to occur, the president would have to turn off the H-1B (and other visa) spigots. He has not.

Multinationals consider the world their labor market. High-tech traitors will continue to replace the worker bees of American STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—with reliably mediocre, culturally aggressive, foreign workers.

And not necessarily because foreign workers are cheaper. Importing workers from India calls for enormous in-house bureaucracies to handle immigration applications and renewals, attendant litigation, and family importation and resettlement packages for tribes of new arrivals (also known as chain migrants). This isn’t necessarily cheaper than employing your local lass or lad.

The H-1B visa racket is, however, a taxpayer-subsidized, grant of government privilege. Duly, profits remain private property. The costs of accommodating an annual human influx are socialized, borne by the bewildered community.

Moreover, with the exception of Indian companies, such as notorious H-1B hogs Infosys and Tata, visa holders in “marquee high-tech firms like Google and Microsoft” are not paid inferior wages. That’s against American labor and anti-discrimination law.

From the fact that an oversupply of high-tech workers has lowered wages for all techies, it does not follow that the (average) men and women imported are being exploited. Rather, it is the glut of average worker bees—their abundance—that has depressed wages for this particular, high-tech cohort.

So, please conservatives, quit crying croc over alleged exploitation, in the high-tech industry, of poor, foreign-born, “indentured slave-labor.” Misplacing compassion does not add force to the argument, for these are the facts:

Again, H-1B visa holders are not paid inferior wages; they’re getting a fabulous deal. Remember: Voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. They involve giving up something one values less (life in Calcutta) for something one values more (life in Seattle), and finding someone else with “opposite valuations”: An Amazon or Microsoft CEO who values people from Calculate more than kids from Kent.

Humor aside, ceteris paribus (all other things being equal), the H-1B visa holder forfeits his (unexceptional) labor for a salary many times the salary he’d get in India or China or Pakistan. If he were not incalculably better off than he was in his previous life, he would not have taken a calculated risk … in a plush American office or a well-capitalized US laboratory.

No, it’s the American STEM worker who is stiffed.

Perversely, companies such as Qualcomm, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft pair aggressive demands for more H-1B visas (those shortages, you know) with a ruthless downsizing of domestic workers—this worker deserves your tears, not his imported replacement.

The price of labor in the high-tech labor market is a function of a political, artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants. Prattle about the price at which American workers will do certain work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—communities. Render asunder the quaint idea of borders—and the world is your labor market; communities be damned.

Realize that this ceaseless supply of labor is maintained not through peaceful market forces, but through the use of political power, wielded by wealthy men and women with access. At work here is their Brave New Borderless World, not the invisible hand we love.

Look deeper before maligning the Profit Motive, as the Left wants you to do. Power, more than profits, is what animates high-tech. Just imagine the thrill of seeing your idea of virtue turned into policy that affects the greatest economy in the world.

For tech superstars are true believers in the borderless multicultural state. These arrogant CEOs and their minions are social-justice warriors, first; giants of industry, second.

Already billionaire tech execs derive greater pleasure from signaling their virtue (via immigration) than from turning a profit. They aim for stardom in Davos, Switzerland, not Des Moines, Iowa.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, WND.com, The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, The Liberty Conservative, Constitution.com.
November 16

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©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
January 29

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