After news broke that Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg had consumed a secret White House dinner with Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren characterised it as part of Facebook’s “charm offensive with Republican lawmakers” in response to her call to use antitrust law to break up Facebook, calling the move “corruption, plain and simple…how the government keeps working for giant corporations and the wealthy and well-connected.”
Others have pointed out that CEOs have often met in private with presidents, but these meetings are not typically secret, and it’s hard to understand what non-corrupt purpose Trump, Zuck and Thiel could have had for failing to disclose the dinner — perhaps they knew we’d been pleasantly surprised later on and didn’t want to spoil it?
For Zuck’s part, he likes to claim that he frequently dines with political activists from “across the spectrum” but when his actual dining agenda is analyzed even cursorily, it becomes obvious that for Zuck, the political spectrum runs all the way from “very right wing” to “raving lunatic Bircher neo-Nazi right wing” with stops for all the flavors of right wing in between.
I am a donor to both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns.
The senator pointed to the dinner as an example of the kind of corporate activities with the federal government she wouldn’t allow as president should she win the 2020 presidential election.
“I won’t cozy up to Facebook when I’m president,” Warren tweeted. “It’s time to root out corruption in Washington. Until we do, we won’t be able to make any progress on any of the issues that matter to us.”
Warren Raises ‘Corruption’ Alarm After Trump, Zuckerberg, and Thiel Hold Secret White House Meeting [Julia Conley/Common Dreams]
(via Naked Capitalism)(Image: Donald Trump, modified; Anthony Quintano and Wikideas1, CC BY, modified)
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