America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Thursday, July 30, 2020
AMERICA: NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!
Intel’s Stock Crashes as Visa Worker Population Rises
Investors lost $40 billion last week when Intel Corp. admitted a technical flaw has delayed a new generation of computer chips.
The company’s stock crashed 18 percent even though the company is a leading user of the visa worker pipelines that advocates say provide CEOs with “the best and brightest” foreign graduates.
But those pipelines should be shut down because they sideline American professionals, suppress meritocracy, and damage the U.S. technology sector, says Kevin Lynn, director of U.S. Tech Workers. Intel’s crash “seems to follow the trend of other companies that become dependent on visa workers,” he said. “Can we point directly and say [reliance on visa workers] is the cause? No, but it is indicative.”
On June 22, President Trump temporarily shut down a few of those pipelines, amid furious opposition from universities and corporate lobbyists. In response, Fortune 500 companies are pressuring administration officials to reopen the flows of “top tier talent” in January, despite massive unemployment in the U.S. economy.
Intel’s stock crashed July 24, shortly after CEO Bob Swan said, “We have identified a defect mode in our 7nm [seven nanometers] process that resulted in yield [production quality] degradation.”
“We’ve root-caused the issue and believe there are no fundamental roadblocks, but we have also invested in contingency plans to hedge against further schedule uncertainty,” he added. The contingency plan is to outsource some production from Intel’s chip-making plan to a Taiwan company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).
The response from Wall Street stock experts was brutal — even though the company also reported higher sales and larger profits.
“We view the roadmap missteps to be a stunning failure for a company once known for flawless execution, and could well represent the end of Intel’s computing dominance,” said Chris Caso, an analyst at Raymond James, according to a Bloomberg report.
“With the latest push out of process technology, we believe that Intel has zero-to-no chance of catching or surpassing TSMC at least for the next half-decade, if not ever,” Susquehanna analyst Chris Rolland said, according to Bloomberg.
Intel’s bad news comes after multiple other shocks.
Newly discovered hardware flaws seem to bedevil Intel every few months. This time it’s a flaw in Intel’s Converged Security and Management Engine’s mask ROM, a particularly nasty spot for a bug because it can’t be patched with a firmware update. “Because this vulnerability allows a compromise at the hardware level, it destroys the chain of trust for the platform as a whole,” wrote security firm Positive Technologies in a blog post announcing the issue. Intel argues that pulling off an attack would require local access, specialized gear, and a high level of skill, making it relatively impractical in the real world. Given the potential impact, though, it’s still a concerning flaw—one that affects every Intel CPU and chipset released in the last five years.
In July 2019, Intel sold its faltering smartphone business to Apple. ElectronicDesign.com reported:
Intel said on Thursday that it plans to sell the majority of its 5G smartphone modem business to Apple for $1 billion, washing its hands of a business that had been weighing it down. As part of the deal, around 2,200 employees from Intel will join Apple, which also agreed to acquire patents and other assets to help expand its effort to control all the major components inside its iPhone.
Intel is losing market share to Advanced Micro Devices. In late 2016, AMD held a 17.5 percent share of one major category of computer chips. By mid-2020, AMD had doubled its share to 35 percent, according to Statista.com.
Amid the bad and good news, Intel relies heavily on visa workers imported via the H-1B, L-1, and other pipelines.
But Intel also hires many foreign graduates via U.S. universities’ Practical Training programs. In 2018, for example, they at first hired 1,348 foreign graduates, including 368 on one-year work permits and 1,111 on three-year work permits. In 2017, the company hired 1,683 foreign graduates, including 613 on one-year work permits and 998 on three-year work permit permits.
The data suggests the company employs roughly 3,500 of these Practical Training foreign graduates.
These visa workers are supposed to leave after several years. But many foreign graduates jump from one pipeline to another so they can extend their stay up to 12 or more years.
Also, Intel nominates many of these foreign workers for green cards. Once nominated, foreign workers are allowed to stay in the United States indefinitely. But the nominated workers usually cannot leave their employers until they can get their green cards, often decades later. From 2017 to 2019, Intel nominated roughly 4,800 foreign workers for green cards.
This visa worker inflow is reshaping the company. The company’s 2016 diversity report said that Asians comprised 40 percent of the technical staff, up five points from 35 percent in 2014. The company has not released 2020 diversity data.
This workforce shift is widespread among Fortune 500 companies. Fortune 500 companies keep at least 1.3 million visa workers. Also, corporate bios show that former visa workers now serve as top leaders of Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM — and also Intel. For example, Intel’s’ chief computer architect was born in India, and Bangladeshi-born Omar Ishrak is chairman of Intel’s board.
