THE DEMOCRATIC CLOCK IS AT FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

by Colin Liddell

In a truly democratic society, big companies would reflect the diversity of their employees. But we know this is not the case. Not only are the CEOs and board members of America's Big Tech companies overwhelmingly from specific ethnic groups (elite White liberals, many with Jewish backgrounds, high caste Indians, etc.) but the political donations from these companies reflect an even more complete lack of diversity, that of political opinion.

Some mismatch would be perhaps understandable in a situation where voters had a truly wide range of political choices, as they do in some European political systems, but, remember, America is a country where you only have two narrowly aligned choices -- Democrat or Republican. So the fact that Big Tech overwhelmingly supports only one side of this extremely narrow choice is even more remarkable.

So, how biased and undemocratic is Big Tech? An analysis published at tech mag Wired found that roughly 95 percent of contributions by employees of six big tech firms went to Trump's Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. Needless to say this is also reflected in how Big Tech treats content and censors voices:

"President Trump and other Republicans often complain that Silicon Valley has an anti-conservative bias. A review of campaign finance data shows that contributions by employees at some of America’s biggest tech companies are overwhelmingly going to his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.

WIRED found that employees at Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle have contributed nearly 20 times as much money to Biden as to Trump since the beginning of 2019. According to data released by the Federal Election Commission, which requires individuals who contribute $200 or more to a presidential campaign to report their employer, employees at these six companies have contributed $4,787,752 to Biden and just $239,527 to Trump.

Employees at Alphabet are Biden’s biggest financial backers in Silicon Valley, having donated just shy of $1.8 million, more than one-third of the money raised from employees of the six companies. An analysis by Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog, found that contributions from Alphabet’s employees and political action committee to the Biden campaign collectively exceed those from any other company. In fact, according to Open Secrets, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple account for five of the seven largest donors to the Biden campaign on that basis.

Employees at the sixth company in WIRED’s analysis, Oracle, have been less one-sided in their contributions. Roughly 20 percent of the contributions by Oracle employees have gone to Trump, compared with less than 10 percent at each of the other companies. The next-highest share going to Trump is at Microsoft, where nearly 8 percent of the money contributed to the presidential campaigns has gone to Trump. Of the six companies, Microsoft employees contributed the most total money to the Trump campaign—$75,428."

It should also be remembered that even when Big Tech people donate to Trump and the GOP, the reasons are not always down to sincere political preference, but instead is because they want to have leverage with a high-possibility winner. They may actually want Trump to lose, but conclude that by donating to him they will have access and influence that would be denied them if their true favorite, Joe Biden, loses. This is especially true as the nefarious role of Big Tech in slanting our culture and political systems is increasingly becoming a burning issue. 

"Big tech has a lot riding on the election. Members of Congress are probing potential antitrust violations by several of the companies; they also are considering changes to a 1990s-era law that essentially absolves website owners of responsibility for what users post on their site. Tech executives have criticized Trump’s increasingly hard line on China, a big trade partner, and on immigration, a source of many Silicon Valley employees."

Donations are the root problem of American politics. A recent study by three academics at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies found that the democratic functionality of US politics is completely compromised by patterns of financial contribution, with the wishes of the rich and powerful being the surest predictor of future government policy:

"Empirical studies have shown that US politics is heavily tilted in favor of the better-off, as political decisions tend to reflect the preferences of the rich while largely ignoring those of the poor and the middle classes. These findings have prompted a lively debate about potential mechanisms that cause this pattern of unequal responsiveness. Existing studies suggest that specific characteristics of the political system are a major explanatory factor – in particular, private donations and campaign financing."

The policy bias indicated here is under the normal conditions of America's supposedly "two party" system, by which both the Dems and GOP receive roughly equal donations from the rich and wealthy. But imagine if 95% of that money is focused on just one of these parties, as it increasingly is with the Tech sector. That, I believe, would represent the total death of democracy in the West. The clock of democracy is truly at Five Minutes to Midnight!

Also published at Democracy NOW!