Wednesday, April 22, 2020

TECH GIANTS ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY - ARE THEY A GREATER THREAT THAN THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND RED CHINA?

Bokhari: Mark Zuckerberg’s Rapidly Increasing Overreach

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg closeup
Anthony Quintano/Flickr
2:52

Is Mark Zuckerberg’s God complex getting worse? Every day seems to bring a new, mind-boggling act of overreach from Facebook.
This week, the company seemingly decided that the U.S. constitution doesn’t matter, as it decided to suppress “unlawful” protests against coronavirus lockdowns.
Unlawful protests? Perhaps it’s been a while since Zuckerberg read it, but I think I remember something about a “right of citizens to assembly peaceably” in the First Amendment.
Earlier in the month, Facebook decided that the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, wasn’t saying the right things about the Chinese virus pandemic, and removed several of the head of state’s posts. Facebook insists that it will transmit official information about the virus to its users — it’s just that some “officials” are too populist, you see!
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, a company that believes it is so important, it should have its own supreme court.
It’s also a company whose CEO is happy to act as the world’s editor-in-chief, deciding what news stories are of sufficient importance to be heard on the platform. Breitbart News extensively covered Facebook’s suppression of stories about the alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
After its ban on all mentions of the alleged whistleblower, Facebook assured the world that once enough public figures mentioned his name, the ban would be lifted. And yet it wasn’t, even after President Donald Trump tweeted out an article naming Ciaramella as the alleged whistleblower.
Being the world’s editor-in-chief isn’t enough for Mark Zuckerberg, though — in the age of Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, he’s set himself up as the world’s Chief Medical Officer as well, deciding what information (and misinformation) about the pandemic gets through to Facebook users.
And we already see the result of allowing one, progressive-dominated company to have that level of power. When Bolsonaro expresses skepticism about social distancing, his posts get deleted. But when the mainstream media repeatedly spreads misinformation and fake news about the virus, they don’t even get “fact-checked.”
With great power comes great responsibility, and Facebook appears to have none of the latter. It’s time for America’s leaders to take seriously the danger of having this out-of-control company in charge of the global flow of information at this dangerous point in our history.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com




Mark Zuckerberg: Lockdown Protests Are ‘Misinformation,’ Facebook Will Ban Organizers

Mark Zuckerberg
Andrew Harnik/AP
2:25



Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that posts and pages attempting to organize protests against stay-at-home orders will be banned as “misinformation.”
The Facebook CEO confirmed that the posts would be banned to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on a segment of Good Morning America.
Stephanopoulos asked Zuckerberg how the company deals “with the fact that Facebook is now being used to organize a lot of these protests to defy social distancing guidelines in states. If somebody trying to organize something like that, does that qualify as harmful misinformation?”
“We do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down,” confirmed Zuckerberg, while at the same time saying that it’s important “that people can debate policies.”
A Facebook spokesman confirmed to CNN that planned protests in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska were having their pages removed from Facebook at the request of state authorities.
Anti-quarantine protests being organized through Facebook in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska, are being removed from the platform on the instruction of governments in those three states because it violates stay-at-home orders, Facebook spokesperson @andymstone tells @donie.



This comes after President Trump gave his support to protesters in several states who are demonstrating against their governors’ stay-at-home orders, including a 3,000-strong protest in Lansing, Michigan. Michigan protesters have used Facebook to organize.
On Twitter, the President called on protesters to “liberate” the states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, also calling on Virginian citizens to “save your great 2nd amendment. It is under siege!”
At Friday’s White House coronavirus press conference, Trump lent more support to the protesters.
“These are people expressing their views,” said the president. “They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”
Protests and demonstrations, like other forms of lawful speech, are constitutionally protected. The First Amendment of the United States, in addition to protecting freedom of expression and religion, also specifically protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.




“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”                                                                                     Karen McQuillan 




TRUMP’S CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
Only a complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
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“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
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The latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch brothers.
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Efforts by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty

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A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.


MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html

“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR


Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires

JOHN BINDER

The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Tucker Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding

Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”


Tucker Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech

Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI

"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it."

“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.


In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
December 20, 2019 
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities. California hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably TexasTennesseeNevadaColorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe NationU.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.



OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER

The Rise of Wall Street Thievery

How corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions. 
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands. 
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings. 
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.

Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.

Report: Big Tech Will Expand Further into Finance in 2020

JOSH EDELSON/Getty
 5 Jan 202040
3:31
According to a recent report, the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley have plans to further expand into the world of finance in the new year — falling just short of opening their own banks.
recent report from CNBC claims that Silicon Valley tech giants are likely to expand their business into the world of finance even further in 2020, but many want to avoid the hassle of becoming a fully-fledged bank. With Facebook announcing its own cryptocurrency, Googles plans to introduce consumer bank account sin collaboration with Citibank, and Apple’s new credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs, finance seems to be a major focus for tech firms.
CNBC writes:

Though their products are different, both firms share something in common: they have no plans to become regulated financial institutions like Citi or Goldman. While Big Tech — a group of companies that includes Google, AmazonFacebook and Apple — will undoubtedly push deeper into finance this year, their progress in banking will be “more of a slow creep than big strides,” said Sarah Kocianski, head of research at fintech consultancy 11:FS.
“The big tech firms will continue to add services that are peripheral to banking to their existing offerings, without going full-stack banking,” she said. “The headache of getting, and maintaining, a banking license would likely be considered too big a risk for these companies. Instead, they will continue to operate with licensed partners.”
But, Accenture’s global payments lead, Sulabh Agarwal stated when asked that it makes little sense for tech firms to become banks. “Do I expect them to become banks? I don’t think so do. I expect them to create new services to enhance their propositions,” Argawal stated.
Facebook is making moves on two fronts in the world of finance, with its digital currency Libra and with its payment processing platform Facebook Pay. CNBC writes:

“The theory goes that if 2 billion people were to withdraw their deposits from the banking system and move them into Libra tokens, you’d effectively have a run on the banks,” said Simon Taylor, co-founder and blockchain lead at 11:FS. “Facebook is absolutely big enough for that to be plausible, but whether or not it happens depends much more on what consumer problem is being solved.”
Aside from libra, Facebook is also consolidating its payment products under a new brand called Facebook Pay. Uber, like its Southeast Asian competitor Grab, is moving further into finance with a division called Uber Money that houses a digital wallet and upgraded payment cards. They’ll face competition from the likes of Google Pay and Apple Pay in the U.S. and Chinese payment apps like Alipay and WeChat Pay.
E-commerce giant Amazon is already in the process of lending out money but has yet to break into consumer banking. It should be noted that Amazon at one point set up a student loan scheme in 2016 with Wells Fargo which shut down shortly afterward. Sarah Kocianski, head of research at fintech consultancy 11:FS, stated that there was “every reason to suspect they’ve learned from that.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’


Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
 10 Mar 2019122
3:19



Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.

In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least amounts, would be better to take care of their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare … plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific). 
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Report: India’s H-1B Companies Ask Labor Department to Let Foreign Workers Stay amid Crash

