A few weeks ago David Plouff the mastermind behind the Obama campaigns joined Uber, an ultra-libertarian company that's pushing down wages in the taxi business.

I was perusing linkedin, and came across this:
Lizzy M.( Upgrade for full name )
Deputy Digital Director at AirbnbNYC / Hilltop Public Solutions
(She also had bona files with the Obama campaign.)

Hilltop Public Solutions is a Washington DC PR firm that leans Democrat/progressive, and I think they are also a kind of lobbying outfit.

Airbnb is basically deconstructing the hotel business, which, in NYC, is one of the jobs that poor women can do to get into the lower middle or middle class. Hotel workers there make around 60k a year due to the unions, which fight on both the political/legislative plane as well as negotiate individually with big hotels. They recently got a $15+ minimum wage in LA for hotel workers.

Then I got this promotional email from The HUB, a local hangout for nonprofit-types and a "diverse passionate community of professionals doing impactful work." You know, Eric Garcetti's demographic.

"What makes ventures like Uber or Airbnb so successful is not just that they're accessible and affordable. It's also because their accessibility and affordability comes from their model of empowering people to use each other as resources.

"When we conceived Civic Innovation Lab with Learn Do Share and LA City Controller's Tech Bullpen, we wanted to take that model and apply it to civic engagement. If we can share our cars and our homes, why can't we share - and build - our solutions to city-wide issues impacting our communities.

"Civic Innovation Lab launched Sunday, September 14, with 150 eager participants discussing local concerns and how we can use the City's Open Data to address them. It was such an inspiring day that we could fill up this whole newsletter gushing like your grandmother at your graduation about everything that happened."


How can Democrat party muck-e-mucks in all good conscience go and do the dirty work for two companies that are attacking the livelihoods of the lower middle class and poor people, particularly immigrants?

Uber and Airbnb are both attacking highly regulated businesses, and are both heavily venture funded, so they have a big warchest they can use to hire lobbyists and make political contributions to dismantle the regulations that exist to raise standards and wages for workers.

The taxi business is heavily regulated - and yes, there's a lot of problems with it - because if it weren't, the drivers would decimate each other. Millions of people can drive and have cars, and if they could all give rides, wages would quickly drop to sub-minimum-wage. At the same time, at specific hours of the week, the prices would rise as drivers figured out how to price-gouge drunks coming out of the clubs. The "medallion" system restricts the number of drivers, and also restricts the prices for rides.

The system has been abused - with medallion owners leasing out their license to others. But that's something to reform, not eliminate.

The hotel business is based around shortages. The business attempts to maintain a shortage of high-end hotels, to keep prices high. And that, they do. At the same time, they try to pay as little as possible for labor. The work doesn't require skills, so there are a lot of people who seek the work, and wages for housekeepers would stay at minimum wage, if it weren't for unions to negotiate higher wages.

Because there are several large hotels competing in any large market, the hotel unions sometimes push to pass laws that raise wages for all hotels, so that no one hotel ends up disadvantaged in their pricing. After securing this political win, they are in a better position to organize more hotels.

What's disingenuous about the Hub LA email is that they claim that these are "sharing" businesses that allow many people to share their resources.

Nonsense.

Both Uber (and specifically UberX) and Airbnb have become business portals for workers and small time hoteliers.

People who drive for Uber basically do it full time. Same goes for Lyft, their main competitor in LA.

Many of the people offering spaces on Airbnb do so semi-professionally, or as a real estate speculation. When you rent out a room over and over, you're not really just offering something as a "share" - you're in business to rent out that room.

There are people who buy condos, and rent them out on Airbnb. They hire maids to clean the spaces. And you can probably guess - they don't pay union wages and benefits to these maids.

Democrats need to push back on this garbage. Labor needs to put on some pressure.

Progressives need to throw support behind real progressives who stand up for working people, and recognize these dotcom profiteers for the destructive forces that they are.

Found this relevant article about the issue:

https://medium.com/the-nib/the-case-against-sharing-9ea5ba3d216d

'Democrats' etc.
Neither 'party' represents the interests of the commons.
Not when the dark network which originates from the families of the banking cartels who are psychopathic degenerates, uses the four horsemen, bribery, blackmail, extortion and assassination to implement their will.
And it aint for our benefit anymore than a farmer cares for their chickens in a factory farm.