Tuesday, November 17, 2020

BARACK OBAMA - LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS WILL RESTORE WALL STREET AND EXPAND OPEN BORDERS AND OBAMAnomics FOR THE RICH

 

Barack Obama: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ‘Will Restore a Bunch of Norms’

US President Barack Obama(R together with Vice President Joe Biden addresses, for the first time publicly, the shock election of Donald Trump as his successor, on November 9, 2016 at the White House in Washington, DC.
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images
3:39

Former President Barack Obama said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) that people who voted for President Donald Trump may not have had “facts” because of their news sources and that he believes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will “restore a bunch of norms.”

In the interview, host Michel Martin asked Obama about the election but did not mention that it has not been officially certified.

“Let’s talk about the campaign,” Martin said. “How do you understand the election results? I mean, by that I mean, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win the White House, but Republicans make gains in the House.”

“And in fact, Republicans now control more state legislatures than at any point in U.S. history,” Martin said. “They control both legislative houses in 32 states.”

 “And of course, we are speaking at a time when there are more than 10 million COVID cases in the United States, 240,000 people have died,” Martin said. “This is as, just as we are speaking now. Yet 70 million people voted for the incumbent who presided over all this. So what do you thinks going on here? How do you understand it?”

“Look, I think there’s no doubt that the country is deeply divided right now,” Obama said. “And, you know, when I think back even to my own first presidential election in 2008, the country didn’t feel this divided, what some people have called the great sort in which you have a combination of a political, cultural, ideological, in some cases, religious and geographical divide that seems to be deeper than just differences in policy.”

“A lot of that I think has to do with changes in how people get information. I’ve spoken about this before, I write about this in my book,” Obama said. “If you watch Fox News, you perceive a different reality than if you read The New York Times and that didn’t use to be as stark because you had local newspapers and you had people overlapping in terms of where they got information.”

“But now partly because of social media and sort of the echo chamber, a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump do not believe that in fact COVID was mishandled, contrary to the facts that now you or I might assert, those aren’t the facts that they accept,” Obama said. “And I think that until we can start having a common baseline of facts from which to discuss the direction of the country, we’re going to continue to have some of these issues.”

“Now part of it is also the fact that the Republican Party — because you mentioned state legislatures — Democrats tend to now be primarily in metropolitan areas, not just cities, but surrounding suburbs, metro areas, and Republicans are spread out more in less densely populated rural areas,” Obama said. “That gives them a huge advantage automatically in the Senate. It gives them a big advantage with respect to state legislative races and even gives them some advantage in congressional races.”

“So, Joe Biden can win by 5 million votes in the popular vote, but because of how those votes are distributed, Democrats are going to be at a disadvantage,” Obama said. “All of which means that I am thrilled that Joe and Kamala have won.”

“I believe that they will restore a bunch of norms — respect for science, respect for facts, respect for rule of law that I think have been breached over the last four years — but some of the bigger challenges in bringing the country together, that’s going to be a project that goes beyond just one election,” Obama said.

Obama is making the rounds to promote his third memoir, A Promised Land.

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 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 BINDER

Democrat 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 peopleexploit 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 peopleexploit 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.