40 Altaf Qadri/AP Photo
3 Apr 202016
23:41
The India-based NASSCOM business lobby is asking the Department of Labor to help the lobby keep its huge workforce of Indian H-1B temporary workers in American jobs throughout the coronavirus crash, according to a report in the Times of India newspaper.
“Everyone that has been involved in the H1-B program … has skirted the rules to stay in the United States,” said one lobbyist. “These companies do not want to have to fire these [H-1B] workers and send them back home — they want to hold them here” so they can grab jobs in the recovery, he said.
Labor Department officials declined to provide any information about the NASSCOM lobbying and declined to say if the agency would help businesses change the paperwork that allows fired H-1Bs to stay in the United States. The Indian report did not say if the NASSCOM lobbyists met with Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.
If the administration moves forward in relaxing regulations governing the H-1B program amid spiking unemployment, “get ready for the pitchforks,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of the U.S. Tech Workers group that opposes the H-1B program. “When people have nothing left to lose, they will lose it — and they will direct it at the elites.” He continued:
On March 27, a friend of mine was fired after giving an hour of “knowledge transfer” to her [H-1B] replacement who came from overseas. Now she’s unemployed at a time when ten million other Americans have filed for unemployment. She doesn’t get to participate in the American Dream. Instead of being a member of the middle class, she’s a member of the financially impoverished class. And in America, to be without a job means you’re out of the pecking order, you’re on the low run, and in American today, that could be years, if not decades. The pitchforks are coming out because people are nine meals away from revolution.
The NASSCOM business association asked Labor Secretary Scalia to allow their imported H-1B visa workers to work at home during the coronavirus epidemic, said the Times of India.
The request seems like a minor accommodation in the coronavirus epidemic. But it is political dynamite because any concessions will help the U.S. and Indian companies keep blocs of laid-off H1-B workers in the United States so they can take many good jobs when the nation climbs out of the coronavirus hole.
There is much evidence that President Trump recognizes the sensitivities of this issue. On April 2, his deputies reversed a plan to import more H-2B blue-collar workers in the crisis. The sudden reversal came after an April 1 press conference where Trump dodged two questions about white-collar visa workers.
NASSCOM’s request to change the H-1B process creates extra problems for politicians.
The H-1B is the largest of the many visa programs — OPT, H4EAD, L-1, TN, CPT, E-3, B-1,  — which keep roughly one million Indian contract workers, plus more than 200,000 migrants from China and other countries, in a wide variety of white-collar jobs throughout the United States. Few of the H-1Bs are more skilled than American graduates, and most are rated as “Entry-Level” or “Qualified” workers in the H-1B process.
Roughly 100,000 new H-1B workers arrive each year. These contract workers have to go home after six years unless their U.S. employer nominates them for a green card.
CEOs like to tout payroll savings when they announce H-1B contracts to Wall Street stick-pickers. But the short-term savings are typically wiped out by lower productivity, lower innovation, higher training costs, and massive featherbedding among Indian contractors, say Americans who have helped import H1-B workers. CEOs ignore those long-term costs because they are principally trying to jack up stock values, said one person in an office which tracked the costs of H-1B workers.
But managers and human resources (HR) staff also like to import blocs of H-1Bs because they are too complacent to bother recruiting and managing independent and innovative American professionals, said other U.S. managers and tech workers. NASSCOM’s H-1Bs workers are an easy temptation for the MBAs who prefer to spend more weekend time on their boats, he said.


DoJ/EEOC do nothing as US & Indian execs trade US jobs to Indian #H1B workers, cutting Americans out of careers, homes & families.
This trade choked innovation in Silicon-V, slammed insurance & banking. 
#SenMikeLee & #S386 will expand it to healthcare http://bit.ly/2vIHAOp 

Lawsuit: Managers Violated Americans' Civil Rights by Hiring H-1B Workers



There are at least four sides to the huge H-1B program, which is used by U.S. CEOs to keep about 900,000 foreign graduates in the jobs needed by the sons and daughters of America’s class of college graduates.
On the first side, major U.S. companies — including the companies’ Indian and Chinese managers — hire many, many H-1B workers. These companies include Microsoft, Google, Intel, Cisco, Facebook, Amazon, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and various banks. These elite companies tend to pay their H-1B workers well and to hire the H-1Bs from U.S. universities via the little-known “Occupational Practical Training” program. In fact, many American technology grads say Indian hiring managers prefer to fill their offices with Indians, not Americans.
Secondly, a large number of U.S. firms import H-1Bs to provide services to other companies. These U.S. staffing firms include Ernst & Young, PWC, and Deloitte.
Third, the India-based U.S. and Indian firms in NASSCOM use the H-1B program to operate a vast ecosystem of large, small, and very small staffing companies that keep hundreds of thousands of H-1Bs in gig-worker contract jobs throughout the United States. These NASSCOM H-1Bs are usually used as gig workers to quickly grab and keep large and small software contracts from Fortune 500 companies in the insurance, banking, manufacturing, software, and other sectors. For example, Genpact is part of NASSCOM, but it was created by U.S. investors to bring Indian labor into U.S. workplaces, including Walmart finance centers.
Lastly, many U.S. companies each import small numbers of H-1Bs to avoid hiring young American graduates. These employers include architecturedentaldesign, media, therapy, and even fashion firms.


