Donald Trump won a Republican White House, Senate and House because he led a rebellion against the Democrats’ embrace of Silicon Valley’s business model, which profits from global trade, offshore labor and foreign skilled workers.
Despite all the hoopla about supposedly booming American high-tech jobs, globalization and the rise of China since the early 1990s have the cost the United States about 5.8 million in U.S. manufacturing jobs, about one third of the sector’s total workforce.
A huge portion of the jobs loss is due to giant Silicon Valley technology corporations’ offshoring of the vast majority of their business operations. As a result, the U.S. annual balance for advanced technology products sales has fallen from a $35 billion surplus in 1992 to a $92 billion deficit at the end in 2015.
As major government contractors, Silicon Valley corporations for decades maintained a neutral stance on political lobbying and campaign contributions. But TechCrunch blog nicknamed Silicon Valley the “Valley of the Democrats,” after PayPal co-Founder and top venture capitalist Peter Thiel reported in an interview last year that over 83 percent of political contributions by the area’s tech executives went solely to Democrats.
The bipartisan Center for Responsive Politics that tracks the influence of Silicon Valley money on American elections and government bureaucrats commented, “Just as water flows downhill, money in politics flows to where the power is.” Their research found that with the rise of Democrat Barack Obama since 2008, Silicon Valley’s annual lobbying expenditures skyrocketed by 800 percent, from $17.8 million to $139.5 million.
Silicon Valley’s “leaning liberal” image has mirrored its effort to maximize profits by importing foreign engineers and software coders under the U.S. Labor Department’s H-1B visa program for foreigners with “distinguished merit and ability. The program was designed to recruit people like Nobel Prize winners, but Silicon Valley has been interested in cheap labor.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and venture capitalist Ron Conway founded FWD.US in 2013. The organization has lobbied for immigration reform to expand H-1B visas.
Breitbart News has written numerous articles on how Hewlett-Packard, Southern California Edison, University of California and dozens of Silicon Valley tech firms have replaced American high-tech workers with H-1B foreigners.
As the ultimate slap in the face, fired U.S. workers are usually hired as temps to train their Indian and Chinese replacements, who do the same job for two-thirds less pay.
Just before the election, Peter Thiel said, “Silicon Valley has been incredibly successful over the last decade.” But for America, “I think the truth has been more one of specific success, but more general failure.” He said rich and powerful tech leaders had not focused improving the national welfare outside of Silicon Valley.
Day two of the “Trump Bounce” sent the stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Index up almost 1.5 percent to an all-time-high, led by U.S. banks and industrial stocks. But the big losers on this historic day were Silicon Valley stocks, which were down by 1.5 percent.