Many Americans tell Breitbart some of the visa workers are very good.
But corporate executives have not shown imported visa workers are better than Americans, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
That is a really important question. Everyone assumes the foreign workers are either better and higher-performing than Americans, or that they are equal substitutes competing equally for the jobs. In fact, they may be imported because companies prefer to bring in workers who are valued because they will accept lower wages and be more compliant.
It remains to be seen if this is really good for these companies. If there is much ethnic nepotism in the hiring process, is that making them stronger companies? Or are they eventually going to experience a decline and fall?
Intel’s green card requests reveal some details about the company’s hiring of visa workers.
For example, the company sought green cards for only 45 people who arrived with O-1 “genius visas” which are given to people with a record of “Extraordinary Ability or Achievement.”
In contrast, 77 percent of the green card nomination went to foreigners with master’s degrees — and only 13 percent went to foreigners with PhDs. Ten percent went to people with bachelor’s degrees.
MyVisaJobs listed the universities where Intel mostly recruits “the best and brightest” foreign graduates:
Arizona State University (583); University Of Southern California (423); Portland State University (365); San Jose State University (197); The University Of Texas At Dallas (186); North Carolina State University (184); Texas A&M University (167); California State University, Sacramento (145); University Of Minnesota (143); Georgia Institute Of Technology (110).
The company also sought green cards for 89 spouses of H-1B and L-1 visa workers.
Intel’s press office did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.
The company tries to hide its growing number of foreign workers.
The company’s 2019 diversity report hides the numbers of Indian and Chinese employees under the category “Majority Population,” and does not differentiate between Americans and foreign-born employees.
“The white male and Adian male majority population continue to represent more than 90 percent of the senior technical roles,” said a report about diversity in 2017.
The 2016 diversity report, however, said Asians comprised 40 percent of the technical staff, up to five points from 35 percent in 2014. The “white” share fell from 52 percent, down five points to 47 percent during the same period. All other demographic groups remained stable at just 14 percent of the technical staff.
The number of Asians in technical jobs grew from 15,048 to 16,794 in 2016. Just 15 percent of non-technical jobs were held by 1,155 Asians in 2016.
Just 21.4 percent of the company’s 313 senior executives in 2014 were Asians. By late 2016, that number had risen to 23.5 percent of 364 jobs.
The numbers understate the role of foreign workers because Intel also employes many additional Indian visa workers via contracts with Indian staffing companies, including HCL and Infosys. OregonLive com reported in April 2019:
Information technology (IT) professionals don’t usually develop new technology but they play an essential role in managing a company’s internal systems. Their work is particularly important at tech companies such as Intel, which depend on IT workers to keep systems secure and running smoothly.
These outside staffing employees — and the roughly 3,500 Practical Training graduates – may not be included in the company’s diversity reports.
Intel’s 2016 report touted the company’s pro-diversity efforts while underplaying the growing share of technology jobs held by Asian workers:
Last year, Intel set an ambitious goal to be the first high technology company to reach full representation of women and underrepresented minorities in our U.S. workforce by 2020. We committed $300M to support this goal and accelerate diversity and inclusion.
Intel’s diversity reports commingle data about visa workers from Indian, China, and other Asian countries.
However, the MyVisaJobs.com site shows the company hires far more Indian visa workers that Chinese workers. For example, the site records the home countries of Intel employees who were nominated for green cards:
India (4989); China (355); Taiwan (111); Russia (102); Mexico (96); Canada (95); Bangladesh (81); Nigeria (64); South Korea (58); Costa Rica (57).
Indians comprised 83 percent of Intel’s 6,008 requests for green cards.
Many of these Indians are forced to wait many years for their green cards, essentially giving the company a growing workforce of bonded workers. The delay is caused by Fortune 500 companies that nominate many more Indians for green cards than can qualify each year.
The inflow of India's visa-workers creates a huge 'bonded labor' workforce that empowers Fortune 500 CEOs & shrivels professionalism, say US/India tech-professionals. "We’ve lost our competitive, innovative advantage because of it," says US manager. #H1Bhttps://t.co/EgkcLsf4Xm
These visa workers are particularly vulnerable because they cannot easily leave the company to seek new opportunities, and they cannot argue with their Indian managers or their U.S. executives for fear of being fired and losing their chance to become an American, said Lynn.
This enforced compliance — and the “bonded labor” — suppresses the meritocracy and diversity of American-style professionalism, said Lynn. In offices run by professional principles, “everyone can compete equally because there are rules to the game,” he said.