Govt data shows 1 million Indian contract-workers get white-collar jobs in tech, banking, health etc.
The Indian hiring ignores many EEOC laws & is expanding amid gov't & media silence.
It is a huge economic & career loss for US college grads.
#S368 #H1B http://bit.ly/2Sy3uw6 

CEOs Keep 1 Million Indian Graduates in U.S. Jobs, Legally



All of these companies get their H-1B workers by first declaring they are needed at particular work sites. The declarations were made in the Labor Condition Application (LCA) documents that are rubber-stamped by the Labor Department under laws that forbid anything more than cursory checks.
So any close review of the LCAs will expose massive fraud by India-based companies, said one former manager at an Indian-run company.
For example, if an American company signs a contract for an Indian company to supply four workers for a three-year project, the Indian company will submit an LCA to the Labor Department declaring that 104 H-1Bs are needed at the American company, he said.
The next year, the company uses the inflated LCA to ask the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for 100 extra H-1Bs. A few months later, it gets about 40 H-1Bs from DHS. Those 40 H-1Bs are kept in India until the Indian company wins other software management contracts, he said. “They build up their inventory [of H-1Bs], and once the [H-1B] person is in the country, they can move them around the country. They have a mobile workforce that lives in apartments to undercut American companies that have to have an employee from one site to another. ”
This predatory strategy has wrecked the labor market for American software professionals, just as China’s hidden subsidies help Chinese manufacturing companies to push American factory workers out of jobs, he said.
The Indian companies are so contemptuous of the LCA process that they hire Indian workers for $4 an hour to fill masses of fake LCA documents, he added.
But the LCA process is the political foundation of the H-1B program — because it allows the companies and the media to pretend that the government agrees that no Americans are available to take the H-1B jobs.
Despite its importance, the LCA process is very inflexible. “Our H-1B system simply does not contemplate this [mass shutdown] scenario that is happening right now,” immigration lawyer Charles Kuck told Breitbart News.
The LCAs do not give employers the needed flexibility to flip their H-1Bs between working at Fortune 500 offices to their home offices. This means the NASSCOM companies may end up violating their LCAs when their Fortune 500 clients down their offices detailed in the LCAs because of the coronavirus.
“In order to ‘work from home’ a new H-1B would have to be filed with a new employer,” Kuck said. “There is no way around this. AND, if their ‘home’ is not in the same MSA as their H-1B, they would also need a new LCA, and thus a new filing of an amended H-1B if the employee remains with the employer.”
“If an employee works from a home which is within commuting distance of the workplace, then there is no need to file an amendment,” sais a post by Cyrus Mehta, a very pro-migration immigration lawyer. But, he added, “if an employee works from a home which is NOT within commuting distance from the workplace, the employer should obtain a new LCA for that location and file an H-1B amendment,” Mehta said.
The phrase “a new LCA for that location and file an H-1B amendment” means that the NASSCOM companies to file new applications at both the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Labor Department has suggested it will relax the process.
A March 20 statement by the Labor Department says employers can move their workers home, providing they post a notice in the original workplace within 30 days:
Because OFLC [Office of Foreign Labor Certification at the Labor Department] acknowledges employers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic may experience various service disruptions, the notice will be considered timely when placed as soon as practical and no later than 30 calendar days after the worker begins work at the new work site locations. [Emphasis added]
Employers with an approved LCA may also move H-1B workers to unintended worksite locations outside of the area(s) of intended employment on the LCA using the short-term placement provisions. As required for all short-term placements, the employer’s placement must meet the requirements of 20 CFR 655.735.
But that apparent concession may be far too little for NASSCOM because the 20 CFR 655.735 rule says that the H-1Bs must be fired if they are kept at the alternative address for more than 60 days:
