Trump’s El Salvador Scheme Is Cruel and Unusual Punishment
May 3, 2025
Israel Is Attacking Aid Ships to Gaza — Again
May 3, 2025
Rewind to 2016. Tech is coming off a two-year financing high marked by record-breaking private funding rounds, an explosion of unicorn start-ups, and an unprecedented wave of megadeals. Perched on top is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, whose personal fortune will grow this year by $11.2 billion, more than any other billionaire’s.
Meanwhile, a type of social justice politics that will eventually be derided as “wokeness” is ascendant. We’re sandwiched between #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign is criticizing Bernie Sanders as myopically fixated on economic inequality while neglecting race and gender concerns. As Sanders raises the alarm about billionaires’ ballooning wealth and political influence, Clinton is cultivating close relationships with Silicon Valley elites, who are succeeding on the identity politics front where Sanders is reportedly failing.
This year, 2016, Apple is throwing money into historically black colleges and universities, while Uber is donating directly to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Google has announced $3.5 million in diversity-focused grants at a screening of a documentary about the murder of an unarmed black man at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco’s historic gay district.
Not wanting to be outdone, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announce the founding of the Primary School, a tuition-free private school dedicated to serving low-income students of color. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the school has “deep roots in diversity, equity and inclusion, vowing to teach about diverse cultures and anti-racism while helping students do social justice work and providing opportunities for families to discuss racism.” As the year draws to a close, Donald Trump narrowly wins his first presidential election, and the Primary School begins instruction on two campuses in the Bay Area.
Fast forward to 2025. Nearly every major Silicon Valley executive has openly aligned with President Donald Trump, with many donating to his inaugural fund and appearing on his inauguration stage. Several have affirmed and zealously participated in his “war on woke,” Zuckerberg among them. And the Primary School? As of April, parents in the school community have been informed that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is withdrawing support. The campuses will be shuttered next year.
As one young student explained to his mother, “The guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore.” Pack it in, kid. This isn’t 2016.
Some will view Zuckerberg’s abandonment of social justice philanthropy as a parable of betrayal. But that’s missing the point. In reality, that era of tech patronage was always a glittering distraction from meaningful social reform at best, and actively detrimental to it at worst. While tech CEOs showered identity-conscious nonprofits with donations and posted vague cultural empowerment rhetoric on social media, their lobbyists fought tirelessly against stronger regulations and higher corporate tax rates that would have benefited working-class people of every background.
The discretionary largesse of the ultrarich was and remains a terrible substitute for progressive taxation to fund universal social programs. With the money tech companies and executives spent on nonprofits during their “woke” era, the public sector could have revitalized entire educational systems, health care networks, and housing programs. And we wouldn’t be at risk of losing those programs the moment wealthy benefactors decide to pivot.
Positive views of the tech industry peaked in 2015, after which they began a rapid decline — the “techlash.” An intensification of identity-focused philanthropy followed, with Silicon Valley donors giving to carefully selected, politically safe nonprofits to ward off criticism from an increasingly skeptical justice-minded public. The tech industry could align its image with values like “equality” and “fairness” and distract from potential reforms that would undercut profits.
But reputation was far from its only concern. When wealthy individuals and companies donate to charity, they receive substantial tax deductions, significantly reducing their tax bills and diminishing tax revenue, as donors can deduct the full market value of appreciated assets like stocks without paying capital gains tax on those assets. By controlling where their donations go through private foundations and donor-advised funds, the wealthy maintain influence over these assets while immediately receiving tax benefits — essentially a massive government subsidy for their philanthropy.
A 2023 report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that the year prior, charitable deductions cost the public $73.34 billion in lost tax revenue from personal and corporate charitable deductions alone. Additionally, Zuckerberg in particular conducts much of his giving through a limited liability corporation, allowing him to blend philanthropic activities with for-profit investment while maintaining greater control and fewer disclosure requirements than a traditional foundation would require. According to the report, he has seen his wealth increase by a staggering 1,382 percent since promising to give away the majority of his fortune in 2010.
On a corporate level, tech firms like Zuckerberg’s Meta are also hyper-skilled at tax avoidance, consistently paying effective tax rates far below the statutory 21 percent corporate rate; Meta paid just 11.5 percent in 2023. This pattern extends across the industry, with the large American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” averaging just 16.1 percent in corporate tax contributions over the past decade, significantly below the US average of 29.7 percent.
All told, America’s tech giants stand accused of avoiding nearly $300 billion in taxes over the past decade. Over the same ten-year period, assuming average teacher salaries, that sum could have funded nearly half a million more teachers in American public schools — four times the current estimated US teacher shortage.
If Zuckerberg wanted to improve educational prospects for low-income students of color, he and Facebook/Meta could have paid taxes to fund our actually existing education system. Instead, a 2021 ProPublica investigation estimated that, when indexed to wealth growth, Zuckerberg’s true tax rate was just 1.1 percent. What looked like woke charity was actually grand larceny.
Having weathered the initial techlash, the industry is now muddling through a “wokelash.” After a period of political recalibration, they have thrown in with a president who celebrates hierarchical domination, and executives are adjusting their postures accordingly. But don’t expect their philanthropic commitments to disappear entirely in a cloud of anti-wokeness. The organizational specifics and cultural valences may change, but the broad strategy of corporate giving is indispensable.
Beyond basic tax avoidance mechanisms, the reliance of so many nonprofits on private philanthropic donations from corporate leaders also has the effect of blunting opposition from the broadly defined left. When entire layers of activists are employed by organizations dependent on those charitable funds, activist priorities shift accordingly. The nonprofit sector now accounts for roughly 10 percent of the American workforce, creating a vast ecosystem of professionals whose livelihoods depend on the current philanthropic system. This dependency creates profound structural constraints: these organizations are incentivized to develop modes of addressing social problems that avoid confronting the profit motive or challenging their wealthy benefactors.
Recent left critiques have highlighted the nonprofits’ bind: they require funding from private wealth to pursue meaningful change yet answer to donors who benefit from economic inequality, contradictions that warp their internal cultures and external priorities. This dynamic, dating back to the 1960s, is no doubt a major factor in how we arrived at the 2010s version of shallow, identity-based social justice politics to begin with.
Circa 2016, tech CEOs and other elites were showered with praise for furthering the cause of social equality with charitable giving. In reality, they were draining public resources while offering a subpar alternative to a real welfare state. For them, it was and is the best of all worlds: a tax-avoidance mechanism that enriches executives at the expense of public institutions, a massive funding network that neutralizes large swaths of their would-be political opposition, a socially conscious rebrand that avoids confronting underlying economic relations, and permanent control of their wealth — including the ability to abandon their commitments at will.
Great Job Meagan Day & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
