Big Tech is Strangling Us
How ironic that the 1984 iconic advertisement that Apple used to introduce the Macintosh computer "played on imagery from George Orwell's 1984 novella [sic] presenting Apple as rebels fighting a technocratic elite. The spot certainly was a lot gloomier than the company’s previous commercials, that used Apple celebrity spokesman Dick Cavett." In truth, "there was nothing cuddly about the new Macintosh ad, which was firmly rooted in the burgeoning dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic."
Ostensibly the advertisement's intention was "to remove people’s fears of technology [.]" In fact, Apple claimed that they "wanted to democratize technology, telling people that the power was now literally in their hands.”
How things have changed as the tech giants have morphed into near-totalitarian giants controlling far too much of our lives. Like serfs, we bend to their will or are punished. Thus, Candace Owens is suspended from Twitter for challenging Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer while Facebook flags the Declaration of Independence as '"hate speech."
In 2016, Aaron Renn reported that both conservative and leftwing groups are pulled down at Twitter. In 2019 "YouTube blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they [were] breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech. The video-sharing website announced that it would remove material glorifying the Nazis from its platform in an attempt to stop people being radicalised. In the process however, it also deleted videos uploaded to help educate future generations about the risks of fascism."
Peter J. Hasson 's The Manipulators highlights how tech giants relish their coercive power against conservatives.
In 2018, Michael Cutler noted that Twitter has "now morphed into a means of thought control through the control of language." Thus, any discussion about immigration that does not pass the politically correct litmus test is censored and controlled.
Today our cell phones and other devices that apparently eavesdrop on us, are far more intrusive than Orwell could have envisioned.
Most recently, YouTube, a subsidiary of the technology giant Google, abused its power by censoring opinions criticizing the continuation of strict stay-at-home government mandates in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2017 Roger McNamee highlighted the fact that "the big Internet companies know more about you than you know about yourself, which gives them huge power to influence you, to persuade you to do things that serve their economic interests." Thus, in 2013 "a study found that average consumers check their smartphones 150 times a day. And that number has probably grown. People spend 50 minutes a day on Facebook. Other social apps such as Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter combine to take up still more time. Those companies maintain a profile on every user, which grows every time you like, share, search, shop or post a photo. Google also is analyzing credit card records of millions of people."
In academia, many colleges now mandate that instructors use a security system in order to log in to their classes, i.e. Okta, Duo. They use identity verification with multifactor authorizations. These cloud-based platforms are supposed to "protect users, data and applications from malicious hackers and data breaches." But with that vast array of information, who is watching the watchdogs?
Moreover, state and federal governments are now preparing to hire "contact tracers." Also known as "disease detectives," contact tracers notify people by phone, e-mail, or social media platforms [my emphasis] that they may have had "sustained contact" to someone who has the coronavirus. Senator Kristin Gillibrand introduced a $55 billion bill to cover the salaries of contact tracers and Michael Bloomberg is donating $10 million to get the tracing off the ground. Thus, "[a]n army of pandemic detectives will have to be recruited, trained and deployed in short order." Teachers are being recruited. AFT President Randi Weingarten asserts that the Trump administration has engaged in "conflicting guidance, bluster and lies" re: the pandemic. Given those who sponsor this program, is it prudent to inquire whether this information can eventually be used against Americans?
While many households use Amazon's Alexa, do they realize that it stores "query history meaning [it] knows everything from a consumer's shopping history, travel patterns and musical preferences?" Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders could never have imagined the power that technological giants now possess. Moreover, "[t]housands of Amazon workers are already listening to some Echoes in order to improve Alexa's comprehension of human speech."
In fact, "in modern life, privacy is no longer a given -- people are being tracked on their daily commute, at work, online, and when they're shopping. That's because data is valuable. In 2018, American companies spent an estimated $19 billion attaining and interpreting consumer data." The data is an "invisible supply chain that creates marketplaces out of behavioral data." Thus, "[w]hen someone has a digital conversation or makes a purchase, that's recorded. That record is shared with a third party, which can sell the data to another organization."
Incrementally our privacy is invaded. In fact, "[t]he day of losing privacy begins at night, because even in our sleep, we're likely to be providing data." Furthermore, with facial recognition devices, we are heading into a world where businesses and government know "potentially everywhere you've been, who you were with and what you were doing all of the time."
In addition, "operating within your own email inbox is no longer private. If you're applying for college, your email etiquette could be monitored. Universities in the US are using data, such as the length of time an email is open and whether links are clicked, to work out the level of 'demonstrated interest' from a possible new student."
Ever wonder why Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are free -- you are paying with your information. According to Forbes, "Facebook has 2 billion active users. Every minute, users upload 50,000 photos to Instagram, and send 500,000 tweets on Twitter. Everything you post could help build a more cohesive data profile of you."
Moreover, carrying a smartphone [is] like carrying a tracking device because Google Maps can remember where you go and save it to a Google Timeline.
Workplaces monitor employees' movements, their work rate on computers and their calendar data.
Gordon Chang has long been concerned with the '"digital totalitarianism in China which assigns every person a constantly updated score on observable behaviors." The score "is designed to control conduct by permitting the Communist Party the ability to administer punishments and hand out rewards." Lest one scoff that this could never happen here, consider that
corporations and governments are using technology to influence our behavior. Total tech is a term that describes devices and algorithms by which individuals forfeit their privacy and autonomy for the benefit of either themselves or some third party.
In 2019 Betsy McCaughey wrote that "Facebook was "imposing its own Silicon Valley brand of political correctness." Daniel Greenfield maintains that "[a] digital iron curtain descends over the internet" and the only way "to stop the rise of Big Brother is to break up Big Data." Otherwise, he predicts, "free speech on the web -- as we once knew it -- will be over within a decade."
Scott McKay asserts that "When Facebook and YouTube start restricting speech, they are taking an editorial position. They are not policing speech in order to provide a safe environment for their users; they are asserting that their point of view is the only valid one."
That makes them publishers and if they want to be publishers, they can be sued as one. It isn’t acceptable for monopolistic Big Tech actors to arbitrarily ban content they don’t like while acting to drive competitors from the scene, and whether that’s punished by the courts, antitrust laws, or federal regulation before the market can do its work, something has to give. If not, then we will find ourselves just like China before long, where only one opinion is allowed.
Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com
“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!
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!
*
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
*
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.
*
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.
*
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors
are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand
a huge DACA amnesty
*
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.
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."
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 Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, 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
Nation. U.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.
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.
A 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, Amazon, Facebook 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
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).
Report:
India’s H-1B Companies Ask Labor Department to Let Foreign Workers Stay amid
Crash
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
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 architecture, dental, design, 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
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.
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.”
“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
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 Coalition, U.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
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
EconomyImmigrationPoliticsEugene ScaliaH-1b visasIndiaLabor DepartmentNASSCOMOPTU.S-India
Outsourcing Economyvisa workers
.
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