(2) Immediately terminate the placement of any H-1B nonimmigrant(s) who reaches the workday limit in an area of employment. No worker may exceed the workday limit within the one-year period specified in paragraph (d) of this section.
The Labor Department and DHS declined to answer questions from Breitbart News. But a department official provided this answer:
The Wage and Hour Division’s (WHD) enforcement of the labor provisions of the H-visa programs continues, and reflects our commitment to safeguard American jobs, level the playing field for law-abiding employers, and protect guest workers from being paid less than they are legally owed or otherwise working under substandard conditions.  Workers or employers who have questions, or would like to file complaints with the Division should call 1-866-487-9243 or visit https://www.dol.gov/whd/. They will be directed to the nearest WHD office for assistance.
NASSCOM’s lobbyists in Washington, DC, declined to respond to questions from Breitbart News.
The NASSCOM companies face a second big and expensive LCA-related problem — they are not allowed to stop paying their H-1B workers unless those workers have been formally laid-off.
But the NASSCOM companies do not want to lay off their H-1B workers because the law clearly says that laid-off workers must leave the United States in 60 days. If their workers are recognized as laid off, they exit the country and cannot be slotted back into their jobs as the economy recovers. But if those workers are not laid-off, the companies have to continue paying them as the rates stated in the LCA.
“The H-1B are REQUIRED, by law, to be paid there full wages, as listed on the LCA,” Kuck said, adding:
Any reduction in wages, in fact, makes the employer liable for the wage in a wage claim by the H-1B worker with the DOL. For an employer to reduce the wages of an H-1B (convert them to part-time), they have to file a new LCA, AND file an amendment with the USCIS, THEN they can reduce the wages go part-time (this can go very low, although how low, e.g. 2 hours, is unclear).
“An employer is not permitted to bench an H-1B worker for a temporary period due to economic hardships without risking liability for back wages and other draconian sanctions,” said Mehta. “If the employer decides to temporarily suspend employment, bench or furlough the employee, the required wage must still be paid notwithstanding the sudden economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Bloomberg Law reported:
“Employers are required to pay H-1B workers the wage offered on the LCA, and that includes having to pay them for any nonproductive periods,” said Marketa Lindt, partner at Sidley Austin LLP’s labor, employment and immigration practice in Chicago. “Obviously we’re in a different environment, but the regulations are the regulations,” said Lindt, who also serves as president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The NASSCOM companies can change their workers’ hour and pay by changing their LCAs, said Mehta. “Converting the employment from full time to part-time employment would be considered a material change as the employer must obtain a new LCA.”
Kuck says DHS can quickly solve the problem:
I think this [coronavirus shutdown] is more of a “we didn’t consider that scenario” kind of thing, rather than anything intentional. The fix is easy. Allow employers to Furlough H-1B workers WITHOUT accruing liability for their wages. Treat them the same as US workers. USCIS COULD issue an emergency reg on that tomorrow.
The third problem for the NASSCOM workforce is that fired H-1Bs must leave the country in 60 days, according to a January 2017 regulation.
The Times of India reported that NASSCOM as the labor department and DHS “for a 90-day grace period for professionals to depart the U.S. following expiration the H-1B [or] L-1 visas.”
NASSCOM’s push for a longer grace period is matched by a public petition for a 180-day grace period. “We request the government to temporarily extend the 60-Day grace period to 180 days and protect the H1B workers under these difficult times. Thank you!,” says the White House petition signed by almost 20,000 people. An Indian H-1B employer created the petition in New Jersey, and it says:
The Covid-19 situation is getting worse with massive lay-offs expected. The economic conditions may have a significant impact on H1B Workers.
Under regulations, H1B workers have a 60-Day grace period of unemployment time during each authorized validity period to stay in the USA legally. They must find new work within 60 days; otherwise, they have to leave the country. Most H1B workers are from India and can not travel home with children who are U.S Citizens as many nations announced an entry ban, including India.
H1B workers cater to the economy at large, mainly supporting the I.T Industry with high tax contributions.


