#tech oligarchs

[tomorrowusa]

It was a record shattering week at ActBlue – the site which raises money for Democratic candidates, causes, and charities.

Since autumn of 2020 Ryan Murphy at GitHub has been tracking donations to ActBlue. The most money previously given to ActBlue had previously been during the seven days starting 27 September 2020. Last week ActBlue raised $252,517,168. All but the first 13 hours and 46 minutes of that was after Joe Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Not ALL of the money raised at ActBlue was specifically for the Harris campaign. But comparison with the previous week (beginning 14 July 2024) shows that Kamala-Mania was a HŪGE factor.

July 14th - July 20th: $61,349,601

July 21th - July 27th: $252,517,168

US: Kamala Harris campaign raises $200 million in one week

The presumptive nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris to run for the Democratic Party in November's presidential election continues to make waves in US politics. The Harris campaign team said on Sunday that in her first week since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and the party coalesced around her, the candidate raised over $200 million (€184 million) in donations. "In the week since we got started, Kamala Harris has raised $200 million dollars. 66% of that is from new donors. We've signed up 170,000 new volunteers," Harris' deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, posted on X, formerly Twitter.

^^^ emphasis added

Keep in mind that Elon Putz has pledged $45 million a month to pro-MAGA PACs – i.e. $225 million. Trump is soliciting $1 billion from oil execs. Far right Silicon Valley tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel are also getting involved financially with Trump.

So there's no time to rest on our accomplishments. Freedom is not free and we need to continue to offer our own volunteer and financial support to pro-democracy candidates like Kamala Harris.

In 2020 there was a stretch when ActBlue took in over $100 million for eight weeks in a row. That's part of what it took to evict Trump from the White House. A similar effort will be needed this year to keep him out.

BTW, visit Ryan Murphy's ActBlue tracker. It's updated every 10 minutes.

ActBlue Ticker Tracker / Ryan Murphy | Observable

[stardew-bajablast]

will say with regard to the tik tok ban, it is probably for the best in the long run that it’s being banned rather than being sold. like if it’s banned, that will get a ton of zoomers pissed off at the government (and maybe even get them off their phones enough to organize about it), rather than having some right wing oligarch buying the US portion of tik tok and turning it into a MAGA propaganda mill a la twitter or facebook

like still sucks that this is happening and no doubt tons of people will be negatively impacted, especially artists who run their whole business on the app. a tik tok ban should never have been on the table to begin with, but i can’t help but think it’s better this way than if someone were to buy it

[goodhairbadmanners]

MILITARY NEWS BEING HIDDEN DAY 2!! Will have more on this tonight - but ...

[theblindmachine]

TECHNOLOGY EMPIRES THRIVE ON OUR DESIRE FOR CONTROL. https://ift.tt/Twv0MAp

[collapseofindustrialcivilization]

Empire Of Extraction: AI, Capitalism, And The Unraveling Of The Biosphere

A Brave New AI World The 21st century is witnessing a convergence of crises unprecedented in both scale and complexity. At the forefront is the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI), a technology whose development and deployment have become emblematic of broader shifts in global power, economic extraction, and environmental destabilization. AI’s rise is not occurring in a vacuum; it…

[nando161mando]

Won't anyone think of the oligarchs....

[tomorrowusa]

Get your lame ass off of Twitter/X. Why would you want to ultimately help Trump on what has become a far right platform?

Elon Musk’s new super PAC is collecting scores of voters’ personal information under the guise of inviting them to register to vote, as part of his effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Earlier this month, Musk denied reports that he would be donating $45 million a month to Trump’s campaign during an interview with right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson. Instead, the technocrat clarified that he had created a new super PAC, called the America PAC. Musk’s America PAC is a door-to-door canvassing operation, which allows it to work in direct coordination with the Trump campaign, according to an FEC advisory from earlier this year. This allows Musk, and his fellow Silicon Valley donors, to stick their hands—and their cash—right into the presidential race on Trump’s behalf. How exactly they plan to do this is even more disturbing. The America PAC has launched a series of digital ads using the image of Trump’s assassination, to invite people browsing Google to “register to vote,” CNBC reported Friday. In states where the outcome is certain, such as California, the ads actually do direct them to a voter registration site. But in key battleground states, users are directed to a very different page, which prompts them to enter their phone number, address, and age. Once complete, users are then greeted by a “Thank You” page, with no actual link to voter registration in sight. Musk’s America PAC has poured $800,000 into digital advertisements to target voters in the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, according to AdImpact. The information collected from user responses to this ad campaign will inform the PAC’s canvassing efforts in those states. Musk’s America PAC has already attracted the financial support of a few Silicon Valley billionaires. Douglas Leone and Shaun Maguire, general partners at Sequoia Capital, donated a whopping $1 million and $500,000 respectively, according to The American Prospect.

In short, Musk is using ads to harvest information from voters without actually registering them.

Musk and fellow broligarchs are motivated strictly by personal greed. They are willing to throw democracy to the jackals just so they can get even more enormous tax brakes from a second Trump administration.

They already have enough money to buy Pacific Islands and never lift a finger for the rest of their lives. But they want even more as well as the power to shape society to their un-elected whims.

We need to do more than usual this election cycle in order to defeat Trump and the Axis of Avarice. And we have to work quickly, Election Day is only three months away. This is a good time to take note of all the people we know personally in swing states; it doesn't matter if we've been out of touch for five years – as long as we are still on decent terms with them. Reach out and ask if they are registered. Remind them that voter registration is strictly geographical and based on home address – you need to register every time you move. And if someone hasn't voted in years they may have been removed from the voter rolls; those people need to register again.

Here are a couple of legit sites which will help register voters.

