Our initiative met with great success: 25 of the 26 companies we directly challenged released their Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO-1) reports or workforce diversity/inclusion data. (Note: Just a few years ago, the San Jose Mercury News filed Freedom of Information requests to secure workforce data — six leading Silicon Valley companies — including Google, Apple, Cisco and HP — went to court and, astonishingly, they won the right to keep their EEO-1 workforce data hidden from the public.)

The data doesn’t lie. Silicon Valley and the tech industry have a diversity/inclusion problem. I’ve called it the 2 percent dilemma, as most companies have just around 2 percent African American and Latino representation in their workforce, C-suites and, even worse, on their boards of directors. When it comes to access to capital, most investment firms and teams, and the companies that receive investment, are led by Whites. [The 2 Percent Problem and What I'm Doing About It , by Jesse Jackson, Huffington Post, April 11, 2016]

Considering how the tech industry has shamelessly pushed for H1-B visas, it's tempting to indulge in a bit ofBut as this is just another shakedown operation by the "Rev." Jackson, I can't take much joy in it.

It's understandable Jackson needs to keep expanding his operation, what with the illegitimate child he fathered while married and with his son, a former Congressman, just out of jail. We can assume he constantly needs money. But why are engineers and software developers paying this corrupt buffoon's bills?

Jackson makes a number of assertions in his piece, which he may or may not have written himself. There are the standard bromides about "diversity being good for business" and how technology companies "must" change, presumably because Jackson says they should.

But the creation of the computer industry is one of the great triumphs of meritocracy, not artificial diversity. If Whites had been worried about "diversity" instead of recruiting smart people so they could actual produce things, Silicon Valley would have never gotten off the ground. Until recently, programming was one of the few industry's where pure intelligence was what mattered the most.

However, in a world where one can't discuss the truth about Human Bio-Diversity and the reality of IQ differences between population, there's no answer to Jackson's absurdities. So you have to pay him off. And as Jackson is a man of expensive tastes, his demands will keep increasing as more and more of the dead weight of diversity is dumped on companies in a competitive industry. The predictable result is that American businesses will no longer be able to defeat the global competition.

The bottom line is the American technology industry needs to start operating with some enlightened self-interest. The smartest people in the country can't help but know the truth about HBD. They need to start pushing back against this kind of egalitarian extortion and helping to build a real opposition. Otherwise, they have no one to blame but themselves when the likes of Jackson turn Silicon Valley into something that looks more like Detroit.