Live broadcast about the poor. Now let's see what came out of it all.

If you don't want to stress out, go elsewhere. There is a quiet life, cheap housing and lilac under the windows. You are sitting in the center of civilization, you want to drive an expensive car, eat in an expensive restaurant, live in an expensive apartment. What did you do for this?

Be honest: in this city, if you don't get a few thousand dollars a month, you have nothing to do.

It was the summer of 2007, Luzhkov was the mayor of Moscow, and Leonid Kazinets, the owner of the Barkley construction company, was going to expel the rogue from Moscow. Polonsky at that very time was sending losers to the ass who did not have a billion. Then it seemed that the loot would forever flow like a river, Moscow grew, grinding the rogue.

10 years have passed and the dreams of Mr. Kazinets came true in another center of civilization - Silicon Valley in California. The place where the future is born, where the offices of the world's leading IT companies are located. And where, too, there is no place for the poor. A recent study found that one in four Silicon Valley residents cannot afford a full meal. I’ll make a reservation right away, this is not Russia Today telling about the horrors of the decaying West, but quite an authoritative British newspaper The Guardian.

At the moment, there are about 720 thousand people in Silicon Valley who cannot afford good nutrition. About a quarter of them are families with children.

How did it happen? The Guardian spoke to one of the women who was one of those people. She works as a cook at Facebook's cafeteria and cooks free meals for Facebook employees all day long. But when she gets home from work, she finds herself with nothing to buy food for her two daughters. This is because almost all of her salary goes to pay for rented housing.

The tech corporations that bring unprecedented profits to the region and make it one of the richest in the country were to blame for this. With each new headquarters building in Silicon Valley, the cost of living and rent continues to skyrocket. The salaries of ordinary people in the valley are not growing as quickly, and so many people have to go without food or go to live on the street.

The cost of renting a home in San Francisco is one of the highest in the country, and many people do not have the opportunity to pay for it. This is one of the reasons why there are so many homeless people in the region. Quite decent people and skilled workers are forced to live in cars or move out of town in order to spend several hours every day on the road to and from work.

The entire population of Silicon Valley turned out to be clearly divided into two parts: highly paid high-tech workers and everyone else. And while the former bathe in wealth, the latter have to make great efforts to survive. Many people even turn to the state for help. But since the salaries of many of them are quite decent by the standards of the country, they are often denied. The median household income in the US is just under $60,000, but for Silicon Valley, $85,000 is no longer enough to rent and feed your family.

In order to somehow help these people, the sponsors opened a food bank in San Jose called Second Harvest. So far, it is the only one in Silicon Valley and one of the largest in the country. It is able to provide food for about 257 thousand people.

The bank stores fresh vegetables, fruits, bread, meat, milk and canned food, which volunteers distribute to those in need.

Volunteers from among the employees of PayPal work in the warehouse free of charge. Many other corporations provide financial support to the bank, for example, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has become one of its main sponsors.

People who come for food are given all the basic products necessary for a normal diet. These include potatoes, rice, chicken, beans, tomatoes and corn.

Photos: Guardian

This whole situation is very ironic in light of the fact that all technology corporations constantly talk about the need for universal equality and zero tolerance for any discrimination. In August, for example, Google fired one of its engineers for taking the risk of claiming that gender disparity was due to biological causes. And a couple of months earlier, an Uber board member had to resign after speaking out against women in the company's leadership.

And in the end it turned out that all these companies, so zealously defending universal human rights and universal equality, became the main cause of terrible social inequality in Silicon Valley.

“The whole problem of Moscow is that in a really expensive city we are trying to maintain social security. Make today in Moscow a paid entry into the city of several hundred dollars a month, entry into the center is even more expensive. And there will be no traffic jams, as there are none in the center of London now.
If you don't want to stress out, go elsewhere. There is a quiet life, cheap housing and lilac under the windows. You are sitting in the center of civilization, you want to drive an expensive car, eat in an expensive restaurant, live in an expensive apartment. What did you do for this?
Be honest: in this city, if you don't get a few thousand dollars a month, you have nothing to do.

At the moment, there are about 720 thousand people in Silicon Valley who cannot afford good nutrition. About a quarter of them are families with children.

The bank stores fresh vegetables, fruits, bread, meat, milk and canned food, which volunteers distribute to those in need.

People who come for food are given all the basic products necessary for a normal diet. These include potatoes, rice, chicken, beans, tomatoes and corn.

Photos: Guardian

And in the end it turned out that all these companies, so zealously defending universal human rights and universal equality, became the main cause of terrible social inequality in Silicon Valley.

Do you remember how, more than twenty years ago, one young and promising deputy from the Mogilev region promised us to deal harshly with the inhabitants of the royal villages that have grown around Belarusian cities? And for those who are poorer - a bag of feed and a refrigerator as compensation for the lost Soviet deposits? And for all of us - a retreat to a safe distance from the edge of the abyss?

Now let's see what came out of it all.

A year ago, many Belarusians were forced to remember the nineties: the lack of decent jobs, prices rising faster than wages, fog instead of brilliant prospects in the economy.

And a year later, we were reminded that the very rich, whose palaces were promised war, had not gone away. They have become even richer and, judging by the Minsk Sea, much more self-confident.

And what is most striking is that these richest people today, as a rule, are their own for the one who promised to fight them at the dawn of a political career. “Their” businessmen open supermarket after supermarket, “their” hockey players build houses and buy up shopping centers, “their” officials received elite houses in one of the most expensive districts of Minsk.

The sign at the entrance to the country club of a businessman close to power is not just a road sign (though dubious from the point of view of the law). This is a sign to all of us that a state within a state has appeared in the country.

One can argue for a long time about why this happened. But a lot of people won't like the answer. It is unlikely that society, for the most part, which once exchanged its right to control power for a small but stable salary, could count on a different outcome.