H-1B contractors & fired visa-workers are lobbying Trump's admin so they can stay for 6 months to grab white-collar jobs in the coronavirus recovery.
US college grads lose out whenever complacent US execs. outsource hiring to India's labor brokers.
#H1Bhttps://bit.ly/3bCINWF 

India's Unemployed H-1B Workers Lobby White House to Stay in the U.S.



DHS declined to answer questions about the grace period.
But DHS officials are suggesting they may help the NASSCOM firms. A senior DHS official told an Indian reporter March 23:
Honestly, your H-1B telecommuting [working from home] question is a really good question that I have not been asked before, and that’s one I would want to check with USCIS before suggesting anything in any particular direction.  We do — we are supporting, across the department, steps for safer working environments in light of the coronavirus, so I would be expecting to see that extended to the terms and conditions enforced with respect to H-1B visas.  But having not dealt with that specific question before, I’d have to defer to USCIS on that.  But again, it’s the same agency making those decisions as I — my previous question, and for those of you who don’t know, I was the [position] of USCIS before I took on the role of the acting deputy secretary for Homeland Security.  So I’m very familiar with that work, and I think you can expect to have a very reasonable consideration from USCIS in all of these sort of circumstances that are only caused by the coronavirus. 
The current head of DHS, Chad Wolf, formerly served as a lobbyist for NASSCOM. Under his watch, DHS has continued the process to import another 85,000 H-1B workers into jobs, starting on October 1.
NASSCOM can use other loopholes in the complex immigration law to keep fired workers in the United States. “We have come across a few cases where people have lost their visa status and are advising them to apply for a B-1/B2 tourist visa which gets them six more months in the country legally,” Matthew Maiona, an immigration attorney at Boston-based Maiona Ward, told the Times of India.
The report by the Times of India included quotes from NASSCOM about European governments’ willingness to extend work permits for NASSCOM’s visa workers. “We are requesting for other operational waivers and proposing to the U.K. government to publish a web page including information for Indian nationals in the U.K.,” NASSCOM told the newspaper.
There is growing evidence on message boards, Twitter, and lawyers’ question-and-answer sites that many H-1Bs are being laid off by American and NASSCOM companies, alongside the American graduates who are being fired in the coronavirus crash.
But few or no U.S. companies or NASSCOM companies have announced that they are firing H-1B workers.
Instead, a review of online discussion boards shows many Indians who say they and their friends have been fired individually or in groups as large as 500, that they are being forced to take vacations, or that their 40-hour weeks are being cut to 32-hour weeks. In the Midwest, one major NASSCOM company has summarily fired the H-1Bs provided by its many Indian subcontractors, leaving those workers with no pay for their last three months of work, two sources told Breitbart News.
NASSCOM companies are trying to hide the mass layoffs, said another close observer of the H-1B economy. By hiding the layoffs, they can keep them in the United States to get new contracts and jobs when the recovery arrives, he said. “That’s what they want to do,” he told Breitbart News.
American professionals have organized to lobby against the H-1B program via the American Workers CoalitionU.S. TechWorkers, and ProUSworkers, and White Collar Workers of America.
The new TechsUnite.US site was created to help U.S. graduates anonymously collaborate while shielded by encryption.
In turn, these groups are backed up by a few sites that track the scale and location of the outsourcing industry in each legislator’s district. The sites include SAITJ.org and H1BFacts.com. Other sites document the conflicts created by diverse foreign business practices in the United States. The non-political MyVisaJobs.com site also provides much information about H-1B outsourcing and green card rewards in multiple industries.
Breitbart News has spoken to many Americans who have been sidelined by the H-1B program.
“Fiona” lives in Florida, and she earned two college degrees in the early 2000s after she left the real estate industry following the 2007 collapse. Since then, she has worked a series of contract jobs, most recently at a seven-month stint at an insurance company run by an imported workforce of H-1B workers from India. She said her job ended when she was forced out by Indian managers, in part, because of her excellent performance reviews embarrassed her Indian office peers.
She is in her 50s, has been unemployed for several months, and fears the Indian-dominated recruiting business will blackball her if she speaks on the record.
She told Breitbart News, “I’m not eligible for unemployment. So I have lived off my savings, and I’m living with my son. I’m still applying for jobs, but they’re very few and far between. I can’t relocate again because when they cut my contract job, I had to cut my lease off early, so now, my credit is bad. My lease history is bad. I can’t go and take the risks that I did before. I was getting ready to go and look for a minimum wage job until this coronavirus came here, you know. Come next month, you know what? I can’t pay my bills because I’ve gone for like eight months on my savings.”
She added, “To be honest with you, I have given up on American companies. I have given up on being able to be hired by America because I’m American, and Americans don’t matter. And I’m sorry I’m going to get a little bit emotional here … Americans don’t matter. I hear politicians, you know, saying, ‘Okay, you know what? We’re going to open our borders, and you can have free health …’ I don’t have health insurance. You know, Americans don’t matter. All that matters is foreign workers. All that matters is if the foreign individuals … I mean, it’s like we don’t matter. America doesn’t matter.”
In the 2016 election, Trump tried to win votes from college graduates who have been struck by the H-1B program. In March 2016, after much zig-zagging, Trump declared:
The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.
Trump has not fulfilled that campaign promise, said Lynn, adding, “We’ll know President Trump is doing his job when someone here on H-1B trains an American on his job after his visa has expired.”


