Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
9-9-21
Working for a public utility and being immersed in union activity for some 30 years, I became fully aware of how accurate the term, “Snouts in the public trough” in reference to the private sector’s relationship to the public really is. At board meetings which were generally held during hours when the working public were at, well, work, I had the opportunity to witness the private sector feeding frenzy when big public contracts are up for grabs.
One dictionary definition of trough is “A long narrow open container for animals to eat and drink from.”, and the most sought after trough of all is the US defense industry; “The Pentagon remains a profit-rich target for big tech companies.”, writes Ryan Tracy in the Wall Street Journal.
The traditional benefactors from this taxpayer trough has been the grossly misnamed defense industry, the manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction like Lockheed Martin, Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and others. But as Tracy reports, Silicon Valley and big tech want to dig their snouts deeper in to the public trough and are pushing the Pentagon to adopt more commercially developed technology. The tech industry barons argue that the private sector has more talent and more money.
Technology is important in war production as it reduces the deaths of the aggressor as troops on the ground are fewer and killing can be accomplished via computer screens thousands of miles away. A small section of US families has borne the brunt of the US War on Terror, a factor in halting public protests against unpopular wars; people go about their daily business in the main and who cares if foreigners die in droves. They hate us don’t they? “What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.”, my mum used to say after dropping a pork chop on the kitchen floor.
Technology and massive spending on WMD’s doesn’t guarantee
victory though as the recent defeat of US imperialism by a bunch of guys in
sandals with no airforce, navy or tech industry shows. No matter what we might think of the Taliban, these
former friends of the Pentagon and the CIA, are committed and have died in
their thousands. Trillions of dollars in
the fiasco the US media calls the Afghan War, cost the US working class
improved living standards, public services and a multitude of other social
services available in most of the world’s wealthier nations.
The
Silicon Valley initiative is being spearheaded by the
National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence that is chaired by
none other than Eric Schmidt*, the former Google CEO. “From the president on down, everyone is saying, ‘OK, we are in a
competition with China,’” says Robert Work, the Vice chairman of the
committee and former US Deputy Secretary of Defense under Obama and Trump.
Other
panelists are a motley crew of ruthless free market competitors whose distrust
of each other is temporarily put aside in order to increase profits by grabbing
a piece of the bloated US offense budget.
The rise of China and to a lesser extent Russia, is threatening US
imperialism’s position as the world’s leading economic power. “Worker Joe” Biden has made it clear
that his administration is opening
up a new era of “extreme competition”
with China and the tech industry is not about to miss out on that plum and warns
that more integration with the state and the defense industry is what can win
this economic war and the physical one if necessary.
The
first question we working people have to ask ourselves is “Why are we as working people in competition with China?” Didn’t
one factory owner. Foxconn have to put nets outside workers’ dorms because workers were so stressed
and alienated that they were escaping the misery by leaping to their
deaths. It seems we have more in common with then than Biden.
In
a June 15th article oozing
sarcasm, Bloomberg Business Week thanked China’s state capitalist approach
for forcing the US to take steps to boost public spending to aid private
industry by passing The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, or what’s known as the China Bill in the US Senate. “It
convinced an ideologically paralyzed Washington that the state can play a
positive role in economic progress.“, says BW. The legislation mimics
aspects of the Chinese state-led economic model, with $250 billion to fund
scientific research and support semiconductor manufacturing, Bloomberg
says.
The Pentagon is
already heavily involved in Silicon Valley, “funding
startups” Business Week adds which is a development the taxpayer knows
little about despite it being our money, and the National Security commission
“….envisions the military and intelligence bureaucracy working more like a large
tech company….”, and that should make the hair on anyone’s neck stand on
end. The FBI has a long history of infiltrating organized labor as has the CIA,
particularly abroad, making the world safe for US corporations. CIA personnel
were the first “troops on the ground”
in Vietnam planting bombs and causing disruption setting the stage for US
imperialism’s horrific assault on the Vietnamese people at the cost of some
67,000 US workers lives. The CIA infiltrated the US labor movement through its
front USAID the United States Agency for International Development.
The lords of tech like their colleagues that run the defense industry are no friends of US workers or the middle class. I have to question the logic of those who detest “big government” but seem to be quite happy to have Apple and Google have all your personal information.
Not everyone is pleased about these developments, Shoshana Zuboff, author of the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” Tells the Wall Street Journal that, “….the data-collection and ad-targeting practices of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon pose the bigger threat.”
Hooray for that, any thinking workers know that the tech industry is already spying on us and invading our privacy.
Bloomberg’s somewhat satirical piece linked to above thanking China for pushing the US body politic to invest more public funds in private sector ventures in order to level the playing field in the technology race with China, is dishonest to say the least as US industry from agribusiness to steel and auto manufacturing offers plenty of help to private industry through tax breaks, loopholes and subsidies. “Big government” is only a problem when it aids workers, our families and our communities.
Most of the world’s global tech companies are US based and these developments remind us that while we live in a global economy, the modern nation state, a product of the revolutions of the capitalist class against the straitjacket of feudalism, still matters. Marx pointed out that while the rise of the nation state was a historical necessity for capitalism to develop, in the epoch of the global economy it has turned in to its opposite, it has become an obstacle to growth, an obstacle to human development in total. It cannot take society forward and actually threatens our extinction.
As I follow these developments I sympathize with my comrades, brothers and sisters who decide to shut it all out. “There is nothing we can do is their refrain.” Think of the wealth of Bezos and Tim Cook, and Bill Gates. How can we stop them? And the US government, it’s a vast impenetrable machine, so entrenched and corrupt. it’s not even worth voting.
It’s overwhelming and we are living in a time where the working class has not, in the US anyway, stamped its mark on society in a serious way. Most young people have grown up never experiencing a mass strike, a total shut down of the economy. They know nothing about the French General Strike of 1968, (if they do its portrayed as student movement). The 44 day Flint occupation that built the UAW, the Seattle, San Francisco, Toledo and Oakland General Strikes are unknown to them.
The great labor uprising of the 1930’s that built industrial unionism is absent from the consciousness of young people. The Civil Right movement or the Black Revolt that had the potential to change the course of history is taught as mainly a black struggle with support from a few white liberals. In reality it shook US capitalism to the core and alongside it we had the colonial revolutions in the African continent from Ghana to Kenya that evicted directed exploitation in the form of European colonialism
US history has a violent and racist past. But there have also been great moments of working class unity despite this racist terror orchestrated from above; we couldn’t have come this far otherwise. It is to this history we must return and are returning. The US working class today is more integrated than ever before. The mood against racism is strong enough in US society that the CEO of Starbucks felt the need to close all of his stores nationally for a day to have some bul*&hit classes on racism and diversity. These people will never let racism go, it’s too useful to them in times of need; but they will pretend and make harmless gestures.
Our enemies are powerful. But we are stronger. We have the numbers. We do the work. Our labor power is the source of their profits and we are international. We load ships in Taipei and Seattle. We work in mines in West Virginia and West Papua. We are the workers of the world and we hold the key to the future.
For more information on this character read: When Google Met Wikileaks
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