What Happened Today: Feb 14, 2022
Clinton spying; Ukraine blues; Kotkin on Tech breakdown
The Big Story
The Hillary Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” Donald Trump’s computer servers inside the White House in a bid to create a narrative linking Trump to Russia, according to a new legal filing from Special Counsel John Durham. The motion filed by Durham on Friday concerns lawyer Michael Sussmann’s potential conflicts of interest while he was working for the law firm Perkins Coie and representing the Clinton campaign in 2016. Last year, Durham charged Sussmann with lying to an FBI agent in 2016, saying Sussmann claimed—during a meeting in which he handed over documents purporting to show a secret communications channel had been opened between the Trump Organization and Russia’s state-linked Alfa Bank—to not be working “for any client” when actually he was employed by Clinton. In fact, Durham claims, Perkins Coie’s own records show that Sussman was billing Clinton for his work related to the Alfa Bank story. Durham’s latest motion, filed on Feb. 11, alleges that Sussmann was actually working for “at least two specific clients” when he met with the FBI agent, one being the Clinton campaign and the other “a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company.” According to the filing, “Tech Executive 1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.” Despite their shady origins, the sensational charges about Trump and Alfa Bank were shopped around to reporters by an opposition research firm hired by Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, the same group that shopped around the discredited Steele dossier. Eventually, a story alleging a secret Trump hotline to the Kremlin was published in Slate by Franklin Foer, the former editor of The New Republic, and was subsequently picked up by dozens of other publications.
Read it here: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/clinton-campaign-paid-infiltrate-trump-tower-white-house-servers
Back Pages: Joel Kotkin on the Tech Breakdown
The Rest
→ “Right now the people’s biggest enemy is panic in our country,” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Saturday as he continued to push back on reports coming from U.S. and Western European leaders that a Russian invasion is imminent. The former comedian and television star, who is Jewish, had a phone meeting on Sunday with President Biden in which he pushed the American leader to visit Kyiv in the coming days and to “contribute to de-escalation.”
→ The Israeli government is preparing to rescue as many as 200,000 Ukrainian Jews should there be a Russian invasion. It’s not clear how many Ukrainians would seek asylum in Israel if war broke out, but the Israeli government reportedly has secret plans to extract and then house those who seek assistance. On Saturday night, Israel’s foreign ministry announced that all Israelis should return from Ukraine immediately. As Russia arranges its army around Ukraine, Israel has not taken sides in the conflict. “Russia and Ukraine have huge Jewish communities,” Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, explained. “So we need to be careful.”
→ Markets appear to be holding their breath, waiting for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to explode or die out. An offhand sarcastic remark on Monday by Zelensky—announcing that Russia was scheduled to invade this Wednesday—was enough to trigger a rapid stock sell-off and gold-buying spree before the Ukrainian leader clarified that he was joking, and the markets began to rebound.
→ Amnesty International held a press conference Monday and blasted the government of Lebanon for upholding a policy that bars Palestinian refugees from holding more than 70 kinds of jobs. Ha, ha, ha! Of course, Amnesty did no such thing. Instead, it simply continued ignoring the situation in Lebanon, as it does with other developments that don’t provide titillating headlines for an audience of Western activists.
Read more: https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/lebanon-backtracks-move-open-jobs-palestinians
→ Who said theocratic zealots can’t do slapstick comedy?
→ Protesters were cleared from the Ambassador Bridge on Sunday night, reopening a crucial road between the manufacturing hubs of Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. “Freedom Convoy” protesters opposing Canada’s COVID-19 policies blockaded the bridge for nearly a week. A quarter of all trade between the United States and Canada crosses the Ambassador Bridge, and the blockade led to temporary production stoppages in auto manufacturing plants on both sides of the border. Though the bridge has been cleared, the protests continue to grow. Trucks line the streets of Ottawa, Canada’s capital, with hundreds of vehicles occupying the area around Canada’s parliament for a third week. The Freedom Convoys have also become an international movement, with truckers gathering to oppose their country’s pandemic policies in the United States, France, New Zealand, and Australia.
→ Super Bowl LVI, in which the L.A. Rams beat the Cincinnati Bengals in a dramatic fourth-quarter comeback, will also be remembered for its halftime show, which was headlined by Dr. Dre (a son of Compton, a stone’s throw from where the game was played) and featured hip-hop legends 50 Cent, Mary J Blige, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar. The Super Bowl is America’s last shared festival, the game an arena of sanctioned combat. This year’s halftime show assembled a group of artists who have produced some of the most interesting and trenchant critiques of the war on drugs, police brutality, and urban poverty, inside a prettified L.A. strip mall to entertain the country and offer muted condemnations of state violence. Kendrick Lamar lopped off “popo” from a line in “Alright,” a song that served as an anthem for protesters opposing police brutality, before Eminem took a knee (apparently, with the NFL’s permission) in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. The show then went on.
→ The Texas attorney general is suing Facebook’s parent, Meta Platforms, for billions of dollars over claims that the company used its facial recognition technology, which was recently shut down, to harvest data from users. The suit, filed Monday, concerns a recently shuttered program that logged the facial geometry in photographs that users uploaded to Facebook from 2010 to late last year. The information collected from the face scans amounted to “tens of millions of violations” of Texas law, according to the suit, which further accused the company of exploiting the information it had acquired “for its own commercial gain,” failing to delete the data in a reasonable time frame and selling it to third parties.