American professionals need to provide quality services to customers if they want to maintain their peer status and income. They are expected to openly argue the merits of technical proposals with their customers, their fellow professionals, and their own executives. If they disagree with their customer and employers, they are expected to quit and find another employer, perhaps at a higher salary.
But the roughly 1.3 million white collar visa workers face workplace pressures that are fundamentally different from the incentives that shape American professionals.
Visa workers have almost no workplace rights during their years in the United States. Even when they are skilled, they are bound to the hiring managers who have the legal power to cast them out of the United States and send them home to live in relative poverty. They cannot easily change jobs, partly because they want their employer to nominate them for the green card that will let them stay in the United States.
These circumstances ensure that visa workers — European, Indian, or Chinese — must go along with their hiring managers, especially if the hiring manager wants them to focus on less useful projects, to hide problems, or even pay kickbacks to the hiring managers.
But this workplace-rights problem is exacerbated when U.S. executives let Indian managers impose India’s workplace culture on their visa-worker subordinates, say Americans and immigrants.
That culture encourages Indian managers to sell jobs and promotions for cash and favors, and to hire people within their family and their ethnic networks. The culture also encourages the group to punish workers who reveal problems that embarrass the Indian group.
Many of Intel’s visa workers put their group interest above American employees, the duties of professionalism, and the company’s performance, a former Intel employee told Breitbart News.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” the American professional said, However, the rules are different in an office run by Indian managers, he said:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
“One of the things that got me in the biggest trouble with the Indians was when I found a bug,” he said. “It was clearly our device causing the problem,” he said, adding that he described the problem via a department email. The Indian manager “became unglued … screamed at me in a conference room and called me the worst engineer,” he said.
Why American grads get excluded from tech jobs: "As a manager, you want Indian guys … compliant, amenable, never-complaining Indian guys with an H-1B. And [then] you are basically getting the big bonuses as a vice-president."#H1Bhttps://t.co/URX7rB6nof
“I saw this over and over at Intel,” he said. “They’ll get somebody in [your department] and if you — God help you — if you make the mistake of questioning somebody[‘s judgment] … everybody else rallies around [the person] and [claims to] fix the issue. So it’s like, it’s effing unbelievable. It’s the most frustrating thing.”
U.S. managers allow the Indian managers to import their workplace culture in American companies, as long as deadlines and budgets are met, Americans tell Breitbart News.
A California state agency is recognizing the quiet spread of India’s ancient caste discrimination into America’s Fortune 500 professional workplaces.
“The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a federal lawsuit today under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … against Cisco Systems, Inc. (Cisco) and two managers for discrimination, harassment, and retaliation,” said a June 30 press release. The press release continued:
“The lawsuit alleges that managers at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters campus, which employs a predominantly South Asian workforce, harassed, discriminated, and retaliated against an engineer because he is Dalit Indian, a population once known as the “untouchables” under India’s centuries-old caste system.
The lawsuit alleges that Complainant was expected to accept a caste hierarchy within the workplace where he held the lowest status within a team of higher-caste colleagues, receiving less pay, fewer opportunities, and other inferior terms and conditions of employment because of his religion, ancestry, national origin/ethnicity, and race/color.”
U.S. managers are now exploiting the Indian workplace culture to impose a similar top-down hierarchy on American professionals, one U.S. software expert told Breitbart. Using the name, “Nathaniel from New Mexico,” he continued:
It is a culture in a lot of these [Fortune 500 Information Technology] shops where I work. That is because these [Indian] folks come in and they have their caste system, and upper management somehow has keyed into that, and the way that their H-1B [Indian-born] managers … treat their [H-1B] employees.
American upper managers think they can treat American employees the same way. American [professionals] know we speak our mind, we speak up when things are not right, we speak up when we think things are going good. But nowadays, if you speak out of turn, you’re [soon] filing for unemployment because they will find some nitpicking things about you to get you gone.
Intel’s employees praise and slam the company at anonymous ratings sites. “Great place to work,” said one current technical employee. But a former chip designer in Portland, Oregon, claimed in March 2020 that “Intel is nothing more than a political freak show. Managers brazenly hire their relatives and friends to bolster their own empires.”
Around 2015, “I would go into a room of 30 people, and 15 to 17 of them are from India, and then the rest of them are the American citizens,” the former Intel employee told Breitbart News. But, he added, “most of the managers are becoming Indian in there, and it is very hard for an American to get hired.”
“Americans are culturally oblivious to this idea that something so Third World would be in the United States,” said Jay Palmer, a consultant who helps India’s mistreated visa workers to sue U.S.-based corporations. “I’ve had so many Indians tell me it is an Indian Mafia — they use those words.”
