Shara Mohtadi of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is funded by the donations of billionaire oligarch Michael R. Bloomberg, will sit on the Council on Environmental Quality. And no less than four individuals, serving in various capacities, are drawn from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-owned by Facebook oligarch Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos congratulates Biden as the
president-elect packs his transition teams with servants of the
corporate oligarchy
Amazon oligarch and COVID-19 profiteer Jeff Bezos, the world’s
richest man, congratulated president-elect Joe Biden following the declaration
four days after the November 3 vote that Biden had won the US presidential
election.
“Unity, empathy and decency are
not characteristics of a bygone era,” Bezos wrote on Instagram, congratulating
Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “By voting in record numbers, the
American people proved again that our democracy is strong.”
Jeff Bezos in
2019 (Image Credit: AP Photo/John Locher, File)
This sentiment was echoed on
November 7 by the Business Roundtable, including Bezos as well as the chief
executives of Apple, Cisco, Microsoft and Salesforce. The big business
organization issued a statement that said: “Business Roundtable congratulates
President-elect Biden on his election as 46th President of the United States.
We also congratulate Vice President-elect Harris on her historic accomplishment
as the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian descent to be elected
Vice President of the United States… We look forward to working with the
incoming Biden Administration and all federal and state policymakers.”
Last week, Biden’s transition
team posted the names and most recent employers of members of its agency review
teams on the website buildbackbetter.org. Given the composition of
these teams, it is easy to see why Bezos and his fellow oligarchs are in a
congratulatory mood.
The individuals who have been
appointed are listed alongside the company for which they most recently worked,
and organized into “teams” based on the government operations they are tasked
with reviewing, such as the departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, Labor,
State and Homeland Security.
The composition of these agency
review teams demonstrates the intersection, if not outright integration, of the
technology monopolies, academic aristocracy, beltway think tanks, trade union
bureaucracies, giant law firms and the military-intelligence apparatus of war
and repression at home and abroad.
Amazon will have not one, but
two seats on the transition teams. Tom Sullivan, Amazon’s director of
international tax planning, will sit on Biden’s Department of State team. In
addition to Sullivan, Mark Schwartz, an “enterprise strategist” for Amazon Web
Services, will serve on the extremely powerful Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) team. The OMB oversees the $5 trillion federal budget and exerts
influence across a broad range of federal regulatory frameworks.
In addition to figures from
Amazon, Nicole Isaac, senior director of North American policy at LinkedIn,
will sit on the Department of Treasury team. Brandon Belford from Lyft will
serve on the Office of Management and Budget team, along with Divya Kumaraiah
from Airbnb.
Shara Mohtadi of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is funded by the donations of billionaire oligarch Michael R. Bloomberg, will sit on the Council on Environmental Quality. And no less than four individuals, serving in various capacities, are drawn from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-owned by Facebook oligarch Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
Arun Venkataraman from Visa will sit on the team tasked with reviewing the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which will also review the US International Trade Commission and the US Trade and Development Agency. This team will also include Ted Dean from Dropbox.
The labor bureaucracies will
also have seats at the table, demonstrating their complete integration into the
apparatus of capitalist rule. Beth Antunez, Shital Shah and Marla
Ucelli-Kashyap of the American Federation of Teachers, together with Donna
Harris-Aikens of the National Education Association, will sit on the Department
of Education team.
The labor bureaucracies are
also represented by LaQuita Honeysucker from the United Food and Commercial
Workers International Union, who will be on the Department of Agriculture
review team, while Josh Nassar of the United Auto Workers will sit on the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau team.
Brad Markell of the AFL-CIO
will sit on the Department of Energy Team. His name appears right before that
of Trisha Miller from the venture capital firm Gates Ventures.
On the Department of Labor team
will be Jennifer Abruzzo of the Communications Workers of America, Dora Chen of
the Service Employees International Union, Jessica Chu of the Amalgamated
Transit Union International, Nadia Marin-Molina of the National Day Laborer
Organizing Network (NDLON), and Shaun O’Brien of the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees, among others.
The major academic
institutions represented on the list include Harvard Law School, the University
of Michigan Law School, New York University School of Law, Duke University,
Stanford University, Georgetown University and others. Major law firms and
consulting firms include Deloitte Consulting; DLA Piper; Orrick, Herrington
& Sutcliffe; Sidley Austin; Covington & Burling; and Latham &
Watkins.
