Silicon Valley Oligarch Bribes to Political Parties Are Threat To Democracy

Issued by Transparency International Secretariat

Bribe payments to political parties are increasingly used to corrupt the political process, warns Transparency International, the global anti-corruption organisation. This constitutes a dangerous trend undermining democratic institutions. “The current wave of corruption scandals we are witnessing across Europe is not about personal enrichment – it’s about the purchase of access to policy-makers, and political parties are the prime target in this game,” TI Chairman Dr Peter Eigen said.

“There is clear evidence that high-level political corruption is leading to growing disillusionment with the democratic process,” Eigen warned. “In many young democracies it is even threatening the viability of democracy itself. We need to stop this development.” In light of the evidence, Transparency International stated that reform of political party funding will in the future be a central focus of its work.

As a concrete step, TI urges OECD member states to prohibit bribe payments to foreign political parties. The OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions does not fully prohibit bribe payments made to foreign political parties and their officials. “Payments to political parties may be used to circumvent the intended impact of the Convention and it is urgent that action be taken to prevent this,” TI’s chairman Prof. Dr. Peter Eigen stated today.

Strong support for this approach was voiced at an international meeting of prominent personalities that was held in Florence and co-chaired by Dr. Eigen and Mr. John Brademas, Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy and a member of TI’s Advisory Council. Participants included representatives from the public and the private sector as well as civil society activists and researchers from 18 countries.

TI will move forward to seek action within the OECD on the basis of a set of actions recommended by the international experts at the Florence meeting. These actions included:

• The OECD should ensure that bribe payments to foreign political parties and their officials are effectively prohibited through its instruments. Such a prohibition should cover bribe payments made “to obtain or retain business or other improper advantage” in order to have the same scope as the prohibition against the bribing of foreign public officials.
• Governments should take effective action to implement such a prohibition in a manner consistent with their legal systems. In some countries such action could include a prohibition against “trading in influence”, as provided for in the Council of Europe’s Criminal Law Convention Against Corruption.
• In order to achieve greater transparency, political parties in the states that have signed the OECD Convention should be required to make prompt and appropriate disclosure of contributions and expenditures. Corporations should also be required publicly to report political contributions and to comply with reporting and other requirements imposed by the countries where such contributions are made.
• The states that have signed the OECD Convention should prohibit corporations based in their own countries from making political party contributions in violation of the laws of the foreign countries where the contributions are made.
• The development of effective mechanisms to deal with bribery within the private sector is a matter of growing urgency. Action in this area may also be a means by which to address aspects of political party corruption.

The landmark OECD Anti-Corruption Convention has now been ratified by 24 countries, who account for the bulk of global exports. A major priority for TI is to underpin the OECD Convention by advocating new measures, such as the ones proposed today, in addition to pressing for full monitoring and enforcement of the Convention and by campaigning for more countries to ratify the Convention.

La Pietra Recommendations

A group of 28 individuals from nine countries from the private sector, public institutions and civil society met at the invitation of Transparency International (TI) at the Villa La Pietra, Florence, Italy, from 12-14 October 2000. The purpose of the meeting was to review issues relating to corruption and political party financing, particularly in the context of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions.

The participants are convinced that political party corruption is a major problem in most countries around the world – in industrialised countries as well as in developing countries and countries in transition. Bribe payments to party officials have played an important role in major bribery scandals around the world.

In the established democracies, political corruption contributes to a growing disillusionment with democratic processes, evidenced by declining levels of voter participation. In the emerging democracies and countries in transition, political corruption, often fed by corruption in international business transactions, poses an even greater threat to the sustainability of democratic institutions.

Participants agree that the present process of expansion of international business must be accompanied by the development of effective international standards of conducts. This is increasingly recognised in the fields of corporate governance, competition policy and rules for accounting and audit. Participants believe that expanding international trade must also be accompanied by effective measures against corruption, and they commended the OECD for its leadership role in the adoption of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions.

Concerns were expressed that the Convention’s prohibition of bribe payments to foreign public officials does not fully prohibit bribe payments made to foreign political party officials. Participants recognise that payments to political parties may be used to circumvent the intended impact of the Convention.