US graduates are being fired by US companies that employ H-1B visa workers & H-1B subcontractors.
So far, there's nothing in the draft coronavirus $ bills to require companies which get taxpayer 
$s to reduce visa workers before firing Americans.#H1Bhttps://bit.ly/33IALIR 

U.S. Graduates Expect Mass Layoffs as Companies Keep Hiring H-1B Visa Workers



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Four Tech Giants Are Solidifying Their Domination of the Post-Coronavirus World


Photo: Getty Images
The only investment strategy, portfolio, or retirement planning any person needs is the following: Buy the stocks of firms that are unregulated monopolies and nothing else. I’ve followed this dictum for a decade, and it’s worked.
Over the last decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have compromised the immunities of the retail and media sectors. Spend has rushed toward digital, where Amazon takes one out of every three ecommerce dollars and Google and Facebook take two of three digital marketing dollars. However, within your portfolio of the Four, it’s fun to speculate who accretes or leaks value, relative to each other, as it might inform the future and provide some insight into general business strategy.
My online Strategy Sprint class is a breakdown of this formula.
Every hedge-fund manager I’ve spoken to in the last month has one static feature in their screens for alpha-dislocation: cash on balance sheet. So, speaking of cash, Google has almost enough to buy the skies, as in Boeing or Airbus. Apple and Google could partner to buy all cryptocurrencies — aren’t we all just fed up hearing about bitcoin and ethereum? — and every professional basketball team in the U.S. Bezos, worth $139 billion, who is in the midst of the mother of all midlife crises, could buy the top three soccer teams and the entire NFL and still have the cabbage to buy ViacomCBS (post-acquisition) and take his date to (Paramount) movie premieres in style, after purchasing Ferrari ($28 billion).
Apple
The iconic tech firm saw its stock recast in 2019, experiencing a near doubling of its price-to-earnings ratio. There’s likely been a flight to safety, and the iPhone continues to be the most profitable item in the history of business, commanding Ferrari-like margins with the production volumes of Toyota. In addition, the firm’s recurring revenue business (services) is now a healthy 18 percent of revenues.
However, it’s hard to imagine that the upgrade cycle for an item that will set you back one month’s household income in Eastern Europe doesn’t get delayed or extended. In addition, Apple’s opportunity in health care has been inflated. Stories of emergency services being alerted by an Apple Watch when someone collapses in Zumba make for great media but won’t translate to shareholder value.
The stock remains in a trading range of +/– 20 percent as it’s fully valued. The outlier here is if they announce a recurring revenue bundle.
Facebook/Google
Facebook and Google’s business will have the rebound pattern the president is hoping for the economy: a V. (The key word is “hoping.” It won’t happen.) Search terms and ads on Google and Facebook have plunged 20 percent in the last 30 days. The recovery will be equally as bloody on the way back up. The duopoly’s share of the digital-ad market is predicted at 61 percent in 2021.
In 2010, I was doing work with the Four Seasons. Great firm — nice people, Canadian (redundant). During the Great Recession, the luxury hotel brand had to cease all print advertising, as revenue per room had declined 25 percent. And a strange thing happened when demand returned: The absence of print marketing didn’t seem to make any difference. Multiply this phenomenon by a million and you have what will happen over the next six months. Thousands of the biggest advertisers globally are about to use this forced abstinence from broadcast media (with business down 30 to 50 percent) to kick the habit and never return.