The racial and identity
politics promoted by the Democratic Party did not fail to be reflected on the
list, with Bonnie Jenkins appointed to the Department of State team from an
organization titled Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security. Jenkins, a
nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, previously served as
the coordinator for threat reduction programs in the Obama administration’s
Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
The Department of Defense team
will be led by Kathy Hicks from the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), who will be joined by Melissa Dalton and Andrew Hunter, also
from the CSIS; Stacie Pettyjohn, Christine Wormuth and Terri Tanielian from the
RAND Corporation; Ely Ratner from the Center for a New American Security; and
Lisa Sawyer of JPMorgan Chase, among others.
The composition of Biden’s
agency review teams exposes and refutes all of the pseudo-left and opportunist
groups in the orbit of the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracies,
which have throughout the year attempted to persuade American workers that
Biden, the Democratic Party and the unions represented some sort of channel through
which they could advance their own independent interests.
The parade of lobbyists,
servants and agents of the capitalist class into the incoming Biden
administration prompted a defensive article in the New York Times on
Thursday, titled “Progressives Press Biden to Limit Corporate Influence in
Administration.”
The title of the article
essentially acknowledges that “corporate influence” (i.e., corruption) is
playing a pervasive role in the formation of the incoming administration, and
suggests “limits” on that influence.
The article concedes that “Mr.
Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a
vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm whose
secretive list of clients includes financial services, technology and
pharmaceutical companies.”
The Times then points to
the efforts of “progressive Democrats” who are advocating “for tighter ethics
rules.” This is nothing but a fig leaf for the otherwise naked domination of
the Democratic Party by the interests of the
military-intelligence-corporate-financial oligarchy.
The facts presented in
the Times article
themselves paint a devastating picture of how the so-called “left” wing of the
party is being shoved aside as the fat cats shoulder their way into the new
administration. In a joint letter sent Thursday, a number of organizations
associated with the so-called “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party
pleaded with Biden not to “nominate or hire corporate executives, lobbyists,
and prominent corporate consultants,” and to adopt “ethics” rules to limit
corruption.
These and other feeble efforts
by the “progressive Democrats” are being unceremoniously ignored. The Times itself was
compelled to acknowledge that “Mr. Biden has not always shared the left’s concerns
about lobbying.”
Tendencies like the Democratic
Socialists of America were used by the Democratic Party during the election
campaign to further the Democrats’ electoral prospects, but within days of the
vote they were tossed aside and roundly denounced for having supposedly cost
the Democrats votes and positions with their “radical” and “socialist”
rhetoric.
These “socialist” elements had
been promised “space” in a Biden administration, but they showed up after the
election only to find their “Green New Deal” and other promised reforms piled
up in trash bags by the curb.
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.
As vice
president, Biden was reportedly opposed even to the barebones rules against
corruption that were imposed during the Obama presidency. In the words of
the Times:
“When he was vice president under Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden bristled at the strict
lobbying rules, which he contended would deprive their nascent administration
of experienced talent.”
From the moment Biden secured a
lead in the voting results, the Democratic Party swung viciously to the right, attacking
“socialism” and the “left” in general. On a conference call with House
Democrats after the election, former CIA agent Abigail Spanberger, now a
representative from Virginia, shouted: “We need to not ever use the word
‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
While
the “socialists” have been escorted out of the back door, the front door has
been thrown open to corporate executives, lobbyists and consultants to staff
the new administration.
Despite
his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has
attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton,
Pennsylvania.
Big Tech and Big Law dominate
Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan administration
takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon
Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the
White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump
became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington
to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions
with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s
chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of
the “transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government
that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and
advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should
be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by
the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has
some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to
normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace
policy ideas well to the left of center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says
former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast
called “Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other
Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious
law firms and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking
executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington &
Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six
from the Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am
very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this
administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even
though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the
incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America
would not “pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden
presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s
transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely
disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan
Knight, whose
Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan
in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders
hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election,
Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent
contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP)
(Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two
dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold &
Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly
settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet
conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican
operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously
complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are
supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure
that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies
the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity,
one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams
were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy.
She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but
only as a secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency
review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for
comment.
One with a typically impressive
biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology
officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company,
CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service,
where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics
maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad
that there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term.
But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did
everything they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for
Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that
helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will
be a “junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been
ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to
be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency
review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to
Trump’s reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition
team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler,
the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a
doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business
Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico
who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials
throughout many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor
of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are
several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and
Treasury teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives
interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a
progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve
team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are
not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed
with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of
his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial
crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from
progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks.
There is not a single current executive
from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America
has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency
review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told
Yahoo News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that
Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is
going to be surprising to progressives in some ways and disappointing in
others, and the agency review teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During
the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s
foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate
America.
Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,”
says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like
Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington.