→ In a new interview published Monday, Art Spiegelman tells New York Magazine that he believes a Tennessee school board’s recent decision to ban his graphic novel about the Holocaust was motivated by the book’s lack of a redemptive arc, not antisemitism. “I never wanted Maus to be for children,” Spiegelman tells his interviewer. “I wasn’t doing it in the context of, I’m going to teach people to be better; I’m going to teach people that they should learn about the Holocaust because ‘Never again.’”
Read more: https://www.vulture.com/article/art-spiegelman-maus-interview.html
Joel Kotkin on the Tech Breakdown
The record meltdown of Meta stock earlier this month suggests turbulence in the tech world and a difficult period ahead for the company formerly known as Facebook. But even as Meta’s stock has fallen, the record profits being posted by fellow oligarchical tech firms Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon indicates that Silicon Valley’s hegemony is far from over. There’s virtually nowhere for new competitors to emerge given the stranglehold that these mega-firms and the associated Wall Street/venture capital money machine have over everything from video games to online ads, search engines, cloud computing, mobile phones, and computer operating systems.
Rather than seeing a new crop of rivals, we’re seeing changes driven by the dispersion of tech work away from places like Silicon Valley and toward emerging locales in Ohio and Texas. In large part, this reflects the extraordinary costs for housing, which makes homeownership a pipe dream for most millennials. A just-published report by Knock.com estimates that, at current prices, the median income household could require between 115 and 167 years to save for a down payment on the median-priced new home in San Jose, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.
Housing is one of the reasons, as my colleague and I show in a new report from Chapman University, that California now underperforms its main competitors (notably Arizona, Texas, Washington, and Utah) in many sectors of the economy—manufacturing, professional business services, construction, and energy. These competitors have begun to easily outpace California in economic growth related to innovation. Silicon Valley’s share of venture capital has also eroded considerably over the past decade.
Playing on those pre-existing trends, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have driven tech workers out of California to smaller cities, less expensive places, and even rural areas. San Francisco, although not particularly hard hit by the pandemic in terms of total deaths from COVID-19, has suffered among the most severe population and office-space losses in the country. It’s no longer clear why anyone would want to pay the housing premium to stay in San Francisco as crime shoots up and quality of life deteriorates. After all, most startups now see their future as dispersed and largely virtual. A new white paper from economists at the University of Chicago estimates that roughly 50% of Silicon Valley jobs can be done remotely.
The scale of the change taking place as the tech industry moves from one hub to many is reflected in the size of the real estate deals being signed. Chipmaker Intel is putting at least $20 billion—the company’s biggest investment ever—in a massive new facility outside Columbus, Ohio. The investment signals a shift that will create what company CEO Pat Gelsinger calls “the Silicon Heartland.” The Columbus area, which boasts an unemployment rate half that of California’s, has become a hub for melding manufacturing with technology and has developed an impressive local training initiative to service this growth.
Meta—which, despite its current problems, should not be counted out—has reportedly purchased 33 floors in downtown Austin, where Apple has now located its engineering division and Tesla is building its new factory. Virtually all of the new plants of the electric car industry and battery production are being located either in the Midwest or the South.
A similar dispersion of tech work is also taking place in Europe. In a new study by Swedish researcher Nima Sanandaji, the greatest growth in information-sector work is not taking place in the United Kingdom, France, or Germany but in less expensive places like Poland, Latvia, Slovakia, and Hungary. The hotspots now, Sanandaji suggests, are places like Bratislava, Prague, Tallinn, and Budapest.
To revive its long-term prospects, the U.S. tech sector needs to change its act, notably by ending its critical dependence on China for markets, manufacturing and, increasingly, technology. Chinese firms like Tencent, Huawei, and Alibaba now stand as the old Silicon Valley oligarchs’ only important rivals and enjoy certain advantages over their American tech counterparts in the form of protected markets and, perhaps, a bit of snooping by what Beijing calls “patriotic” corporate thieves.
The question is whether America’s oligarchs have the capability or even the willingness to challenge our primary global rival. Apple has already reached a historic $275 billion accord with Beijing, which cements the firm’s long-term dependence on Chinese manufacturing and willingness to share the latest technological breakthroughs. Silicon Valley, like Wall Street, remains a bastion of pro-China sentiment. Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya recently suggested “nobody cares” about the ethnic minority Uyghurs being forced into internment and reeducation camps by the Chinese government. The tech oligarchs stay quiet about the suppression of Hong Kong and would probably accept a takeover of Taiwan as long as they got their share of the island’s chip production.
Yet as awful as the oligarchs may be, we perhaps should be more concerned with the fading of their creative spark that once powered American tech innovation and is increasingly being replaced by brute financial power. Long-time Silicon Valley observer Mike Malone sees the new masters of tech shifting “from … blue-collar kids to the children of privilege” while also moving away from the production ethos that made the valley so inspiring and egalitarian. An intensely competitive industry, he suggests, has become enamored with the allure of “the sure thing” backed by massive capital. If there is a potential competitor, he says, they simply buy it.
As concerned as we may be about the arrogance and lack of backbone of the tech oligarchy, we have to hope they find a way to return to their innovative roots or help nurture a generation of new players. It’s still better to have egomaniacal Silicon Valley CEOs in charge than to turn the technological future to people who answer first and foremost to Xi Jinping.
Thank you, thank you, for publishing such content, including the inimitable Joel Kotkin. And not the drivel put out by the media and repeated by so much of the mainstream Jewish world run by aging, out-of-touch Boomers.