Dustin Moskovitz, Compelled to Support Hillary Clinton, Makes Huge Donations

Bravo to Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, for sticking his head above the parapet, donating $35 million to help Democrats in the 2016 general election, and showing the way for others in Silicon Valley. Those who follow his lead will prove how much they really care about American democracy. Moskovitz published Compelled To Act, on Medium, explaining his reasons. 

I understand why he had to think twice before doing this. Organizations like the NRA and people like the Koch brothers have used and still do use their power and wealth to lobby for the creation and cementing of policies that benefit the donor and hurt everybody else by keeping the inequality status quo in place and also damaging the environment. The Republican Party has enabled them. The result is that the core of the GOP has eroded away over time, leaving an empty space where true conviction once lay.

Inexorably that has left an environment where somebody like Donald Trump can flourish. So it's easy to say that money in politics is evil.  

But it's a false equivalence. The money isn't the problem; what people do with it, is. And not everybody who donates does so out of self-interest. And in any case, that's only half of the equation. The other half is what's done with the money.

Not every politician who accepts donations feels themselves obliged to accept a chain around their neck that can be yanked by the donor. The accusations that have been thrown at Hillary Clinton for belonging to Wall Street, primarily because she accepted sums of money she deserved for her bank speeches, are utterly unsubstantiated. Notably absent have been specific examples of how she has done their bidding—talking dates, people, policies. The same goes for the accusations against the Clinton Foundation for accepting money from regimes that are sustained on inequality and citizen abuse. Again, money is not the problem.

Republican donors' motives for plowing money into the political system have been about self interest and the corresponding behavior of GOP politicians has been to let themselves be yanked on a chain.

But there is a world of difference between that and Moskovitz's donation—and what will be done with the money. It will be used to further equality and protect the environment. 

And nobody can rationally accuse Moskovitz of self interest, because he is assisting, amongst others, the presidential candidate who wants to raise taxes for the wealthy. 

In his article, Moskovitz's assessment of Donald Trump as a con artist whose only interest in the presidency is to promote his brand is correct. Trump has always been a con-artist above all else, and that brand of humanity is very good at what they do. He's a self-congratulatory, over-enabled, out-of-control, narcissistic ego/megalo-maniac. The comparisons between him and Hitler aren't shallow. The consequences of him winning the election won't be either, not just for America but for the whole world. I think that in this time, sitting on the fence is an abdication of social responsibility. Not getting involved is a definitive choice tantamount to supporting Donald Trump.

Moskovitz has refused to give press interviews to date or reveal his future plans, but he's committed to Hillary Clinton winning. Have a look at his Twitter page.  

Connect with Hillary Clinton on Twitter @HillaryClinton  

Connect with me on Twitter @JenniferJS_

California Drought of Water & Creative Solutions to Poverty

At the beginning of April I read a New YorkTimes article about California in crisis over water shortage from prolonged drought. The article has the most extraordinary photographs of lush, well-watered upper middle class areas bordering on desert.

It’s always been like that in California, the land of creative milk and honey with a driving culture of virtually zero constraint, but how long can you sustain man-made solutions against the power of nature when it’s been so interfered with it’s on a rampage like an angry god? Problem with us humans is we tend to be short on long-term vision and if we can force our will on the natural world or a group of people, or even just one person for a while we think it’s forever.

When you’re riding a wave of monumental success it’s easy to believe you’re in control of everything. We all do it. We’ve all got Superman or Superwoman complexes at some level, to varying degrees.

But too many people and not enough water has always been kind of like railway tracks. You look down them and it seems like they’re merging in the distance but you tell yourself it’s just an optical illusion. Usually it is but not this time. Those tracks have always been leaning inwards towards each other and failing a sudden and dramatic turn in climate change, the collision that’s already actually happening isn’t going to magically unhappen.

But maybe the drought will end at some point. If it does, the Californians with money and/or access to it will probably find a way around the problem in the mean time and on the surface it seems like Californians are pretty well off. California has the 7^th largest economy in the world and the average income in 2013 was measured at just over $5,000 a year. But how can median income mean anything in a state with Silicon Valley where a data scientist can get from $120,000 to $250,000 a year, and Hollywood, where an actor can get a couple of million bucks to appear in a scene for one day—and the fruit and vegetables they buy are harvested by somebody who earns from $10,000 to $15,000 a year?

Without Silicon Valley and Hollywood the average would drop significantly. Even with them, taking into account costs of living (including childcare) and taxes etc., 23.8% were living in poverty in 2012, which put California at the top of the US Census Bureau’s list of poverty in all the states.

It’s still the same old story, the one we don’t want to look at. It’s not love and glory. It’s not romantic. It’s ugly, it’s scary, it’s a nuisance. But like any virulent, disfiguring disease, poverty spreads unless it’s dealt with seriously. In a drought it goes viral. And, most inconveniently, poor people are actually human, they affect things like economies. You’d think with all that incredible creativity in California they’d have cracked this one by now. There’s a great song sung by Bessie Smith, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton; Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. Ain’t that the truth.

FBI Push to Tap Internet Communications Triggers Big Brother Paranoia

The Washington Post and the New York Times have both reported that the Obama administration is considering a bill that will enable the FBI to tap internet users in much the same way as it has permission to wiretap. The matter has been debated for years, as far back as 2010, when the FBI asked Congress to pass a bill that would force internet companies to update their technical capacity to comply with a court order to intercept and unscramble internet communication in specific cases. 

This would include social networking sites and encrypted email transmitters. All companies would be required to put adequate technology in place so they could comply if asked, or face a $25,000 a day fine.

 FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III

The FBI didn’t succeed then and they’re pushing again for the same law to be put in place. Their rationale then and now is that methods of communication have evolved but their ability to pursue criminals hasn’t kept pace. Everybody knows about wiretapping and how to avoid it now so the FBI has lost its edge.

This is not Hollywood; the FBI will still need a court order just as they do for wiretapping, but it’s creating a firestorm of protest among IT companies and internet users. Both are bringing in the big paranoia guns, arguing that this is a big brother move which will make privacy even more of a joke and facilitate hackers. They’re also warning it will impact negatively on Silicon Valley and the US IT industry as a whole; that established IT companies and startups will gravitate to other countries without any controls. Which argument isn’t much different from the 1% protesting that if they have to pay taxes they’ll leave and the economy will collapse without them.

It's difficult to distinguish the difference between the real work that the FBI does in protecting society and the Hollywood version of a corrupt, inept, megalomaniac organization. It's also hard to know where sanity kicks in, in the war on terror, given that nobody really knows what happened on 9/11 and that the Iraq war was initiated on fabricated ‘evidence’. And that conservatives with an agenda and their media have played a huge role in cultivating paranoia.

It’s also impossible to know whether the FBI will abuse this capability or whether it will really help them pursue criminals. Probably both will happen. The firestorm is understandable but it isn’t logical. Everybody lived with wiretapping and if this bill passes everybody will get used to it too. In any case it’s ludicrous that companies like Google and Facebook would protest about people’s right to privacy. Personally I’d rather be guarded by the FBI than intruded upon by either of those two thugs. 

And right now the internet is the wild west; there aren’t any controls at all, so maybe it would be good to introduce some. What can anybody do if you’re the victim of internet crime? Absolutely nothing. So maybe this will actually facilitate not just catching terrorists but hackers, pedophiles and internet bank robbers.

Snapchat Fills the Facebook Gap and Silicon Valley Invests in Privacy

Imagine a world where companies listed on the stock exchange didn’t make any money at all, but investors bought and sold according to the companies’ popularity. A monetary value would be attached to non-tangibles and creativity would be directly rewarded for its own sake. Nothing would have to be bought or sold; it would just have to be created, requiring investment.

It’s not such a wild idea. Snapchat, an app that lets you share photos and videos for a couple of seconds before they self-destruct, attracted the attention of Silicon Valley investors after its popularity started going through the roof. It was created 2 years ago by Evan Spiegel, 22, and Bobby Murphy, 24, from Venice Beach, responding to a need they saw for better privacy, especially in their own age bracket and younger. The app now has 60 million users a month, most of them between the ages of 13 and 25.

Users see it as a way to be more real with friends – which of course includes sexting, but that isn’t its exclusive use. This is really about a younger generation wanting to be able to express itself freely but valuing its privacy above everything else. And it’s about investors rewarding creativity for its own sake, not requiring the artist to sell their product. Not much different from artists getting sponsorship just to produce art. Except that Snapchat’s value isn’t tangible.

A successful entrepreneur and investor, Scott. D. Cook, founder of Intuit, put his weight behind Snapchat, valuing it at $60 - $70 million – without it having made a cent and not even really having a capacity for making money – which resulted in Snapchat raising $13.5 million recently for development.  

Unfortunately, as Dominique Mosbergen points out in huffingtonpost.com, it’s really easy to take a screenshot of images and videos before they disappear, without the original sender being aware, so its privacy isn’t really privacy after all, but it is a notch better than Facebook. When Katie Notopoulos asked the founder Evan Spiegel about this vulnerability, he said, rather cryptically, “The people who most enjoy using Snapchat are those who embrace the spirit and intent of the service. There will always be ways to reverse engineer technology products — but that spoils the fun!” (Buzzfeed)

Snapchat has moved in where Facebook failed, by recognizing the most important thing to users – privacy - and finding a way to capitalize on it without compromising it. So far, anyway. It will take a creative investor to understand where the real value lies and that they also need to join in the creativity and find a way to create profit without destroying the most important component. It’s hard to imagine that investors will be that creative. They seem hard-wired and utterly insensitive to where real value lies. Advertising seems to be all they know as a means of creating revenue. 

But it’s not really working on Facebook, and in any case, advertising is finite; there’s only so much space on a page and people either get inured to it or they get annoyed and stop opening up that page.
Whether what’s happening with Snapchat is really creativity being valued for its own sake is hard to say. All successful companies have an eye on Wall Street, and even though most trading does seem to be controlled by prediction, to think that pure speculation based on popularity but no income stream is enough to trade off is kind of like science fiction. 

Some kind of change is in the wind, though. Snapchat has competitors, including Poke on Facebook, all a response to market demands. Maybe individuals and companies will find it harder and harder to earn megabucks in an advertising-saturated world; maybe eventually they’ll run out of options, particularly as people become better informed and demand what’s important to them. Maybe founders of apps like Snapchat won’t enjoy the idea of world dominance, like Mark Zuckerberg did, and kill their own birthchild.

Frankly, I’ve never understood why anybody would want to have so much financial power. What on earth can a single person do with it? Absolutely nothing. How many cars can you drive, how many houses can you live in at one time? How many places can you fly to in a year? How much stimulation can you take in?

That lust for more and more is a beast. Eventually you run out of ways to feed it. I think the world would be a much more peaceful and better place if these giant corps and super-wealthy individuals were brought down to earth a bit. And imagine a world where you weren’t besieged by advertising at every turn.