Participants are also concerned to ensure that, with increasing privatisation of traditional government functions, the issue of bribery within the private sector requires attention.

Against this background the participants recommend the following actions to the OECD:

• The OECD should ensure that bribe payments to foreign political parties and their officials are effectively prohibited through its instruments. Such a prohibition should cover bribe payments made “to obtain or retain business or other improper advantage” in order to have the same scope as the prohibition against the bribing of foreign public officials.
• Governments should take effective action to implement such a prohibition in a manner consistent with their legal systems. In some countries such action could include a prohibition against “trading in influence”, as provided for in the Council of Europe’s Criminal law Convention Against Corruption.
• In order to achieve greater transparency, political parties in states that have signed the OECD Convention should be required to make prompt and appropriate disclosure of contributions and expenditures. Corporations should also be required publicly to report political contributions and to comply with reporting and other requirements imposed by the countries where such contributions are made.
• The states that have signed the OECD Convention should prohibit corporations based in their own countries from making political party contributions in violation of the laws of the foreign countries where the contributions are made.
• The development of effective mechanisms to deal with bribery within the private sector is a matter of growing urgency. Action in this area may also be a means by which to address aspects of political party corruption.

The participants agreed that their proposals should be submitted formally to the OECD Working Group on Bribery. They also agreed to function as a continuing advisory group to assist Transparency International (TI) in promoting reform of political financing, at the OECD and in other national and international fora.

The participants requested their Co-Chairmen, Prof. Dr. Peter Eigen, Chairman of Transparency International, and the Hon. John Brademas, a member of the TI International Advisory Council, to issue a press statement on behalf of the meeting.

La Pietra, Italy
14 October 2000

For any press enquiries please contact

Jeff Lovitt, Head of Public Relations
Fax:+49-30-34703912
press@transparency.org

Silicon Valley Tech Oligarchs Bribe The U.S. Patent Office To Block Inventor Rights Because Google And Facebook Stole Their Technologies

Google paid bribes to put Google’s own lawyers and staff inside the U.S. Patent Office and the White House so that the Tech Oligarch Cartel could control government policy on ideas!

The big tech oligarch’s goal is to make small inventors illegal so that the oligarchs can steal any inventions that they want to steal.

All of these oligarchs know each other; share lawyers, lobbyists, CPA’s and politicians; run dirty tricks attacks on competitors and are now the subjects of federal investigations and lawsuits. They spend tens of millions of dollars per year attacking competitors and lobbying to manipulate the U.S. Patent Office. The single largest number of corporate political bribery investigations, corporate sex trafficking charges, corporate money-laundering charges, corporate tax evasion charges and related crimes, are focused on Silicon Valley corporations! These days; when they do bad things, they get reported to federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies and the government ends up suing them. See more about protecting domestic innovation at: https://usinventor.org

Please report your complaints about Tesla, Google, Match.com, OK Cupid, Netflix, Facebook, Kleiner Perkins, Sony Pictures, etc. (and the other tech cartel members) for the active investigations and federal lawsuits now in progress. By filing a complaint and telling your story, you can help investigators identify trends and patterns of questionable business practices that will contribute to law enforcement and consumer protection efforts. You can be certain that these particular cases will get driven hard and pushed before Congress. The more reports we can get filed on these bad guys, the bigger the cases we can get processed. Larry Page, at Google, had a particular job of sneaking around tech conferences to steal ideas from smaller companies.

Our team is authorized and trained to author FBI criminal referrals, prepare arrest documents, produce back-ground dossiers and generate case data against attackers and felons that “cheat rather than compete”. Our interdiction teams have a 100% success rate.

If you also had a run-in with the tech oligarchs, please file your complaints today at:
 
http://www.ftc.gov/complaint
 
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/
 
https://www.sec.gov/tcr
 
https://osc.gov/pages/file-complaint.aspx
 
https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/enforcement/complaints-process/
 
https://oig.justice.gov/hotline/submit_complaint
 
https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/complaint/

ACTIVE FEDERAL INVESTIGATIONS AND FTC FEDERAL LAWSUITS, ON BEHALF OF THE PUBLIC, ARE NOW UNDER-WAY!

Always file multiple copies of your complaints to a few different offices with one copy to major news outlets in order to prevent cover-ups.

