Smart Nerds, Foolish Choices: Why Silicon Valley votes against its interests
GLASSMAN, JAMES K.
Smart Nerds, Foolish Choices Why Silicon Valley votes against its interests BY JAMES K. GLASSMAN One of the deepest mysteries of this New Age is why Silicon Valley—as a geographic metaphor for...
...Last year, however, Cisco was the only dissenter on the energy subcommittee of a local industry group that favored the new plant...
...Prop 38 failed, 71 percent to 29 percent, possibly damaging more reasonable school-choice efforts nationwide...
...But most of his colleagues haven't absorbed that lesson yet...
...the new speaker asked...
...We are the party of entrepreneurial values...
...In the end, Democrats want to run your business...
...Cisco's chairman, John Morgridge, gave $471,000 while the company itself chipped in $250,000...
...Tax cuts are not high on Silicon Valley's agenda...
...In other words, the opposition to Republicans appears almost aesthetic.Yes, Democrats may have tastes that fit better with Silicon Valley lifestyles...
...They, of all people, should understand that the best solutions come when consumers have broad choices and institutions compete like crazy for their favor...
...On the surface, there appears to be evidence that high-tech executives are waking up...
...Smart Nerds, Foolish Choices Why Silicon Valley votes against its interests BY JAMES K. GLASSMAN One of the deepest mysteries of this New Age is why Silicon Valley—as a geographic metaphor for smart, productive high-technologists around the country—prefers Democrats to Republicans...
...But TechNet stays away from tough—or even not-so-tough—questions...
...Why is Silicon Valley oblivious to the policy concerns that can shape the economy and their own businesses...
...While tech firms are in severe jeopardy from electricity blackouts, Cisco quickly became a leading opponent of an effort by Calpine Corp...
...Instead, last November tech billionaires donated about $15 million to the successful campaign for Proposition 39, an initiative that made it much easier for local governments to raise taxes to pass school bond issues...
...Since the power cuts, Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel Corp., has said that his company is not likely to expand in California until the energy crisis is fixed...
...So what's the problem...
...A few years later, when Bill Clinton's Justice Department went after Microsoft on antitrust charges, Gates learned that, for a high-tech CEO, business issues trump social issues...
...The final question to a flabbergasted Armey: "Why is it that you Republicans are so obsessed about abortion...
...Delevett reports that among the firms that may have been pressured was Hewlett-Packard Co...
...A vote of 55 percent, rather than the current two-thirds' margin, will now suffice...
...My explanation for it," Armey told me, "is that they have prospered for all these years, independent of government and indifferent to it...
...Yet with his wife, Doerr, one of the Valley's half-dozen most powerful figures, donated $6 million to the Prop 39 effort...
...Democrats and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 Valley technologists may like the same music, drink the same latte, drive the same model ofVolvo...
...In an article in the San Jose Mercury News, Peter Delevett wrote that "giant 10 Cisco Systems Inc...
...Drapers heart was in the right place, but he was politically oblivious...
...Recently, Presidentelect Bush invited 16 high-tech executives to his Texas ranch for a private briefing, and they included only those who had supported him over Gore...
...The big issue for the Valley execs is improving education...
...A few years ago, they started a lobbying organization called TechNet and recently hired White, the former congressman, to head the group...
...Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems and a financial backer of seven Republican (and no Democratic) Senate candidates, gave $125,000...
...It is snobbish and shortsighted for Silicon Valley technologists and entrepreneurs to shun a party that shares their free-market values but, perhaps, not their styles and tastes...
...The half-dozen who chose to respond tended to cite priorities other than a tax cut," according to the Times's Barnaby J. Feder...
...But most of the cluelessness lies leftward...
...White says that the group has not even taken a position on Internet sales taxes...
...Republicans have given far more support to the issues that high-tech executives say are dear to them: expanding visas for skilled immigrants, giving China the same trade status as other countries, limiting the power of trial lawyers to blackmail technology companies for damages over Y2K software failures and practically anything else...
...arning of the Microsoft case...
...Now, the Valley is backing candidates and initiatives that would reverse these hands-off policies...
...has made no bones about its opposition" to Metcalf, but "no competing heavyweights have emerged to champion the proposal...
...So why not use the same process in education...
...John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems and a donor to Republican candidates and causes, gave $270,000...
...Rick White— the former Republican congressman for the Washington state district that includes Redmond, home of Microsoft—told me that shortly after the GOP sweep in 1994, Bill Gates sat down with Newt Gingrich...
...A favorite cause, of course, is environ-mentalism...
...What high-tech executives seem to forget is that their industry thrived largely because government has given it a wide berth...
...The measure, backed heartily by the teachers' unions, helps further entrench the state's education establishment...
...High-tech was a kind of enterprise zone of low taxation and low regulation...
...Then, all of a sudden, things changed, and they didn't seem to be able to make the transition from the politics of the heart to the politics of the brain...
...Why don't more high-tech execs support us...
...Meanwhile, another venture capitalist named Tim Draper threw more than $20 million of his own money into Proposition 38, a broad initiative on behalf of vouchers that had no chance of passing...
...Later, they were asked by the New York Times to comment on the most important steps the government could take for high-tech businesses...
...At least until very recently, politicians have not told tech entrepreneurs what products to make, what prices to charge and with whom they could make deals...
...Maybe that will get their attention...
...Armey spoke for half an hour, then invited questions from the floor...
...If you look at all these issues," says Rep...
...There was a report that two high-tech venture capitalists, John Doerr and Jim Barksdale, have set up a $1 million fund to compensate their new leader...
...But they don't share Silicon Valley's ideas about the New Economy...
...So far, the plant has not been built...
...As Silicon Valley becomes more politically active, it opts not for open markets and competition but for the liberal statist quo...
...to build the Metcalf Energy Center, a 600-megawatt natural-gas power plant in San Jose...
...They are on the side of higher taxes, more regulation, more lawsuits...
...The tech executives ignored the substance of his talk and instead asked questions that might have come from a gathering of the Urban League or the National Organization for Women...
...It's hard to see how anyone could be against that one, but you would think that technologists would want the kinds of reforms for schools that worked for their own businesses...
...Its passage was a blow to competition and choice in education...
...In the presidential election, for example, voters in the two counties in the peninsula south of San Francisco—Santa Mateo and Santa Clara—chose Al Gore over George W. Bush, 63 percent to 32 percent, with 4 percent for Ralph Nader...
...Henry Samueli, co-chairman of Broadcom and another big GOP donor, contributed $168,000...
...Some think that's because Cisco has intimidated everyone into silence...
...Gates replied: "We do agree on business and economic issues, but we have hesitation on social issues...
...But the mystery remains: Why do high-tech executives act against their own best interests when it comes to government intervention—even after the warning of the Microsoft case...
...Last year, Armey, the House majority leader, went to Silicon Valley to drum up support for his "e-contract"—a set of bills to help tech firms, including setting a standard for digital signatures and keeping a moratorium on new Internet taxes...
...They came at politics from a personal point of view...
...Dick Armey, "Republicans are their friends...
...Even the Sierra Club has supported the new plant...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