The two largest radio firms, iHeartRadio and Cumulus Media, will likely be Chapter 11 (again) within 12 months. Radio advertising is projected to decline 14 percent in 2020. COVID-19 has a mortality rate of 4.1 percent in the U.S. (Note: This should decline dramatically as we get our act together on testing.) Among U.S. media firms, the death rate will be 10 to 20 percent. Firms ranging from Condé Nast to Viacom — including Vox Media — are furloughing/laying off people as Facebook and Google ramp up hiring. How do you identify the best people at News Corp. or Time Warner? Simple —they will be working at Google by June 1.
Even harder hit are the digital marketing firms that aren’t Facebook or Google. BuzzFeed and Yelp have seen display ads on-site decline 40 to 70 percent versus last year. Vox, HuffPost, and Vice will follow. Some will make it out. Some.
Google goes sideways to up. Facebook sideways to down, as every lie they’ve told is a debt to the truth and that debt is coming due. Libra is dead. And while Facebook should be the primary platform at the center of a vast state-sponsored virus-tracing effort, it is not. It’s no accident the social-media firm was excluded from Apple and Alphabet’s contact-tracing program.
Facebook used to sit with the cool kids at lunch, but word got out that the founder killed a dog, filmed it, and made a meme of it. Big tech is disarticulating, as one of these firms is not like the others. One of them is run by a sociopath whose fabric softener is to exploit his top executive’s gender, personal loss, and engagement as a likability shield to drive shareholder value.
Amazon
Amazon will be the first $2 trillion-value firm by the end of 2021. Whether it’s an explosion in streaming media, grocery home delivery, or the ultimate supply chain for essential goods, one firm stands alone on the Iron Throne. No company is adding more market share or revenues than the Seattle giant. Even among the Four, Amazon stands alone on the podium of medals awarded to firms whose revenues have increased during COVID-19.
Amazon Fresh orders are up 323 percent year-over-year as of March. The company hired 100,000 fulfillment-center and delivery workers in March, then another 75,000 in April. Its New York City employees increased 24 percent. Amazon is Ben Johnson, juiced up on the steroids of tax avoidance, government subsidies, flaccid antitrust, and cheap capital that make the firm a species no other retailer can compete with.
Amazon is not only delivering food to our doorstep but beginning to do what our government has been unable to do — test for COVID-19. Imagine Walmart with the largest cloud business, most innovative tech hardware (Alexa), and fastest-growing media business (AMG) with the potential to be the fastest-growing health-care firm in the world. Okay, no need to imagine … It’s Amazon.
Stalin said one death is a tragedy, millions a statistic. Big tech (even Facebook) has stepped up and filled the void created by a level of federal incompetence that, on a smaller scale, would be deemed involuntary manslaughter. The Four are being solid citizens, and their employees are demonstrating grit and courage (e.g., Amazon warehouse workers).
Unsurprisingly, big tech is using this cloud cover to lobby governors and legislators to delay and obfuscate regulation and antitrust.
The question we, and our elected officials, will face post-corona is: Are big-tech firms run by good people who have demonstrated admirable citizenship or are they a threat to the ecosystem and should be broken up? The answer is yes.


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