"As it stands, Democrats, with a few exceptions, have generally declined to meaningfully contest the tech giants’ rise to power—and in many cases, they’ve helped hit the gas.
Elon Musk and his companies have been showered with subsidies, tax breaks, and incentives since at least the first Obama term, when Tesla received $465 million in DOE loans as part of the 2009 stimulus package. (In an argument redolent of the ones made by OpenAI and others today, Musk appealed to Obama by claiming that Tesla simply needed more capital than the enormous amount already sunk into the company to be successful, and would go under without it.) Obama declined to have his FTC investigate whether Google was violating antitrust laws, and was a strong supporter of Airbnb and gig work companies like Uber. Speaking of Uber, city government after city government, many Democrat-led, rolled over when the gig app giant broke local taxi laws in a bid to shore up market share, impoverishing taxi and livery cab drivers in the process.
The Democratic schmoozing of big tech is still going strong today: When Chuck Schumer convened a closed door Senate hearing on AI policy in 2023, he invited Silicon Valley CEOs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to take the lead. Biden’s Treasury bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after it collapsed in the wake of deeply irresponsible risk management practices and VCs demanded cash to save it. Last year, star Democrat Gavin Newsom sided with Google over working journalists and threatened a veto that doomed a bill that would have required tech giants to pay newspapers a small share of the ad revenue for hosting news on their platforms. The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna argued on CNN that Democrats have simply been *too hard* on Elon Musk, not showering him with enough praise and thus driving him into Republicans’ arms."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-tech-oligarchy-has-been-here
#USA #DemocraticParty #BigTech #Oligarchy #Oligopolies #Competition #Inequality #SiliconValley
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