They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s
camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the
mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at
the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and
cronies loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of
people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as
you’re not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book,
Nicholas cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach
to government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their
stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury
Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than
a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that
bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The
coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase
populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or
perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now,
falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of
Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense
contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans
of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate
influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on
Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the
presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both an
anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties
Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury
transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between
former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those
who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials
had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the
corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not
seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock
by four years,” Weeks says.
For many progressives, Trump was a
singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but
rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire
communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities.
It doesn’t help matters that, today,
tech giants are distrusted by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that
were run out of Palo Alto garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad
companies of a century ago.
And like those companies, they know how
to use their influence. In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential
technology firms — Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government
affairs,” better known as lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may
have been a subtle warning to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law
of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the
Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel
at Uber. Jake Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.
The company recently won a major victory
in California with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal efforts
to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not contractors. That’s
exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Biden administration
must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon
Valley in 2017. They could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation
for free market capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty
word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely
stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers
technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser,
executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has
called, without much affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team
for the Office of Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly
from Silicon Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and
Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous
amount of power,” says Hauser, including in both how congressionally
appropriated money is doled out and how certain rules are implemented. Though
it had a supporting role in Trump’s
impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for
covert exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence
of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that
the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the
former Sanders adviser, recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.”
The head, in this case, is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long been a skeptic.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,”
Gray says. She reasons that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest
movement in American history” to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted
to do much for conservative causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New
Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be
made to hear the voices of progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough.
She points out that there is widespread support for progressive legislation
like the $15 minimum wage in Florida, even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small amounts
of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive
ideas are more popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop
screaming that reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed
to keep fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval
Office once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan
Ernst/Reuters
DO THE MATH! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL
BILLIONAIRES WANT OPEN BORDERS. ALL DEMOCRATS WANT GLOBALIST TO KEEP WAGES
DEPRESSED.
Analysis conducted last
year reveal that 71 percent of tech
workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech
industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50
percent foreign-born tech workers.
While America’s working and middle class
have been
subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of
cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million
mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country
annually — the billionaire class has experienced historic
salary gains." Sen. Josh Hawley
"This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing
us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of
millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our
communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
“Behind the ostensible government sits
enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no
responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul
the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first
task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Biden’s Chief of Staff Worked on Behalf of
Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
13 Nov 2020314
3:13
Democrat Joe Biden has chosen Ronald
Klain to be his chief of staff should he enter the White House in January.
Klain worked on behalf of Silicon Valley executives and their interests, which
include providing tech corporations with an endless supply of H-1B foreign visa
workers and more free trade.
Klain, who was made Biden’s incoming
chief of staff this week, served on the executive council of
TechNet — a firm that promotes the interests of Silicon Valley’s tech
corporations in Washington, D.C. Klain served on the council alongside executives from the Oracle Corporation,
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Google, Visa, Apple, and Microsoft.
TechNet, most recently, joined a lawsuit against President Trump’s reforms to the H-1B visa program that
sought to prioritize unemployed Americans for jobs rather than allowing
businesses to continue importing foreign workers.
TechNet is
one of the groups that has filed an amicus brief to oppose the new regulations
on H-1B visas. https://t.co/ofY4GJ2sVR
— U.S. Tech Workers (@USTechWorkers) November 12, 2020
Trump’s seeking to force businesses to
hire Americans over importing foreign visa workers is an affront to Silicon
Valley’s tech corporations, those represented by TechNet, who advocate for an
endless flow of H-1B foreign visa workers.
There are about 650,000 H-1B visa workers in the
U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off and forced to train their foreign
replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than
85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through
the H-1B visa program.
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered
that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley,
California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco,
Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by
the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.
TechNet’s listed immigration goals include allowing corporations to
dictate the annual level of legal immigration to the United States and the
elimination of per-country caps that would effectively let India and China monopolize the
U.S. green card system.
The group’s goals on trade are in direct
opposition to President Trump’s economic nationalist agenda that has imposed
tariffs on foreign imports from China, Canada, Europe, and other parts of the
globe.
TechNet’s trade goals include reducing “tariff and
non-tariff barriers to information, communications, and advanced energy
technology products, services, and investments” as well as “protections for the
free flow of data across borders…”
While Biden has vowed to flood the U.S. labor market with more
foreign workers to compete against Americans for jobs, he has shied away from
questions on whether he will eliminate tariffs on foreign imports that were
imposed by Trump. Such elimination of tariffs would be a boon to multinational
corporations that offshore their production and jobs overseas only to import
their products back into the U.S. market, often with no penalties for doing so.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart
News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Billionaires Back Claim That Only Amnesty
and Illegals Can Save America
Getty Images
13 Nov 2020800
5:54
The United States’ complex economy
cannot recover from the coronavirus crash without an amnesty for at least 11
million illegals, including the stoop labor in the fields, according to an
article that was written, posted, and touted by advocates for billionaires.
