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Welfare Recipient Cisco Wiping Out Greenbelt

by Paulina Borsook, MOJO Wire
On the Corporate Welfare dole, computer giant Cisco ranks with Intel and Microsoft. While the company opposes business regulation, it is all too eager to accept government handouts, while taking from its local communities. Csan they have it both ways?
Cyberselfish Cisco
Paulina Borsook, MoJo Wire
December 7, 2000

Four years ago, I published an essay in Mother Jones magazine called
\"Cyberselfish,\" in which I criticized the dominant libertarian culture of
the high-tech universe. Now, it\'s almost a half-decade later, and in the
dot-com bubble that has bloomed and mostly burst, where high-tech has gone
mainstream, and the Brownian noise of day-trading hums incessantly, surely
nothing I wrote way back then could possibly still be true.

Wrong.

My new book, \"Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly
Libertarian Culture of High-Tech,\" describes the religion of high-tech, if
religion is understood to be a set of mostly unconscious, commonly-held,
collective beliefs. And religion, like all human culture, perseveres, even
when regimes change (or fail to -- witness the 2000 elections.)

For example, consider the case of Cisco, that fine company which, along
with Al Gore, brought you and continues to bring you the Internet. Cisco
has a valuation far far in excess of any Old Economy company you can think
of, and is one of the Big Three of the New Economy -- Intel and Microsoft
being the other two.

Funny thing, Cisco ended up paying no federal income tax last year.
Amazing what you can do with the wonders of stock-option accounting. But
what\'s even more amazing, and more telling, is that folks all over
Northern California high-tech think this a fine thing: Cisco creates jobs
and wealth and isn\'t this enough?

Yet, as I wrote in the introductory chapter to my book:

\"Quiz: where would you want to do business in 2000? In Russia where
there\'s no regulation, no central government, no rule of law; or in
Northern California where the roads are mostly well-paved and
well-patrolled and trucks and airplanes are safer than not, where the
power grid is usually intact and the banking system is mostly fraud-free
and mostly works, where construction of new buildings is inspected to make
sure they are basically safe and sound, where people mostly don\'t have to
pay protection money, and the majority of law enforcement personnel are
not terribly corrupt or brutal? If gangs steal computer chips from
factories, these thefts are investigated and the perps prosecuted. And
government, through subsidy and regulation and supervision, is the
invisible hand behind this relatively peaceful, mostly prosperous scene,
making wealth-creation possible.

That government had anything positive to do with any of these structures,
checks, and balances that influence so much of how we all live and work
(and high-tech so flourishes) is invisible to technolibertarians. Yet
these political technolibertarians driving their Hummers home to pricey
mansionettes off Woodside Road derive as much benefit from these
government interventions as do the poor schnooks driving their Ford LTDs
to so-pass
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