I Will Vote

Be a voter | Vote Save America

I have always felt that the best way to register is to do so in person. That way you can take a picture of your registration or maybe even get some sort of receipt. And when you register in person, you'll be informed immediately whether you've provided sufficient identification and have completed the forms correctly.

We can beat the wannabe planetary tech tyrants but it's necessary to put more effort into it and not take anything for granted.

[helenvaughans]

[...]To save themselves, the tech-oligarchs must attack the very notion of universality as such—hence their abandonment of liberal universalism for racism, nationalism, masculine domination, etc., because they represent a conspiracy, a shrinking, exclusive interest against a larger one. They are attacking first and foremost the State and the Bureaucracy, the civil servants: everything that Hegel identified in The Philosophy of Right with the universal, general interest of the whole society against the particularity of “bourgeois society,” the chaotic mass of self-interested businessmen. They want the State to appear just as particularistic as they are and destroy its legitimacy. Indeed, they have to attack the system of recognition—meritocratic honors rather than mere wealth and power—and of right—the rule of law and regular administration. They are the “rich rabble” par excellence that thinks “it can buy anything.” Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state. (It also functions a lot like “race” and “IQ:” as a repository of social value that provides a haven from degradation, but I’ll address that another time.) Here’s the thing: They can only see corruption around them because they are wholly corrupt. [...]

[curiouspupsicle]

Me working on Google docs. It's such a shitty program and yet people insist on using it. It introduces errors. It's ugly. And it's slow. I'd say it's the American thing to elevate mediocrity but it's an international phenomenon. Wish more fan fic writers used Ellipsus.

[abronzeagegod]

After working another dumb tech event and listening to people try to sell AI to businesses me and a coworker have determined that the dystopia we are in is

Mid Tier Technologic Dystopia

No flying cars, no Nexus 9, no robo-cops. Just fucking shitty chatbots and oligarchs

[guavagyal]

Why bother staging a coup in the Global South when you have US conservative politicians paving the way for that in the US?

[stoicmike]

The endless scams of technology are becoming tiresome… -- Michael Lipsey

[lost-carcosa]

Dutch pension fund ABP sells all Alphabet and Meta shares, CEO tells newspaper FD

AMSTERDAM, Feb 17 (Reuters) - ABP, the Netherlands' largest pension fund, has sold its shares in tech companies Meta (META.O), opens new tab and Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, its CEO told Dutch newspaper FD in an interview published on Monday.

CEO Harmen van Wijnen said the companies no longer fit the fund's governance criteria. FD reported last month that ABP had sold its shares in Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab for the same reason.

[goodhairbadmanners]

[tomorrowusa]

J.D. Vance would prefer to have people think of him as a barefoot hillbilly from some Appalachian hollow. In fact, he's a venture capitalist with a Yale law school degree who grew up in a Cincinnati suburb and likes couches a lot.

Far right tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel groomed J.D. and have lavished him with campaign loot.

In a recent column, Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman writes...

Vance’s ascent has, to a significant degree, been powered by a small group of technology billionaires, with Peter Thiel, who poured millions into Vance’s 2022 Senate race, at the center. There’s clearly overlap between this coterie and the tech types who a year ago briefly swooned over Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Their enthusiasm for Kennedy seems to have waned as they’ve realized the obvious — that he’s a crank who could still play the role of spoiler, but not a serious presidential contender in his own right. On the other hand, the elevation of Vance — who seems to be a worse politician than even his detractors realized, looks harder to reverse. While it’s technically still possible to replace Vance on the G.O.P. ticket, Trump is probably stuck with him. In any case, you really want to think of Vance as an avatar, not of hillbillies — as the title of his memoir would have you believe — but of tech bros. [ ... ] Some right-wing techies have also descended into conspiracism. Leading the pack, Elon Musk has taken to promoting false claims that Democrats refuse to deport illegal immigrants because they expect to receive their votes. In general, as I’ve noted in the past, paranoid politics comes surprisingly naturally to the ultrawealthy, and not just in the tech sector. Partly that’s because it’s hard for some billionaires to avoid surrounding themselves with people unwilling to tell them when they’re talking nonsense. Partly it’s because some seem to feel a peculiar sense of grievance over the things money can’t buy: If I’m so rich, why can’t I shape the world to my liking? [ ... ] Anyway, the backing of tech billionaires is a key reason we ended up with Vance as a vice-presidential contender. He pitches himself as a champion of working-class America. But behind his cynical culture-warring — behind his professed allegiance to Everyman totems like Mountain Dew — he’s closely tied to a tech-sector ethos that’s anything but populist.

J.D. is part of the "elite" he claims to be fighting against. He's a willing errand boy for far right tech oligarchs who think that their enormous wealth gives them the right to impose their will on society.

[hachani]

Having to reblog from “liberals are cool” makes me want to hurl, but this is just MISINFORMATION. With 30 thousand fucking notes. That’s not how the stock market works or what a margin call actually is.

If Musk owns shares which were purchased with borrowed money under a margin agreement, the lender reserves the right to demand either: (1) additional funds from Musk or (2) that Musk reduce his position until he meets whatever the agreed risk limit is.

But that's OPTIONAL on the part of the lender/broker (who is likely following the news and also knows that Musk is in cahoots with the piece of shit in chief for the time being), and it could also be solved with cash or by selling other securities to meet the agreed risk limit (IF he has them; doesn't have to be Tesla stock as long as he meets the limit).

With the whole market in a downturn, the broker is going to look at the overall picture and say, "Well, everyone's down, this is just a market correction, Musk can either use some other method of reducing his risk or we'll just wait and see a little bit." It’s always hard to say when things are volatile, and they will continue to be as long as the tariff threats loom. The whole stock market is currently in “correction territory” (as of 13 March, 2025).

All this to say: “death spiral" is a NOT a likely outcome.

Here is your mission.