Will the Working Class never learn that we are but one more huge field
of corn, waiting to be harvested? This sort of theft of the People's
Lands has been going on as long as there has been a nation. The
People's Land, the People's Airwaves, water ways and rivers and
beaches that are declared to belong to "the people", but in practice
are "owned" by private enterprises.
But, "The People", looking like a big flock of dumb sheep, the Working
Class dreams of one day winning the multi million dollar lottery and
joining the ranks of the Masters.
Ah well, there be truth in the wise words of that great philosopher P.
T. Barnum, "There's a sucker born every minute".
Carl Jarvis
On 2/19/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From Truthdig
Google Secretly Expands Tech Empire Across the U.S., Getting Millions in
Tax
Breaks
Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. (Shawn Collins / Flickr
Creative Commons)
Amazon spent much of the last three months in the media spotlight, with its
search for a second headquarters outside Seattle leading both to bidding
wars between cities fighting for its affections, and extensive backlash
from
residents and elected officials in New York City, one of the winning
locations. The protests against the new development were loud enough to
cause Amazon to cancel the deal last week.
While Amazon received both suitors and scrutiny, another tech behemoth was
quietly expanding its footprint across the United States. At the end of
2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced expansion plans leading to a
presence in 24 out of 50 states. The Verge reported in December that "So
far, most of Google's facility development plans in the US have been met
with little opposition outside of the Bay Area." According to a new report
in The Washington Post, however, that might be because the public wasn't
aware of them.
Post Reporter Elizabeth Dwoskin writes that Google's "development spree has
often been shrouded in secrecy, making it nearly impossible for some
communities to know, let alone protest or debate, who is using their land,
their resources and their tax dollars until after the fact."
In Midlothian, Texas, Google, under the name Sharka LLC, received over $10
million in tax breaks from local government for developing a data center in
the town. Larry Barnett, president of Midlothian Economic Development, one
of the agencies that negotiated tax breaks, told Dwoskin that he knew
Sharka
LLC was really Google, but the company had asked for secrecy, and didn't
reveal itself publicly until the deal was finalized. Travis Smith, managing
editor of the Waxahachie Daily Light, a local paper, said, "I'm confident
that had the community known this project was under the direction of
Google,
people would have spoken out," adding, "We didn't know that it was Google
until after it passed."
The process repeated itself in multiple cities.
In San Jose, Calif., where Google is planning its second-largest campus
after its original home in Mountain View, the company has used
nondisclosure
agreements with local officials and developers to keep its plans under
wraps. Records of this, going back to 2006, were obtained via Freedom of
Information Act requests by the San Jose branch of the Partnership for
Working Families, an organization that advocates against economic
inequality. The organization requested documents from local governments in
eight cities in which Google already has data centers, plus Midlothian and
seven cities in which Google has offices. The FOIA'd documents revealed:
"
Officials in eight of the cities signed non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs,
in their real estate dealings with Google, according to the documents. The
documents also show that the search giant used shell companies to negotiate
to build data centers in five of the six localities with data centers that
responded to the records requests, including Midlothian; Berkeley County,
S.C.; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Lenoir, N.C.; and Clarksville, Tenn. Google's
identity was eventually revealed, but often so late in the process that it
precluded public debate.
Google spokesperson Katherine Williams told the Post that Google is
committed to engaging communities in its development plans, saying in a
statement: "We believe public dialogue is vital to the process of building
new sites and offices, so we actively engage with community members and
elected officials in the places we call home. . Of course, when we enter
new
communities we use common industry practices and work with municipalities
to
follow their required procedures."
While real estate development negotiations are not exactly paragons of
transparency in general, the level of secrecy surrounding data center
deals,
especially when it comes to Google, is particularly egregious. As Michelle
Wilde Anderson, a Stanford Law School professor specializing in state and
local government law, told Dwoskin, "If you scrutinize the winners and
losers in this bargain, you see that Google is overwhelmingly the winner.
Google has a strategic interest in getting their name out of these deals so
that they go down more quietly, without public debate."
