Julian Assange has warned that Wall Street and multinational corporations are no longer merely exercising power, but are now literally ruling over us, and cautioned that a Clinton White House will feature an unprecedented merger between the private power of corporations and the military might of the state.
Speaking via video feed at the Green Party convention in Houston, Texas, Assange said Google’s goal is “to integrate with Washington, to prevent antitrust regulation and to be part of that family of traditional D.C.-mediated power.”
The consequences for the 21st century of such a collusion will be similar to the consequences for the 20th century provided by the merging of the state with military-industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, Assange claims.
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“Google has been to the White House, on average over the last four years, once per week—more than any other single company. It spends more money lobbying Washington, D.C., than any other single company.
The chairman of Google, who was the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has started, about a year ago, a company to run Hillary Clinton’s digital campaign.
Hillary Clinton’s former staffer, Jared Cohen, was hired by Google in 2009 to head up Google’s internal think tank. There’s a lot of other interconnections between Google and the state. Eric Schmidt is now also, at the same time as being chairman of what is now Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is chairman of the Pentagon innovation board.
So you have a connection between Google, the Clinton campaign, which will be almost certainly the next White House, and the Pentagon. And this triangle is extremely worrying, because, as time goes by, Google is understanding that it does have an ability to influence election campaigns. It’s also bought more than 10 drone companies. It’s integrating its mapping data in order to better be able to fly and navigate drones around the world, is expanding into every country in the world.
And it has a very strange, quasi-religious vision of the future, of this vision of the singularity. I’ve done research that it’s very disturbing what they believe in Silicon Valley, that they believe they can create a massive artificial intelligence, more powerful than any human being or any society’s ability to think. And, of course, we all know what happens when such power is in limited hands.
And so, Google in the White House will be, essentially, an unregulatable company. It’s a question whether it’s already unregulatable, but you can—you can just completely forget about any kind of antitrust legislation being used on Google if there is a Hillary Clinton White House.
Google is very different, in an important way, from Lockheed Martin. Yes, Google is building drones. Yes, Lockheed Martin was and is building F-16s. But Google also controls how we communicate with each other. So, Google is, in a sense, like HIV. It doesn’t—it’s not just something that afflicts your arm; it afflicts your ability to understand and fight the infection. That’s true of all media, libraries, communication services, etc. They’re involved in that part of society that we use to understand ourselves, and that is the freedom of communication.
So, the freedom of communication, in some sense, is the fundamental right, because it is the enabling right that allows us to speak to each other to understand the importance of all our other rights. And so, when the freedom of communication is degraded or maligned, when whistleblowers are prosecuted, when one organization starts to develop a monopoly on the internet and interfere with our communication, then all our rights suffer, because this fundamental enabling right is degraded.”
