HIGH TECH GLOBAL MONSTERS - Apple Is Lobbying Congress to Weaken Bill Against Chinese Slavery

“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely staked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.

There is nothing unexpected about the emerging right-wing, pro-war, pro-Wall Street composition of the incoming Biden administration. Biden himself spent decades in Washington as a corrupt bag-man for wealthy interests in the state of Delaware, the legal headquarters of hundreds of thousands of corporations that take advantage of its business-friendly laws.

GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS: PARTY OF BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS and open BORDERS. I was reminded after reading that 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into Joe Biden’s campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat Trump in November.  Among the prominent are Jeff Skoll, of eBay who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million,  and Josh Bekenstein, of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.  STEVE McCANN

 SERVING THEIR RICH - If Biden and Harris win, the country will devolve to a kingdom of  state and regional duchies composed of  often semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor class, the clerisy (media scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and academic rent seekers who promote favored policies and shut out the dissenters), an impoverished, smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast layer of muzzled, docile poor serfs (ILLEGALS). CLARICE FELDMAN

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-minister-of-propaganda-neo.html

Report: Apple Is Lobbying Congress to Weaken Bill Against Chinese Slavery

NG HAN GUAN /Getty

LUCAS NOLAN

21 Nov 202039

3:23

Lobbyists for Silicon Valley tech giant Apple are reportedly attempting to weaken a new law aimed at preventing slave labor in China, the Washington Post revealed on Friday.

The Washington Post reported, citing two anonymous congressional staffers, that Apple lobbyists are working to dilute the effects of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would require U.S. companies to guarantee that they do no use slavery or forced labor from the mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang, where it is estimated that the Chinese government has placed as many as 3 million people into concentration camps.

Apple relies heavily on manufacturing in China and human rights reports have reportedly identified instances where Apple’s supply chain has been fed by Uyghur forced labor that evidence suggests is tantamount to slavery. The difference between forced labor and slavery in international law is that, in the former, the individuals being forced to work are treated as persons, rather than property, by the state.

China insists that its concentration camps are “vocational training centers” for underprivileged minorities.

A study published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in March also identified Apple as one of 83 companies around the world whose products are being manufactured in factories using Uyghur slaves, not necessarily in Xinjiang. While China initially built the camps in Xinjiang – where survivors say they endured communist indoctrination, torture, rape, slavery, and medical studies indicating trials for live organ harvesting – after intense human rights condemnations, the Communist Party began shipping Uyghur workers to factories nationwide. The ASPI study revealed government incentives to companies to hire Uyghur slaves.

The congressional staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Apple was one of many U.S. companies opposing the bill as it is written.

The staffers declined to detail the specific provisions that Apple was trying to have changed or removed as they feared providing that information would identify them to Apple. But both stated that they believed Apple was attempting to water down the bill.

Cathy Feingold, director of the international department for the AFL-CIO which supports the bill, stated: “What Apple would like is we all just sit and talk and not have any real consequences. They’re shocked because it’s the first time where there could be some actual effective enforceability.”

Apple spokesperson Josh Rosenstock said that the company “is dedicated to ensuring that everyone in our supply chain is treated with dignity and respect. We abhor forced labor and support the goals of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. We share the committee’s goal of eradicating forced labor and strengthening U.S. law, and we will continue working with them to achieve that.”

Rosenstock added that Apple this year “conducted a detailed investigation with our suppliers in China and found no evidence of forced labor on Apple production lines, and we are continuing to monitor this closely.”

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

Michelle Malkin: There Is NO American Worker Shortage

 

Earlier, by Michelle Malkin: A Day Without American Tech Workers

"We're full, our system's full, our country's full!" That was President Donald Trump last year at our southern border.

"Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families." That was Trump in January 2017 at his inaugural address.

"The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult... to earn a middle class wage." That was presidential candidate Trump in 2016.

Contrast those clarion "America First" statements with the apparent hysteria of Trump's current acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who was caught on tape telling a private audience of elites in England last week: "We are desperate—desperate—for more people. We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we've had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants."

Mulvaney reportedly went on to push for "expanding" merit- and employment-based immigration to fill all the high-skilled jobs that Americans purportedly aren't capable of filling. By how much, for how long, in which visa categories and under what conditions this "expansion" should happen, Mulvaney is not reported to have detailed. (He will be featured at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning. It would be nice if someone asked him to elaborate, wouldn't it?)

"Running out of people" is typical Beltway swamp talk from a big business lobbyist trafficking in open borders "Chicken Little" alarmism. Has Mulvaney opened a newspaper or browsed the internet in the last 10 years? How about the last week? Over a 48-hour period, I compiled a Twitter thread of more than 50 stories of tens of thousands of recent U.S. worker layoffs in tech and other high-skilled industries. Among the U.S. corporations and institutions responsible for laying off, replacing, offshoring, and outsourcing tens of thousands of American jobs:

Wayfair, TripAdvisor, LogMeIn, Inc., Zume Pizza, VMWare, Shutterfly, Intel, Comcast, Xilinx, 23andMe, NortonLifeLock, AT&T, Macy's, Walgreens, Uber, Lyft, UCSF Medical Center, Baptist Health, Sysco, WeWork, American Family Insurance, Tennessee Valley Authority, Amway, UPS subsidiary Coyote Logistics, Comcast, Lime, Bird, Unicorn, Getaround, Cerner, Oracle, Samsung US, Edmunds.com, Textron Aviation, Morgan Stanley, Spirit AeroSystems, Mozilla, UiPath, Plexus, Cisco, Ancestry.com, Clover Health, State Street Corporation, Anthem, Transamerica, Verizon, MassMutual, Disney, Carnival, Abbott Labs, EmblemHealth, Harley Davidson, Cargill, Eversource Energy, Best Buy, Southern California Edison and Qualcomm.

The most recent entry in my U.S. worker layoffs thread came in Monday from Expedia, which announced it is laying off 12% of its information technology workforce (roughly 3,000), including 500 employees at its Seattle headquarters. Tip of the iceberg. As leading American workers' employment attorney and Protect US Workers advocate Sara Blackwell (right) points out, "so many companies are able to conduct this awful business model under the radar." And they get away with it because it's legal, workers are silenced, and most Americans "just do not care because it does not yet touch them personally."

Do we "need more immigrants," as Mulvaney claims? Marie Larson, an American mom who founded the American Workers Coalition with Barbara Birch and Hilarie Gamm, told me: "I talk to Americans almost daily who are being discriminated against, who keep getting laid off by Indian managers, who have to train their foreign replacements to get the much-needed severance packages, who have to pull kids out of college because they can't afford it, even having to sell their houses. These are STEM workers, who got the 'right' degrees and did everything they were supposed to do, only to have our government turn their back and sell out to big businesses push for even more H-1Bs." Tech firms cut 64,166 American jobs in 2019, up 351% from 14,230 in 2018.

Are we so "desperate" for more bodies to "fuel economic growth?" Let's recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn't include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign "students" now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.

"We" ordinary Americans don't need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They've been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation's Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.

Remember: The only persistent tech worker shortage in America is a shortage of workers at the wage employers want to pay. Beltway swampers gnashing their teeth over barren American worker recruitment pools are full of it.

 

Michelle Malkin [Email her] is the author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin is also the author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies, ,Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs, and Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers.

Malkin is author of the book, "Open Borders, Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction," available directly from VDARE.com in hardcover. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.