Why I Left Facebook -- And Why You Should Too
Like millions of Americans, I have in recent days grown sick of Facebook. Like hundreds of thousands, I've abandoned it for Parler.
When I said goodbye to my friends on Facebook, they were all kind. Many said they'd miss me, and others offered advice. One told me she had glanced into Parler and had found it horrifying. But, she said, she was sure I had done my due diligence before signing on.
Indeed I had. Parler allows you to choose whose words you read and whose memes you chuckle at. I'm not a fan of outlandish conspiracy theories so I don't keep up with the Joneses -- Alex or Mother. I enjoy reading intelligent articles from all sides, so I follow the American Thinker and National Review on Parler. I'm a libertarian, so on Parler I also follow Reason and the Cato Institute. Because they haven’t yet signed on to Parler, I subscribed to the New Republic and Harpers. I don’t want to be trapped in a bubble of anyone’s making.
Problem solved.
Another pointed out that according to Wikipedia, “Parler has a significant user base of Trump supporters, conservatives, and Saudi nationalists, and posts often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories.”
That sounds to me a great deal like conversations in the real world, yet so far I've avoided falling prey to the emotional disorders that underlie many of the worst excesses of the left and the right. I still believe most people are good and kind, and I never call people fascists or communists, racists or baby-killers. The evidence I find on Facebook indicates strongly to me that doing so is emblematic of a larger unhinged hatred within, no matter which side you're on. And I happen to like people. I think some are dumb, because some are, and some are misguided, because many are, but that's okay. Sometimes I'm dumb and misguided. But at least I like people.
That fact -- the fact that I like people -- is what separates me from Facebook. It isn't the people I follow and engage with who are at issue. Not even the dumb or misguided ones. It's the children in San Francisco who are now determining what I should hear, read, and think.
Another friend wrote, “Oh, Mark, we will miss you. But that Zucker's failure to censure Bannon for calling for Fauci's beheading on FB may drive me off too.” My friend is a dyed-in-the-wool lefty and an academic. And a lovely, lovely woman. We just see this issue from a different perspective.
I don't want some Zucker like Zuckerberg determining for me that I shouldn't hear what Steve Bannon has to say regarding the appropriate proximity of Dr. Fauci's cranium and clavicles. I think allowing him to post this comment has the beneficial effect of reminding those who need reminding (yes, there are some) that Bannon is a particularly nasty carbuncle on the wrinkled bottom of American politics. Let it run.
One friend of mine recently commented that “Biden voters are idiots,” which earned her a month-long stay in Facebook jail. At most points in time this is nothing more than a comical anecdote, but my friend is deadly ill with advanced cancer and was using her Facebook account to communicate with her family and her several hundred friends. Among her missives was a series of requests for prayers.
Nevertheless, the children in San Francisco who decide these things determined calling Biden supporters idiots was simply too much. Those words could not be borne by others, some of whom may have been Biden supporters and others of whom may in fact be Biden-supporting idiots.
Ergo, she had to go.
The argumentum ad nauseum, of course, is that Facebook is a privately owned entity and as such is free to choose what it will publish and what it won't. That's not entirely true. Facebook, Twitter, Parler, MeWe, and everyone who posts unmonitored comments from the public enjoy special privileges not enjoyed by others on the web. A specific federal law, Section 230, provides immunity for platforms on the web that post comments and articles submitted by the public as long as they don't pick and choose. The only exceptions are those that are prima facie illegal (for example, promoting violence), though there is also a long history of judicial support for suppressing obscenity.
Facebook and Twitter are abusing this privilege by acting as publishers -- that is, they decide what will be published on their platform and what won't. That should negate the Section 230 protections, leaving them open to the same legal liabilities incurred by other publishers. If they allow stories to be published describing high-school graduate and recent multi-millionaire Nicholas Sandmann as a racist -- and a confrontational one at that -- they should be as liable to lawsuits as the Washington Post.
Parler promises to be hands-off, which has led many in the clueless media to declare it a hazard to American democracy, saying it will increase the likelihood of “bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Yes, this is very amusing given the now well-documented bubble in which virtually all of American's news organizations function. But it is also telling of exactly what is said and believed within that bubble: The people must be protected from certain thoughts. And that's our job.
This wouldn't be true even if they weren't delusional regarding their own intelligence and mental reach. (“What is a reporter? Someone who can become an expert in any field in an afternoon.”) But unfortunately, they are delusional, and they do regard themselves as gatekeepers. They are just like the children in California who decide what you must not hear and see on Facebook. After all, it's for your own good.
So Zuckerberg and his minions, the children of California, are not only making money from your private information, they are also putting you into a bubble of their making.
Let me say this: I've been on Facebook for more than a decade. I credit it with renewing old friendships I thought were lost to diverging lives, and for making many new friends. But this combination -- selling me to the highest bidder and treating me like a rat in a maze -- is simply too much. I will miss Facebook and the ready possibility of conversations with friends and family, but I'm gone. If you're looking for me I'm on Parler at @Mcouhig.
Mark Couhig is a retired reporter, editor and publisher. He now lives in Texas.
OLIGARCHY – BILLIONAIRES,
BANKSTERS AND BAILOUTS
Biden’s Chief of Staff
Worked on Behalf of Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry
players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that
covers technology.
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.
THE BILLIONAIRE
CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
"GOP estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight
to hide up to four blue/white-
collar cheap-labor programs in lame-duck DHS budget.
Donors are worried that
salaries are too damn high, & estb. media does
not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP
CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase
OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American
Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON
CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA
CRONIES, BIDEN CRONIES
Amazon WORKS FOR BIDEN, OR DOES HE WORK FOR JEFF BEZOS?
Walmart
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
Tech
Elites Endorse Joe Biden to Secure more Foreign Workers for U.S. Jobs
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
Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition
who are current or recent lobbyists.
“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.
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. ALEXANDER NAZARYAN
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. Alexander Nazaryan administration
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely staked
with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication
that covers technology.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
///
Tech Elites Endorse Joe Biden to Secure more Foreign
Workers for U.S. Jobs
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
Sold Out: How High-Tech
Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best
& Brightest
By
Michelle Malkin and John Miano
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.
Joe
Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
JOHN BINDERDemocrat presidential
candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that
have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors,
those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President
Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall
Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new
list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the
campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned
on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the
Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall
Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn
co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street
funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark
Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon
Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny
Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall,
Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert
Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff
Zients.
As Breitbart News
reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on
Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street
executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the
former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less
money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from
financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted
from Wall Street.
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.
In a post on Sunday, Biden
wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the
world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million
from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000
that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
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
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
Adios,
Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian
laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving
the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens,
now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15
MILLION ILLEAGLS). The Federation for American
Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW
ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT
MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education,
Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
Liberals
claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true.
It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute
only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6
billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg,
claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to
support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies 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 illegal aliens were
contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6
million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens
has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who
entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of
the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in
2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for
illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were
illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the
18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those
statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer,
they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown
administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes.
That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a
“sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the
border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US
Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will
emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights
and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either
form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing
Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect
our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to
attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that
cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor
Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With
over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt
compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the
DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University
of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for
illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations
all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers
hear about this program. I can’t afford college education
for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college
education.
…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
JOE BIDEN’S GLOBALIST AGENDA:
BANKSTERS, BAILOUTS and a BORDERLESS AMERICA
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-frames-his-globalist.html
That baleful presence of
George Soros, all over the Biden 'transition' team
Big Tech and
Wall Street, for sure, are getting their influence and power. But where
the mask is really off, revealing at last who he's really fronting for
is leftist billionaire George Soros. MONICA SHOWALTER
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