The Democratic/Progressive war against high tech intensifies

The Democratic war against Silicon Valley businesses intensified this week.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin from Michigan raked Apple CEO Tim Cook over the coals in a session of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations because, in the opinion of the honorable senator, Apple is not forking over enough dough to the IRS. Levin accused Apple of using "sham" entities, "gimmicks," and "convoluted and pernicious strategies" to avoid paying taxes.

Republican Senator from Rand Paul of Tennessee, a Tea Party favorite. disagreed with Levin:

I, frankly, think the committee should apologize to Apple. We haul before this committee one of America's greatest success stories, and you want applause? I say instead of Apple executives we should have brought in here today a giant mirror, okay? So we could look at the reflection of Congress, because this problem is solely and completely created by the awful tax code. If you want to assign blame, the committee needs to look in this mirror and see who created the mess, see who created this tax code that is chasing American companies overseas.

Tim Cook himself testified:

With all this growth and investment, Apple has become – to the best of our knowledge – the largest corporate income taxpayer in the United States. Last year, our U.S. federal cash effective tax rate was about 30.5%, and we paid the U.S. Treasury nearly $6 billion in cash. That’s more than $16 million per day. We expect to pay even more income tax this year. ... We pay all the taxes we owe – every single dollar.

This statement by Mr Cook is, of course, correct; if Apple were doing anything illegal, the IRS and the Justice Department would be all over them like flies on jam (or, to use a more timely analogy, like Lois Lerner on Tea Party organizations applying for tax-free status).

Already last year I published a blog post in which I detailed the war being waged by Democrats and Progressives against Silicon Valley businesses. The attacks come in the form of a variety of charges made against high-tech companies:

1. they destroy low-skill jobs by automating more and more tasks;
2. by destroying these jobs and concentrating wealth in the hands of a small class of knowledge workers, they contribute to income inequality;
3. they engage in racist and sexist hiring practices because they don't hire enough blacks, Hispanics, and women (for more discussion of how this attack will play out, see my recent post on the coming impact of disparate impact);
4. they do not pay enough corporate income tax;
5. they focus entirely on profit, pursuing business goals exclusively, while ignoring their "social obligations" (generally defined as whatever programs Democrats and their dependent constituents support).

The charge that high-tech companies destroy low-skill jobs by increasing automation is one that I find particularly hard to stomach. What is modern society supposed to do? Should we construct Potemkin villages and Colonial Williamsburgs, where everyone dresses up in costume and reenacts the jobs of the past (churning butter, for example, or hewing logs with an adze)? That is, are we to create jobs and employ people not because these jobs are the most efficient way of doing something, but merely because they provide income for some group of people who are unemployable in jobs that produce real economic value? This is pure Keynesianism, of course, where it supposedly does not matter how money is spent, but only that it is spent. What you end up with under such a regime is, of course, a situation where capital is forcibly taken from those sectors of the economy with the highest return on investment and redistributed to an ever increasing number of sectors where capital is allocated inefficiently. How such an operation of legalized theft, implemented, apparently, through the kind of tax regime that Senator Levin would prefer, can ever result in a free and prosperous society is never explained.

At any rate, I still wonder when Silicon Valley executives and engineers are going to wake up and realize that Democrats are not their friends. Instead, Democrats see Silicon Valley as just another fat goose ripe for the plucking, another store of treasure ready to be plundered and redistributed to their liberal political dependents/supporters.

The coming impact of disparate impact

Wikipedia states:

In United States employment law, the doctrine of disparate impact holds that employment practices may be considered discriminatory and illegal if they have a disproportionate "adverse impact" on members of a minority group. Under the doctrine, a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may be proven by showing that an employment practice or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on members of the protected class as compared with non-members of the protected class.

One of the great advocates of the doctrine of disparate impact is Thomas Perez, who currently serves as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and earlier this year was nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Labor. Of him, WSJ writes:

Mr. Perez is a champion of disparate-impact theory, which purports to prove racial discrimination by examining statistics rather than intent or specific cases.

Expect disparate impact doctrine to be used by the Justice and Labor Departments and by trial lawyers to extort large settlements from Silicon Valley companies and to strong arm them into hiring more blacks, Hispanics, and women. The fact that the distribution of these groups in the high-tech industry is not the same as their distribution in the general population will be used as evidence that these companies engage in discriminatory employment practices. Yes, high-tech CEO's, despite the fact that you employ the most diverse workforce in the world, you are just a bunch of racist and sexist bigots.

As I have warned elsewhere, I fully expect that soon Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will descend on Silicon Valley to "work with" CEO's of high-tech companies to establish racial quotas for African-Americans and Hispanics in the engineering workforces of these companies.