The pro-amnesty article said:
Our economic recovery from the pandemic
is entirely reliant on providing a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million
undocumented people currently living in the US. There’s no way forward without
doing right by the undocumented individuals who are keeping all Americans
alive as our country continues to combat the coronavirus crisis.
“It’s not just economic gibberish
— it is demeaning to Americans,” responded Mark Krikorian,
director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
He added, “I don’t even know if that’s the way they mean it because
they’re just lobbyists saying whatever they think is going to promote their issue. But it really does come across that way and,
to use the cliche: This is why you got Trump.”
In reality, prosperity for ordinary
Americans rose rapidly in Trump’s lower-migration economy, without any amnesty.
Bloomberg reported October 30:
In 2016, real median household income
was $62,898, just $257 above its level in 1999. Over the next three years it
grew almost $6,000, to $68,703. That’s perhaps why, despite the pandemic, 56% of U.S. voters polled last month said their families were
better off today than they were four years ago.
The pro-amnesty article’s author is Alida Garcia. She
works for Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group as a director of coalitions and
policy. Zuckerberg’s group was created to pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty
that would have transferred even more wealth from wage earners to investors. The founding members and donors include many wealthy investors,
such as Eric Schmidt, the former chief of Google, and Greg Penner, the chairman
of Walmart.
FWD.us is now chaired by David Plouffe, a Zuckerberg advisor who also seems to have played a
critical role in spiking urban turnout for Biden in several states.
FWD.us director Todd Schulte touted Garcia’s claim as a “really important OpEd.”
FWD.us supports multiple campaigns to
get cheap labor for investors. For example, the group funded the p.r. campaign that got the Supreme Court
to block Trump’s cancellation of President Barack Obama’s award of work permits to roughly 800,000 illegal migrants under the
“Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” amnesty.
The Garcia article was posted by the Milken Institute, run by Michael Milkin. He earned a fortune — plus
a 10-year jail sentence and a $600 million fine — while working on Wall
Street.
The Milken Institute also touts cheap-labor migration into the United States and Europe. For example, Garcia’s article calls for an economy powered by
immigrant workers and consumers, not by Americans, their children, and their
work:
We should transform our immigration
system fundamentally … Immigration can power the next century of American moral leadership,
not just economic leadership.
…
We need individuals to be able to come
to the US to contribute across a wide array of industries and skill levels,
helping to infuse our country with talent, creativity, and innovative energy
from all over the world.
The article comes as the billionaire
groups prepare a 2020 blitz to shove a cheap labor bill through the House and
Senate.
The push will likely showcase attractive
young illegals while hiding the economic transfer in complexity and push polls.
The lobbyists will also try to get their wealth-shifting measure through the
legislative via a series of complex and obscure bills that will likely be
ignored by the legacy media.
Garcia’s billionaire-boosted article is
“opportunism secure in the knowledge that they won’t be mocked by legacy media
figures … [so] they don’t realize when they verge into the preposterous,”
Krikorian said. He added, “The legacy elite shares their perspective so that
they’re not going to mock them the way they deserve to be mocked …. There’s
nobody at their shop or even anyone that they talk to or interact with that
would tell them, ‘This is comical; why don’t you dial it back just a little
bit?'”
But the article is also “a continuation
of the idea that Americans are inadequate … that without immigration, we can’t
function,” said Krikorian. It is “insulting to everybody who’s not an illegal
alien [to claim] that a vast continental nation with a third of a billion
people can’t function without a few million illegal immigrants.”
The idea is also embedded in the
establishment’s post-1950s insistence that the United States is only a “nation of immigrants,” instead of a nation of and for Americans.
Overall, open-ended migration is praised
by business and progressives partly because migrants help transfer massive wealth from American wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp
on labor-saving
technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled
people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange
labor in the
cities, impose tight
control and pay
cuts on American
professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine labor rights, and redirect progressive
journalists to
cheerlead for Wall
Street’s priorities and claims.
Progressives
romanticize stoop labor as vibrantly diverse agriculture.
That condescension is great for companies b/c it perfumes their $$-decision to
not buy labor-saving & clean machines.
Gov't should incentivize US mechanization over #H2a migration.https://t.co/tPbAhMaSKS
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) April 6, 2020
THE BIDEN AMNESTY
…or will it be continued non-enforcement? No matter, Wall
Street will write it!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/bidens-plan-to-fix-americas-jobless.html
THE BIDEN AMNESTY - Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine labor rights, and even redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities. NEIL MUNRO
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