Elizabeth Holmes — Big Tech’s Latest Sacrificial Lamb
Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink... Here in drenched Northern California, where recent rain and snowstorms have fallen heavily in recent weeks, our long drought worries are finally over. Right? I mean, the snowpack in the Sierra Mountains, which we count on for our water supply in the late spring and summer months, is currently at 160% of normal -- and that's before a new wave of wetness washes over the state this week. So no more drought, right?
Nope. According to the experts, California will remain in drought mode unless the rains this year turn to biblical proportions.
So here's what I don't understand. We on the West Coast live in the very center of technological innovation, from Silicon Valley to Seattle. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can shoot rockets to the stars. Google wizards can reinvent transportation with driverless cars. And those brilliant folks at Peter Thiel's Palantir can track "bad guys" halfway around the globe so our CIA and Pentagon can zap them. (Oops, sometimes they make mistakes while playing Old Testament God, but you get the point.) But Big Tech can't find ways to store and transport excessive amounts of water and snow runoff for dry seasons and states plagued by drought?
What good are these tech divinities? I mean, I'm really asking. When it comes to the most grievous problems facing humanity -- i.e., climate change, unequal distribution of wealth, the militarization of life -- Big Tech is utterly useless. In fact, tech corporations, which represent the highest stage of capitalism, have only made our problems worse. Thanks to tech capitalism -- and its noxious libertarian philosophy -- we live in a world that is significantly more robotic and violent.
Left to their own devices, megabillionaires like Bezos will spend their obscene fortune on rocket ships and other boy toys. I've met Bezos and other tech masters of the universe. I've looked into their eyes. There's nothing there. Nothing in their souls. They had one brilliant idea -- and then monetized it with terrifying efficiency. The only social solution to the wealth gap that they have driven is to tax the hell out of them, and spend the loot on the most pressing problems that bedevil the human race.
Bezos et al PLAY at philanthropy. But they will never invest the billions -- trillions -- that are necessary to solve chronic drought, end poverty, or ramp up global health.
Which brings us to Elizabeth Holmes, Silicon Valley's latest sacrificial lamb. The corporate media now wants us to believe that because this smalltime hustler is facing 20 years in prison, Big Tech has cleaned up its act. Right. And who did Holmes defraud with her innovative blood-testing scheme? Not patients, according to the jury -- who desperately want low-cost, do-it-yourself medical testing. But big investors like Trump-financing Oracle mogul Larry Ellison and the Walmart family. (I've had dinner with Ellison -- he was probably dazzled by Holmes's youthful, blond good looks.) THESE are the zillionaire investors in Holmes's startup for whom we're supposed to feel sorry?
Big Tech. Whatever Time magazine and the rest of the propaganda machine tell you -- these people are not "Man of the Year." They're greedy, corrupt, soulless boys with far, far, far too much money.
Elizabeth Holmes, fall girl.