[mdpopescu]

The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious efforts at political organizing (they actually called Zuckerberg in front of Congress because Facebook was not censoring enough people! Facebook! That was freaking mind-blowing.)

Yep, the difference is amazing.

[42_]

If you're Chinese or Russian, ignore my comment. But if you're an American, you need a bit of perspective. Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US. And literally no other country has an egalitarian setup where anyone can potentially succeed. The countries that are objectively better than US in terms of human rights for own citizens, are very few (Switzerland, Nordic countries, few others which are either small/or have homogeneous population). I am stunned when I read comments suggesting that US is as bad or Russia or China.

[beckman466]

> If you're Chinese or Russian, ignore my comment. But if you're an American, you need a bit of perspective. Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US. And literally no other country has an egalitarian setup where anyone can potentially succeed. The countries that are objectively better than US in terms of human rights for own citizens, are very few (Switzerland, Nordic countries, few others which are either small/or have homogeneous population). I am stunned when I read comments suggesting that US is as bad or Russia or China.

Your critique misses the vastness of the violent capitalist system that exists and operates today:

"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.

Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1]

Can you show me a critique that is more clear and true than this? I have quoted it a million times and that's because I just haven't heard a better explanation.

An area where capitalist firms are doing a lot of damage using their IP system is in the global south:

"The possibility of a handful corporations monopolizing healthcare and agriculture in the developing world is a very real risk today. Closely associated with these corporations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) - the richest and the most powerful philanthropic foundation shaping these sectors globally - aids them in the process of monopolization by granting huge funds to its network of NGOs to carry out activities which mainly benefit these selected corporations, in many of which the foundation has considerable financial stakes.

Apart from making such grants, through the vehicle of Public Private Partnerships (PPP), the foundation also has been facilitating the flow of millions of dollars of taxpayer money into what are essentially private projects.

The foundation also plays a crucial role in lobbying for stronger IPR regimes which oblige developing countries to grant long patent periods for drugs which are only minor alterations of already existing, off-patent drugs. In Africa, this foundation is one of the most powerful forces that is arm-twisting governments to gradually rewrite seed laws to provide patent protection for commercial seeds, which would eventually require criminalization of all non-certified seeds.

[...]

Far from aiding the production of cheap drugs by generic pharma through means such as technology transfers, the corporate giants, including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, “lobbied vociferously” for acceptance of TRIPS agreement, which obliged member countries to agree to grant patents to pharmaceutical companies for a minimum period of 20 years. Microsoft again lobbied the G8 in 2007 to strengthen the protection of global Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), which, Oxfam warned, is bound to “worsen the health crisis in developing countries”, the New Internationalist reported.

Stifling the development of generic pharma by lobbying for stronger Intellectual Property Rights regime (which, contrary to incentivizing innovation as is widely claimed, has the opposite effect as demonstrated by many empirical studies including one by U.S government ); facilitating a flow of enormous subsidies into private projects of closely associated pharmaceutical companies, not only by making philanthropic grants but also by channelizing through GAVI alliance the public money granted by various states; and protecting selected corporations from potential competition in the market by locking countries receiving assistance through this programme into long-term commitments to buy vaccinations they manufacture - all appear to be a multi-pronged strategy to monopolize the global healthcare industry. And being “the single most influential voice in global health”, Bill Gates is more than well-qualified to be at the helm of this machine." [2]

People like Gates grew up with access to an immense amount of privileged high quality knowledge, theories and pedagogical material available to them - access to the immense inheritance of humanity's scientific explorations. Yet what makes them powerful is that they have kicked away the ladders they themselves used to climb up in the first place.

The US and it's capitalist allies are powerful because they have created one big corrupt intellectual property system that favors the already powerful capitalists. There is no opting out of it. Through IP laws this system criminalizes sharing and turns inventions and science into commodities to be bought and sold. Helping ourselves and other humans is criminalized.

If the boy geniuses of Silicon Valley are so genius, why do they need to turn something that is not scarce (knowledge/science/inventions) into something scarce, and lock it away as a trade secret? How can we speak about egalitarianism when this system is so clearly the opposite of that? This system is not democratic, it's a bourgeois run prison.

> Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US.

The reason there is violence in other countries is exactly because people in these countries are deeply implicated and entangled in the global capitalist production system, which is being led and directed by global north capitalists.

[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[2] https://grain.org/en/article/5910-under-the-cover-of-philant...