“If you substitute favoritism for merit, your customers will substitute your competitors’ product for your product,” said Lynn. “This is the risk Intel is running.”
“What made Silicon Valley great? It was ideas generated by a professional population,” Lynn said, adding:
As these companies have matured, and gained huge market shares, they have moved for being innovative to monopolistic. They are no longer looking to solve problems … they’ve chosen to place quarterly returns over innovations, and they have adopted this employment-visa model because they are only looking at quarterly profits … Now they are hurting their long term viability by delivering flawed products.
The U.S. economy suffered its worst quarter ever, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic activity — shrank 32.9% during April, May and June, as America’s businesses ground to a halt in a desperate effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The numbers continue to paint a grim picture as another 1.43 million people filed for unemployment last week, according to the Labor Department’s latest findings.
The U.S. Economy Suffers Sharpest Downturn on Record
The U.S. economy shrank in the second quarter by the fastest rate since the government began keeping track of gross domestic product after World War II, as lockdowns aimed at curbing the coronavirus pandemic decimated economic activity and anti-police riots tore through many American cities.
Gross domestic product, or the value of all goods and services produced by the economy, contracted at a 32.9 percent seasonally adjusted annualized rate in the April through June three month period, according to the preliminary estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis published on Thursday. That marked the steepest drop on records stretching back to 1947 and compared with economists’ forecasts for a 35 percent decline in output.
The BEA reports the change in GDP on an annualized basis, which can exaggerate the impact of temporary and sudden shifts in the economy. Compared with both a year ago and with the first quarter of the year, GDP was down 9.5 percent.
The previous record decline on the standard, annualized basis was a 10 percent drop in the first quarter of 1958. The U.S. economy shrank at a 5 percent rate in the first three months of 2020.
Consumer spending crashed at an annualized rate of 34.6 percent in the quarter, led by a 43.5 percent annualized decline in spending on services. Consumer spending on goods fell at an annualized 11.3 percent. Private sector investment fell 49 percent, driven down by a 38.7 percent decline in residential investment, a 34.9 percent decline in commercial building investment, and a 37.7 percent decline in equipment investment.
Consumer spending on durable goods, which had been the worst hit segment of the economy in the early stages of the pandemic, declined a milder 1.1 percent.
In comparison to the year-ago period, the declines look less extreme. Consumer spending was down 10.7 percent. Spending on services dropped 14.7 percent. Spending on goods declined 1.8 percent. Private investment fell 17.9 percent.
Much of the economy was locked down during the second quarter, with only essential workers and services permitted to operate for work that could not be done from home. Americans were under instructions to stay home or social distance when in public. State reopenings required many businesses to operate at diminished capacity, limiting the speed of any rebound.
As well, businesses in cities across the U.S. found themselves under siege as protests turned into riots and looting. Although the total number of businesses that were damaged during the Black Lives Matter riots remains uncounted, that number certainly runs into the thousands.
In a separate report also released Thursday, the Department of Labor said that 1.43 million Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits last week, an increase of 12,000 from the week earlier. The virus and social distancing forced millions of employers to cut payrolls, throwing tens of millions of Americans out of work, as consumers slashed spending on travel, hotels, restaurants, and many other businesses. Yet as states have reopened their economies, employers have been hiring workers back at a record pace. An additional 4.8 million workers were added to payrolls in June and the unemployment rate fell to 11.1 percent.
The U.S. Census Bureau said in its latest weekly Household Pulse Survey that 51.1 percent of households experienced a loss of employment income in the week ended July 21, up from 48.3 percent four weeks ago.
Government relief efforts, however, gave a big boost to household income in the second quarter. Despite double-digit unemployment and the crash in consumer spending, personal income increased $1.39 trillion in the second quarter. The government said the increase in personal income was more than accounted for by an increase in government benefits. After-tax personal income increased $1.53 trillion, or 42.1 percent, in the second quarter. Real disposable personal income increased 44.9 percent.
Personal spending fell by $1.57 trillion. The contrast of rising income and falling spending drove up personal saving by $4.69 trillion in the second quarter. The personal saving rate—personal saving as a percentage of after tax personal income—was 25.7 percent in the second quarter, compared with 9.5 percent in the first quarter and 7.3 percent at the end of 2019.
Most analysts expect a sharp rebound in the current third quarter, covering the July through September period. Even still, the data is likely to show the economy contracted in 2020. So far the recovery has been less smooth than some analysts and many Trump administration officials expected. The housing sector has done well as the economy reopened but many other sectors, especially the labor market, have struggled or stalled.
