Headline, April28, 2014

"' THE YOUNG GEEKS ARMOURY "'

IN 2012,  Google    alone spent  $23million  on direct corporate lobbying in D.C., more than defence contractors like:

Boeing, drug firms like Pfizer and oil companies like ExxonMobil. Only General Electric spent more as an individual company. And in the later months-

The Digital-research firm, which employed  122  registered lobbyists, plans to relocate to bigger offices on Capital Hill with a larger  event space, where lawmakers and staff, can come to policy briefings and shoot off the  occasional Nerf gun.

And then, just about  the same time,  Apple  hired former Environmental Agency head Lisa Jackson, and the mobile-payment start-up  Square  hired  the former acting U.S. Trade Representative Demitrios Marantis.

Onetime Clinton Whitehouse Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles is a director of   Facebook,  where public policy is run Joel Kaplan, who was deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush.

Former Vice President Al Gore sits on the board of  Apple   and is a senior adviser to  Google, where the Washington operation is run by a former Congresswoman, Susan Molinari.

The stark contextual  truth is   -that no one has ridden the tech wave with more success than President Barack Obama,  -who did the valley another favour recently:

When he announced new executive action to discourage the kind of abusive-patent-infringement lawsuits that plague Silicon Valley. In 2012, for the first time:

In Democratic Party history,  President Obama raised more money from the Bay Area than from Hollywood 

BUT the real exciting political action these days has nothing to do with big corporations  or   their cash-rich bank accounts.Rather,  tech investors  and executives are striking out on their own to flex their political muscle.

"We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment." reads a memo written by Joe Green, Zuckerberg's college roommate.

"Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans." This memo which was leaked later to Politico, was meant to drum up donations for the group that would become fwd.us, and it went even further:

Describing  "control"  over massive distribution channels online that the tech community could use to control the political debate.

As soon as the document leaked, Green apologized. But the spirit of large scale political disruption is not hard to find among technology leaders, since it worked once before.

Back in January 2012, a host of Internet companies, including Google, took to their homepage to protest  antipiracy  legislation being pushed by Hollywood movie and  television producers   -including Time Warner-  that wanted better tools:

To limit the theft of their  intellectual  property online. The resulting public outcry, including millions of e-mails to members of Congress, effectively killed the bill.

"It was transformational," said Chris Dodd, a former Democratic Senator who runs the Motion Picture Association of America.

It also terrified Washington's established lobby shops, which had never lost control of a political debate so quickly. Meanwhile,  the thrill of winning  -fast, under the radar, before the old-line lobbyists knew what hit them   -empowered the new political activists in Silicon Valley.

"You can't really go to sleep after you have been awakened like that," said Ron Conway, another wealthy tech-company investor, who is a donor to fwd.us and the Khanna Campaign.

In his hometown of San Francisco, Conway helped fund an independent expenditure campaign to help elect Mayor Ed Lee after Lee supported a set of tax breaks for   Twitter     and other  start-ups in the city.

Conway has also been working on gun control in recent months, helping stage a December takeover of major websites' home pages, including those of Adobe, Foursquare, and Funny or Die, to push for gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Big and bold, however, does not always work in politics !!!

The Honour and Serving of the Post will continue in the future.

With respectful dedication to the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"' LightBox  "'

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless