Apparently worried about the populist movement led by Donald Trump, Silicon Valley tech firms are rallying companies to give workers the day off on Election Day.
As Breitbart News has reported, the Obama administration has shown lots of love to Silicon Valley’s corporate elite by allowing tech companies to offshore the majority of their employment; eliminating a huge chunk of their 40 percent U.S. corporate tax rate to Ireland’s infamous 12.5 percent tax rate; supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal; and helping them do spectacular amounts of business with the federal bureaucracy.
One investigation documented that offshore tax havens have saved tech corporations $89 billion in U.S. tax liability. That explains why Silicon Valley leads American business sectors in continuing to park $2.1 trillion in profits offshore to avoid any U.S. taxation.
Partly because of that symbiotic business relationship with Washington D.C., Silicon Valley has earned the nickname of “Valley of the Democrats” by the TechCrunch blog.
Stanford Professor Adam Bonica found that the share of political giving by the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans to the GOP has plummeted from 68 percent in 1982 to 59 percent during the 2012 re-election of President Obama. According to Bonica’s analysis of two decades of data, Silicon Valley CEOs’ overwhelming percentage of political contributions going to Democrats might be more about gaining economic advantage than being fellow travelers with leftist comrades.
Because the vast majority of Silicon Valley tech CEOs supported Barack Obama’s 2012 Presidential re-election bid, about 83 percent of all employee donations from top tech firms went to Obama.
In the 2016 election cycle, the Silicon Valley tech elites are almost exclusively backing the Democratic establishment and its candidate. Tesla’s Elon Musk donated directly to Hillary Clinton, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wrote big checks to San Francisco’s Democratic Party organization, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates heavily funded three Democrat congressmen.
Republicans over the last two decades did not mess with Silicon Valley’s outsourced employment business model, but that may have permanently changed with the withering and viral attacks by populist Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Perhaps in response, more than 180 Silicon Valley tech giants and start-ups have signed on to participate in a new initiative, “Take Off Election Day,” — including Autodesk, Spotify, SurveyMonkey and Square.
Venture capitalist Hunter Walk, who was instrumental in founding Take Off Election Day, has been called out for constantly “pimping” Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. But he claims that has absolutely nothing to do with his efforts to move more Silicon Valley employees to the polls, according to the TechCrunch.com blog.
Walk tweeted on August 8, “@kurtybot I’m supporting Hillary – but nothing abt #TakeOffElectionDay is partisan. & companies are emphasizing voting, not a candidate.” Walk referred Tech Crunch to the Take Off Election Day website motto: “Work Can Wait.”
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