Jackson Jambalaya

This is scary.  Apparently being a successful or having a job makes one a target for the Occupy Crowd. The New York Times reports:

Even as the tech companies extend their global reach and jostle to own the future, their hometown is turning from admiration to anger. The buses, which illegally use city stops, have become an unlikely rallying point. First, people were priced out of their homes, activists say; now they are being pushed off the streets.

Demonstrators regularly block the shuttles. Last week, a group of activists stalked a Google engineer at his East Bay house, urging the masses to “Fight evil. Join the revolution.” A prominent venture capitalist struck back, comparing the tech elite with persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany.

“We’ve never seen anything remotely like this before,” said Gary Kamiya, author of “San Francisco, Cool Gray City of Love.” “Techies used to seem endearing geeks, who made money and cute little products but couldn’t get the girls. Now they’re the lord and masters.”

If the Bay Area is planning to relive the 1960s, it is still only the dawn of the decade. The protesters are relatively few, fragmented and uncertain in their tactics. The activists in San Francisco seem a bit more mainstream, while those in the East Bay are more inclined to escalate their protest — when they stopped a Google bus in December, a window got smashed.

The group that stalked Anthony Levandowski, an engineer at Google X, the company’s clandestine research laboratory, calls itself the Counterforce, after a Thomas Pynchon novel. About a dozen members, all dressed in black, gathered outside the Berkeley house where Mr. Levandowski lives with his partner and two young children.

They unfurled a banner and handed out fliers detailing the engineer’s work on Google’s driverless car technology, Street View and Google Maps. The flier read: “Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation. He is also your neighbor.”

Google, whose famous motto is “Don’t be evil,” declined to comment.

Several of Mr. Levandowski’s neighbors, who preferred not to give their names, said that the protesters decamped after about half an hour and that city police closely monitored the block for a day afterward. One neighbor speculated that the protesters were associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement. “It felt like regular old Berkeley behavior, to tell you the truth,” another said......

Conditions are ripe for another large-scale protest movement, Mr. Hayden said in an interview.

“These days you have a very large, frustrated younger population watching the middle class disappear before their eyes just as they prepare to go into it,” he said. “A rising, serious hostility against Google and companies like Google is inevitable, part of a class struggle around the means of producing information.”

If something has started, the outcome still depends on what the protesters do and how the companies react.

“It’s like one snowflake after another landing on a mountain,” said Paul Saffo, managing director at Discern Analytics. “If conditions are just right, there’s an avalanche.”

Mr. Saffo, a longtime tech futurist, said the Bay Area had been sliding toward an “Occupy Silicon Valley” situation for several years.

“The tech companies are going to discover they are going to have to become better citizens,” he said, pointing out that the sheen of corporate coolness is already wearing off. Google, for instance, is reportedly paying an unnamed midlevel engineer $3 million a year. “Google is not doing this because they are generous. They are doing it because that’s what it takes to prevent him from going anywhere else.”

The Counterforce leaflet, which included a photograph of Mr. Levandowski’s Arts and Crafts house taken from Google Street View, urges the masses to throw off their chains, or at least their Google Glass, and “join the revolution.” Rest of article

Hmmm........ Does anyone think China would be more than happy to take these companies?  Wonder what would happen to all that tax revenue and money spent on the local economy if that happened?