Fed Sees Dim Economic Outlook as Pandemic Squeezes Economy
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve is expressing concern that the viral outbreak will act as a drag on the economy and hiring in coming months and that it plans to keep its benchmark short-term interest rate pegged near zero.
In a statement at the end of its policy-making meeting Wednesday, the Fed acknowledged that the economy has rebounded from the depths of March and April, when nearly all states closed down nonessential businesses. But it said the ongoing coronavirus pandemic “will weigh heavily on economic activity, employment and inflation.”
The Fed announced no new policies in its statement. The central bank said it will also continue to buy about $120 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds each month, which are intended to inject cash into financial markets and spur borrowing and spending.
Economists say the Fed has time to consider its next policy moves because short- and long-term rates remain historically ultra-low and aren’t restraining economic growth. Home sales have picked up after falling sharply in the spring. The housing rebound has been fueled by the lowest loan rates on record, with the average 30-year mortgage dipping below 3% this month for the first time in 50 years.
With the economy struggling just to grow, small businesses across the country in serious danger and unemployment very high at 11.1%, few investors expect the Fed to hike interest rates for perhaps years to come. After its previous meeting last month, the Fed had signaled that it expected to keep its key short-term rate near zero at least through 2022.
Beginning in March, the Fed has slashed its short-term rate, bought more than $2 trillion in Treasury and mortgage bonds and unveiled nine lending programs to try to keep credit flowing smoothly.
Since the Fed’s previous meeting in June, the pandemic’s threat to the economy has appeared to worsen. The number of laid-off workers applying for unemployment aid has exceeded 1 million for 18 straight weeks. Measures of credit card spending have declined. And companies that track small-business employment say the number of people at work has leveled off, far below pre-pandemic levels, after having risen in May and June.
Most analysts say they think the Fed’s next move will be to provide more specific guidance about the conditions it would need to see before raising its benchmark short-term interest rate from zero.
Economists call such an approach “forward guidance,” and the Fed used it extensively after the 2008-2009 recession. Some Fed watchers expect no rate increase until 2024 at the earliest given the bleak outlook for the economy and expectations of continued ultra-low inflation. But by providing more certainty for investors about when a rate hike may occur, forward guidance can help keep longer-term rates lower than they might otherwise be.
The Fed will likely provide such guidance at its next meeting in September, economists say.
According to the minutes of their June meeting, “various” Fed officials felt it would “be important in the coming months … to provide greater clarity” about the future path of rates.
One potential form of forward guidance would be for the Fed to announce that it won’t raise rates until annual inflation has reached or exceeded its target of 2% for a specific period. This would be intended to allow inflation to rise above 2%, to offset inflation that has fallen below that target nearly continuously since 2012. (Inflation is now running at just 0.5%, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge.)
In recent speeches and appearances, Fed policymakers have sounded largely pessimistic about the economy. Several, including Powell, warned in late May, as many states began allowing more businesses to reopen, that a resurgent virus could imperil any recovery.
Congress is in the early stages of negotiating an economic relief package that might extend several key support programs, such as an expiring unemployment benefit that is now paying out $600 a week. That benefit will likely be reduced in any final legislation.
For now, the two parties are far apart, and the federal jobless benefit will likely lapse for about 30 million people who have been unemployed for several weeks. That would likely slow consumer spending and weaken the economy.
Susan Rice: 150,000 Dead Americans Is on Trump’s ‘Gross Mishandling of This Pandemic’
Wednesday on ABC’s “The View,” former Obama administration National Security Advisor Susan Rice said President Donald Trump was to blame for all the Americas who lost their lives in the coronavirus pandemic.
Rice said, “Anybody who knew anything about national security, global health, understood that a pandemic was inevitable. I write about it in my book that we were just talking about briefly at the outset. We prepared the incoming administration with a pandemic for dummies playbook. So the fault here, the tragic loss of 150,000 Americans and counting is on Donald Trump and his gross mishandling of this pandemic. He said it would go away. He likened it to the flu. He said, you know, that it would be fine to reopen our states prematurely. He’s encouraged kids to go back to school in communities where the virus is raging.”
She added, “Every step of the way Donald Trump has put his own personal political interests ahead of the health and well-being and the economic security of Americans. That is why this tragedy has been as bad as it has been, and if anybody has any doubt about that, look at many other competent countries in the rest of the world. In Europe, in Asia and elsewhere that have handled this in such a way that their kids are going back to school, their economies are reopening, and the numbers continue to go down. That is not what’s happening here.”
No comments:
Post a Comment