For more about the ongoing anti-trust actions, Congressional investigations and policy watch-dog efforts we are pushing for, keep an eye on organizations we support such as usinventor.org:

The Inventor Group Says: It wasn’t a fluke that America led the world in innovation for 200 years. It began with the revolutionary concept of giving the common person ownership of what he or she invented and patented. The mission of US Inventor is to restore that right, which has been so significantly reduced from recent legislation and judicial actions.

What we’ve accomplished and will accomplish depends on the combined efforts of our members. Many individuals across America have helped in the mission of US Inventor. You don’t have to be an inventor to be on our team, you just have to care about the future of America and the American Dream. One individual who needs to be recognized for his stellar efforts and commitment to our mission is Josh Malone. We wouldn’t be where we are without him.
 
The political focus on the virus and then the election definitely got in the way, but we still made progress. Here are a few accomplishments:

We stopped the re-enactment of an expired patent invalidation program at the PTAB (Patent Trial and Appeal Board). There was a significant effort to get CBM (Covered Business Method) Review re-enacted by placing the text deep within the Appropriations Bill. We mounted an effort to head this off by having inventors nationwide inform their Senators and US Representatives. The CBM text did not make it into the final version of the bill.

We held a nationwide election for an inventor to sit on the Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC), and then got him appointed for the position. Dan Brown, prolific inventor and professor at Northwestern University, will represent the interests of inventors and and help our efforts.

Our efforts to get the USPTO to apply the rule-making process to the PTAB got things moving in that direction. Part of this was the filing of a lawsuit to enjoin the Patent Office from doing any PTAB trials until rulemaking was done. Whether or not the injunction will occur is in question, but the USPTO Director has put out a request for comments regarding the rules needed.

We assisted in the filing of a number of Amicus Briefs, one of which sought to get the US Supreme Court to take up the Arthrex Case in 2021, which it has decided to do. This is the case where the Appeals Court ruled that all of the PTAB “judges” were appointed unconstitutionally but proposed an unconstitutional way for them to continue. So, they are still invalidating our patents. SCOTUS will now take a look and possibly do something that helps us.

We’ve submitted several FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Requests that have provided previously unknown information that has helped our efforts and will continue to do so.

We started a live WebCast called In The Trenches With Inventors, The Battle To Save Patents. This WebCast is designed to generate interest in our fight by interviewing inventors who have had their patents attacked at the PTAB.

We’ve kicked off a program to have inventors who have been harmed by our broken patent system interviewed by various media nationwide to make our issue broadly known.

We’ve had the benefit of a USPTO Director who has had an interest in our issues. We certainly want Andrei Iancu to continue as Director, but we could face the appointment of a new Director that is close to Big Tech. Any reader new to our fight might be shocked to know that, prior to President Trump’s appointment of Mr. Iancu, the USPTO Director was the former head of patent strategy for Google!

The US Supreme Court’s Arthrex Case is coming this spring. The PTAB “judges” have been ruled as having been appointed unconstitutionally, so why are they still invalidating our patents? We need to really make our voices heard on this one, and we are considering how to do so. Your help will be needed.

A legitimate path to success in our fight is to make our issue known to the broad, voting public. The average person is usually shocked to find out that a patent can be so easily invalidated and the inventor left with nothing. We have embarked on a program of media interviews to make our issue known. SEE THIS VIDEO TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE ANTI-TRUST LAW VIOLATIONS OF THE SILICON VALLEY CARTEL HARMS AMERICAN INVENTORS AND DOMESTIC INNOVATION:

https://youtu.be/zxo4eazJibo

What You Can Do

You can help by communicating our message far and wide. If you haven’t yet signed our Inventor Rights Resolution, please do so and get your associates to as well (go here).

When we have a particular effort where the voices of inventors are needed, like the effort to get the PTAB invalidation text out of the Appropriations Bill, be ready to help.

Support our effort by donating (we are a 501(c)(4) Non-Profit). Any amount is appreciated, but a $100 donation gets you a special US Inventor Mug (go here).