Breaking the Obama omertà

ABC News now reports that Lois Lerner of the IRS planted the question at the ABA conference that allowed her to reveal that the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups prior to the 2012 elections. What the fuck?!?

Celia Roady, a prominent Washington lawyer in private practice has made a written statement that she received a call from Lerner the day before the May 10 conference, requesting that Roady ask a question about tax exempt groups. “I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the [American Bar Association] Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks,” Roady said in a statement obtained by ABC News. “I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day.

ABC also reports that Lerner had appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee just days before the conference and failed to disclose what she knew about the targeting.

“A little more than a week ago Lois Lerner was in front of our Oversight Subcommittee. She serves as the director of the Exempt Organization Division, and she has been directly involved in this matter, yet she failed to disclose what she knew to this committee, choosing instead to do so at an ABA conference two days later,” Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) said on Friday morning. “This is wholly unacceptable.”

This begs the following questions: How long before the ABA conference did Lerner know about the targeting of conservative groups? (What did she know and when did she know it?) Who did she tell about this targeting? For example, did she tell anyone in the White House? What discussions did she have with whom about how to disclose the targeting? Whose idea was it to plant the question at the ABA conference? Whom did Ms Lerner meet with in the weeks prior to the ABA conference? Are there any records of telephone conversations or emails?

We can imagine the scenario. IRS officials realize that they have a major scandal on their hands. They consult with the political operatives to figure out the least damaging way to disclose it. They decide that they will get one of their lackeys to ask an apparently innocuous question, hoping that it will go mostly unnoticed, but will still allow them to say that they have "disclosed" it so that they will have covered their political asses, so to speak. Unfortunately, it does not go unnoticed and all hell breaks loose.

And then add in Jay Carney's spin: "The IRS, as you know [nice touch], is an independent enforcement agency with only two political appointees." Sorry, Jay, but it's all just a little too neat. Are you trying to tell me that, as soon as a major scandal at the IRS starts to blow wide open (and, btw, this is the agency that is going to enforce your "landmark" Obamacare legislation), you conveniently have ready at hand an explanation for why there is clear separation and no connection between the IRS and the White House? How stupid do you think I am?

Celia Roady has already betrayed the Obama omertà. Others will crack too. An independent counsel is going to be appointed and follow this one right up the chain of command.

Update: WSJ reports:

The conference revelation was itself stage-managed. Ousted IRS acting Commissioner Steven Miller testified he planned it with the director [Lois Lerner] of the division in question.

So, now we know that the IRS acting commissioner and Lois Lerner together planned the disclosure through the planted question, but we are asked to believe that the IRS commissioner did not inform anyone in Treasury or the White House about this. WSJ goes on:

Mr. Miller said the IRS, meanwhile, had "called to get on the calendar" to also brief the Ways and Means committee—a statement Republicans met with barely disguised disbelief.

Did no one at the IRS think that they should get on the White House calendar to brief Obama? This is simply unbelievable.

In Obama Administration there is only political motivation.

If the IRS audits didn't result from political motives, what other possible explanation could there be for them? We are told that extra scrutiny was triggered by names that included phrases like "Tea Party," but that this scrutiny didn't have a political motivation. How can this be? We have entered the age of Orwellian newspeak. As Charles Krauthammer recently wrote:

And yet two IRS chiefs (Steven Miller and Douglas Shulman) insisted that the singling-out of groups according to politics was in no way politically motivated. More hilarity. It’s definitional: If you discriminate according to politics, your discrimination is political. It’s a tautology, for God’s sake.

As for Benghazi, one understands how there can be chaos during the fog of battle. But, that's not what we are talking about. What we are talking about is the fact that the President, Secretary of State, and the Ambassador to the UN continued to insist on a narrative (stupid video precipitates spontaneous "demonstration" that spins out of control) that was patently implausible from the very start and that was completely inconsistent with even the earliest eyewitness reports about events on the ground. It's not that they removed references to Ansar al Sharia because they were unsure that Ansar al Sharia was involved, but that they did not remove references to the stupid video. The problem is that Obama trotted out Susan Rice on 5 Sunday morning talk shows to insist with brazen obstinacy that the attack was caused by this stupid video when it was obvious to everyone (even me sitting in my easy chair watching the Sunday morning talk shows) that this simply could not be the case.

And again, we are told that there was no political motivation. One needs simply to consider Victoria Nuland's words that information in earlier versions of the talking points “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …” What is this if not a government official suggesting that information be removed from a report for political considerations? In addition, Nuland says: “These changes [in a later revision] don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my building's leadership.” To whom does the word "leadership" refer? Did Nuland have conversations with particular people? Who were those people? Was one of them Hillary Clinton? Were political motives discussed? If such conversations did take place, why have they not been reported by Hillary before?

In the Obama Administration political motivation is the only kind of motivation there ever is.