Big Tech, Koch Network Cheer Biden’s Amnesty to Flood U.S. Labor Market JOHN BINDER
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations are cheering on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would pack the United States labor market with more foreign visa workers for business to hire over American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
— Amazon Public Policy (@amazon_policy) February 18, 2021
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there
is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are
out of work today and hundreds of thousands of
U.S. graduates enter the labor market every
year looking for white-collar professional jobs
with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
Why Biden supports the unionization of the Amazon workforce
Jerry White , Joseph Kishore
3 March 2021
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On Sunday night, President Joe Biden issued a video statement fully backing the efforts of the Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionize workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Nearly 6,000 workers at the facility, which is located just outside of Birmingham, are currently voting on whether to join the RWDSU.
Biden clearly called on workers in Alabama to vote “yes” on the union drive, for which balloting concludes on March 29. “The National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say unions are allowed to exist,” he said. “It said we should encourage unions.”
Biden speaks at The Queen Theater, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021, in Wilmington, Del. [Credit: AP Photo/Matt Slocum]
He continued, “Today and over the next few days and weeks workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. This is vitally important—a vitally important choice—as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis, and the reckoning of race—what it reveals about the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”
Biden’s intervention is historically unprecedented. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law in 1935, the leaders of the newly organized industrial unions declared that “The president wants you to join a union.” But FDR never actually said that.
In this case, Biden gave no indication of impartiality, all but calling on workers to vote the union in and accusing Amazon of intimidation. Biden is putting the entire prestige of the White House behind the vote. He would not have done this unless he felt that the direct support of his administration was both necessary to ensure a “yes” vote in Bessemer and strategically important.
The very fact that Biden has intervened so forcefully exposes the claims that what is involved in the unionization campaign at Amazon has anything to do with the interests of Amazon workers. Biden’s entire career in the Senate, from 1973 to 2009, coincides with the abandonment by the Democratic Party of any program of social reform and its accommodation to “Reaganomics.”
Long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
In the 2020 elections, Biden won the Democratic Party nomination for president through the intervention of the party leadership on the basis of an explicit repudiation of any program of social reform. Biden was promoted as the right-wing alternative to Bernie Sanders.
Biden’s aggressive intervention on behalf of the unionization campaign at Amazon can only be interpreted as a strategic, and not merely tactical decision by a significant faction of the ruling class. What are the considerations motivating this policy?
First, the ruling class confronts an unprecedented crisis, which has been enormously intensified by the pandemic. As a result of the refusal of the ruling class to take the necessary measures to save lives, nearly 530,000 people have died from COVID-19 over the past year. The impact of mass death, combined with the disastrous social and economic situation, is having a profoundly radicalizing impact on the consciousness of workers and youth.
Trump has responded to this situation with the promotion of fascistic organizations that will be used as a spearhead against working class unrest. The Democrats are attempting to smother social opposition by utilizing the unions. This is combined with their relentless efforts to divide workers against each other through the promotion of the politics of racial and gender identity. Significantly, Biden framed his intervention at Amazon in racial terms, presenting unions as instruments for defending “especially Black and Brown workers.”
Second, the international situation is no less concerning to the ruling class, which is determined to maintain its global hegemonic position through the use of military force. The Biden administration is carrying out an increasingly confrontational policy toward Russia and, in particular, China. The logic of this policy leads to war. In the event of a major “great power conflict,” the pro-capitalist unions will be critical in promoting national chauvinism and suppressing the class struggle. War abroad requires a disciplined “labor movement” at home.
Biden’s intervention at Amazon is part of a broader strategy of promoting the unions and integrating them ever more directly into the state apparatus and corporate management. Prior to his inauguration in January, Biden pledged that he would be the most “pro-union” president ever.
In mid-November, shortly after the 2020 elections, Biden held a meeting with the leaders of all the major unions, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, along with corporate executives from General Motors, Microsoft, Target and other companies. Biden reportedly told the meeting that he is “a union guy,” but insisted “that’s not anti-business.” He added that “we’re in a pretty dark hole right now,” but “we [that is, the union executives, the corporate CEOs and the incoming Biden administration] all agree on common goals.”
The strategy Biden is pursuing is known as corporatism—that is, the integration of the government with the corporations and the unions on the basis of a defense of the capitalist system.
It has been decades since the AFL-CIO was associated in any way with the defense of workers’ interests against the corporations and the ruling class. Since the isolation and defeat of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981, the trade union movement has been completely integrated into the structures of corporate management. During the 1980s, the unions played a critical role in isolating and suppressing opposition to the ruling class counter-offensive spearheaded by the Reagan administration.
With the assistance of the unions, strike activity was almost entirely suppressed in the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century, facilitating an increase in social inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s.
In 2018, during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), a lawyer for AFSCME summed up the role of the unions by saying that the “agency fee”—the requirement that public service employees in some states pay the equivalent of dues even if they opt out of joining a union—“is the tradeoff for no strikes.” Without maintaining the financial security of the unions, he warned, “you can raise an untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”
The corporatist organizations like the AFL-CIO are still called “unions,” but their actual practice and role bear no relationship to the function traditionally associated with the term “union.” They are not workers’ organizations, but instruments of management and the state.
The ruling class, however, is extremely concerned with and sensitive to the growth of opposition in the working class, which has been concretized in the movement for rank-and-file committees, including among Amazon workers. The ruling class is, moreover, aware of the ability of workers in the US and internationally to utilize social media and other forms of communication to share information and organize outside of the control of the corporatist unions.
There is particular concern over the political radicalization of Amazon workers, who have become even more critical to the overall process of capitalist exploitation since the onset of the pandemic. The world’s fifth largest employer added 427,000 jobs in 2020, bringing its total to 1.3 million employees worldwide, including half a million in the US.
The promotion of the unions is aimed at countering the expanding movement of rank-and-file workers. It is aimed at subordinating workers to the array of laws that come into effect when the unions are established as the “sole legitimate” representative of the workers. In return, the union executives will be given access to the union dues that come from the institutionalization of these organizations in broader sections of industry.
The combination of aggressive backing by the government and anger and opposition among Amazon workers could produce a victory for the union drive in Bessemer. Whatever the outcome of the vote, the fight to establish and build rank-and-file committees must be developed and expanded. Workers cannot allow themselves to be disciplined by the pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist trade union apparatus.
This must be combined with a new political strategy to mobilize the working class in the US and internationally in the fight for socialist policies, including the expropriation of pandemic profiteers like Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and the transformation of Amazon and other logistics companies into public utilities, democratically controlled and collectively owned by the working class.
At its most fundamental level, the promotion of the unions by the ruling class is aimed at quarantining workers from socialism. The overriding fear of the ruling class is that the objective radicalization of the working class, intensified by the pandemic, will acquire a socialist leadership and political program. It is this fear that is behind Biden’s extraordinary intervention at Amazon.
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]
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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.
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