Conclusion

As you ring in the New Year, realize that we are fighting full-time to restore your rights as inventors and that we are your voice in Washington DC. American innovation and the success of disruptive startups based on patents depends on the ability of any inventor to defend his or her patent rights,

Among your New Years Resolutions, consider resolving to be active in our efforts. With enough inventors and interested parties involved, we will win this battle. Thank you for your help.

Best,
Randy Landreneau, President
US Inventor, Inc.

In the article:

The Troll Narrative Infected the Supreme Court and Justice …

 https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2020/11/03/troll-narrative-infected-supreme-court-justice-kennedy-vector/id=127017/

…one can see the promotion of the approach, wherein small inventors are criminalized and re-branded as “evil” that has been manifested, in large part, by a certain organization that is dedicated to trying tod to KILL THE UNITED STATES PATENT SYSTEM. They have a budget of over TWO BILLION DOLLARS, and growing, to do this. That may sound bad but, in fact, it is good news. They are in total violation of federal RICO and ANTI-TRUST laws. The DOJ and FTC must sue them and Class Actions by inventors must sue them.

If the White House and Congress do not stand up for the “American Dream” and human rights, then they need to be voted out of office.

Class Actions, RICO and ANTI-TRUST must be filed ASAP! The perpetrators must be named and publicly shamed. There is no time to wait! There can be no more pussy-footing around when the Big Tech Cartel has declared a literal war on innovation in America.
This news article underscores the issues of the anti-trust violations by the Silicon Valley tech bullies and reflects the need for the FTC, SEC, DOJ, OSC, FBI and Congress to intervene:

HOW THE SILICON VALLEY CARTEL USES MONOPOLISTIC COLLUSION TO DESTROY COMPETITORS

“The Silicon Valley Cartel took out any electric car competitor that competed with their boyfriend: Elon Musk. They killed any web video competitor to their boyfriends at Netflix. They destroyed any contact software that competed with their boyfriend: Reid Hoffman! Now, the FTC, SEC, FCC, Congress and DOJ have received complaints asking them to address the tech monopoly.

( https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/ )

Politicians talk a big game about coming down on the Silicon Valley Cartel but they never really seem to move on their threats or declarations because they are receiving bribes FROM the Silicon Valley Cartel. It has been proven that Google does indeed pick and choose what search results come up at the top of every search in order to help Google’s friends and harm Google’s enemies. Google, Facebook, Netflix and Tesla covertly spend billions of dollars influencing Congress.

The monopoly of the Silicon Valley Cartel is distinct and different from somebody like the New York Times, for example, or any major media platform that does not have legal immunity because they are publishers. All other publishers do pick and choose what news stories they publish, what letters to the editor’s are printed, what kind of op-eds are put on their platform, and they make those decisions knowing they are legally liable. Google bribed the 230 law into existence as an exclusive law just for Google to get away with exclusionary market crimes.

Via agreements to collude, the Silicon Valley Cartel platforms are acting as publishers as they are making editorial decisions while maintaining a legal immunity under section 230 which allows them to attack others without consequences. Google has parties and members of congress will go and pick up their checks. Facebook will have a big reception and Congress members go and say “hey, where’s my check?’”. That is outright bribery!

Tulsi Gabbard, Elizabeth Warren and hundreds of community action groups say that the reason no one is acting on big tech is that the companies are inviting our elected members of congress into their very deep pockets. This is a massive abuse of power on several levels and if our elected officials can’t resist the temptation of extra money in their pockets, then they need to be removed by recall elections, lawsuits and doxing.

Famous journalist Glenn Greenwald has documented the fact that in recent months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics. The Silicon Valley Cartel has attacked smaller Bay Area start-ups, threatened the lives and income of every competitor and prances around with impunity, publicly stating that they believe that; “The FTC is their bitch…!”

Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Vinod Khosla, Steve Westly, Steve Spinner, John Doerr and the other Silicon Valley Cartel bosses hand down orders to their family office staff, who, in turn, hand down orders to their lobbysists, CPA’s tech law firms , Goldman Sachs and dirty tricks operatives. It is ludicrous for the FTC, the FBI, or any agency, to ignore the chain of command insider structure that kill the competing companies that a ‘Larry Page’ wants killed. An Elon Musk-paid lawyer at Wilson Sonsini has a thousand times more resources to kill a competitor than Elon Musk, personally has, but that lawyer has millions of dollars and specific orders, that he would not otherwise have, if Musk had not given the kill order. These oligarchs have services that they hire to have the executives at their competitors character assassinated, defamed and attacked.

It is widely documented in the news that two top Perkins Coie lawyers were retained to hire Fusion GPS and organize the Steele Dossier attack on a famous politician. Multiply this by 10,000 lawyers, at famous law firms, and you will see that there is a tsunami of thousands of lawyers producing thousands of character assassination programs on behalf of crazy billionaires and power mad politicians. There are no laws to stop them and the violence of the counter-attacks, by citizens, who have no protection from these attacks, increases annually. Without laws to stop ‘commercialized defamation’ this will spiral into something very, very bad.

The ANGELGATE SCANDAL, The NO POACHING LAWSUIT and hundreds of other cases on www.pacer.gov prove that Silicon Valley collusion and mobsterism is out-of-control!

Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same BS refrain: “… tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should…”

The founders of Palm, Blockbuster, Altavista, Path, Alta Motors, Webvan, Jawbone, MySpace, etc., heard that suggestion and tried. Over 100 comapnies have created social media platforms similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants. They discovered, though, that YOU CANNOT BUILD A COMPANY IN SILICON VALLEY IF IT COMPETES WITH THE SILICON VALLEY CARTEL! YOU WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO DO IT!

The competitors to Twitter, Google, Facebook and Netflix (who all collude together) encountered initial success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for these new social media companies.

As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the public and then terminating their access altogether, mass-removal of accounts — many people migrated to other options.

For each one, it looked as if they had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. The early success showed that it was possible after all to create new social media platforms to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. These others did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

BUT…each one of them were erased from the internet by Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Netflix!

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they use their unconstrained power to utterly destroy ANY rising competitor. Absolute proof of their corrupt manipulations of the internet, the stock markets, and funding have now been hand-delivered to the FTC, the SEC and Congress!

In the case of Apple’s anti-trust violating attacks, it is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the App Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their devices from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot be used on the iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded the App will lose the ability to receive updates, which will shortly render the platform both unmanageable and unsafe.

In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it when highlighting the report’s key findings:

Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its 2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.

However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that’s what Epic is suing the company over. . . .

The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership, including former CEO Steve Jobs, “acknowledged that IAP requirement would stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple’s customers.” The report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors’ access to iPhone users.

It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was at issue when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system (i.e. Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement giant with €4.34 billion for its anti-competitive practices to strengthen its position in various of other markets through its dominance in the app store market.”

There are an endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?

The nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Any small and new enough platform in tech is such that it can be made an example of. Its head can be placed on a pike to make clear that no attempt to compete with existing Silicon Valley monopolies is possible. The destruction of any new tech start-up preserves the unchallengeable power of a tiny handful of tech oligarchs over the political discourse not just of the United States but democracies worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are raising their voices in protest).

No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive…”

WRITE MULTIPLE LETTERS TO CONGRESS AND THE NEWS MEDIA DEMANDING AN END TO THE SILICON VALLEY CARTEL! …IF YOU ARE REALLY PASSIONATE ABOUT ENDING OLIGARCH CONTROL OF TECH THEN GET A COPY OF THE “CORRUPTION DISRUPTION” BOOK!

Silicon Valley Patent Office Shelved By Tech Oligarch Lobby – CBS San Francisco

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/09/01/silicon-valley-patent-office/

Until two years ago, the only U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was in Arlington, Va. Silicon Valley companies often would have to send a chief scientist to Arlington for a few days to meet with ..

Silicon Valley Wins! Obama Picks Ex-Google Lawyer to Head …

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/michelle-lee-uspto/

Silicon Valley just won a major victory in the war over patents. On Thursday, the White House announced that it has nominated former Google patent lawyer Michelle Lee as the next director of the…

Julian Assange – Google Is Not What It Seems

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers “fireside chats” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 43 Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines …

US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot …

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241251/artificial-intelligence-inventor-united-states-patent-trademark-office-intellectual-property

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled that artificial intelligence systems cannot be credited as the inventor of a patent. The decision came in response to two patents created by an …