“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely staked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol , an online publication that covers technology.
There is nothing unexpected about the emerging right-wing, pro-war, pro-Wall Street composition of the incoming Biden administration. Biden himself spent decades in Washington as a corrupt bag-man for wealthy interests in the state of Delaware, the legal headquarters of hundreds of thousands of corporations that take advantage of its business-friendly laws.
A Homeless Village Is Growing on Apple’s Silicon Valley Property The Associated Press
LUCAS NOLAN
According to recent reports, a growing homeless encampment has been set up on dozens of acres of undeveloped land in the heart of Silicon Valley owned by tech giant Apple.
VICE News reports that despite Apple committing billions of dollars to fix California’s housing crisis, an encampment of homeless people living in RVs, shacks, and tents has taken over dozens of acres of undeveloped land owned by Apple in the center of Silicon Valley.
Between 30 to 100 homeless people have reportedly set up camp on the property owned by Apple in North San Jose. The area covers about 55 acres according to the local CBS affiliate KPIX . Some current residents of the site say that they feel they can be left alone there, despite the area’s proximity to PayPal’s corporate headquarters and other office buildings.
Before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, around 6,000 homeless people lived in San Jose with fewer than 1,000 beds available to them. It’s common for homeless people living outdoors and in vehicles across the Bay Area to be moved from place to place by security and police, those staying on the Apple property have largely been left alone according to Renee Corona who has lived in an RV on the property for nearly two years.
Corona, who receives disability payments but cannot afford to live in San Francisco where she was raised, stated: “This is an area where you’re secluded from the city. I don’t think a lot of people knew about this.” She added: “I’m grateful that they don’t kick us out. I just want to say thank you. They don’t bother us.”
San Jose City Council member David Cohen, whose district includes the property, told VICE News that his office is trying to schedule a meeting with Apple to discuss the site. “We’re setting up a meeting so that I can begin to talk to them about what we might be able to do to help the people who are living there, and to figure out some plan for offering services,” Cohen said.
Read more at VICE News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
U.S. Companies with ‘Made in China’ Products, ‘Optimistic’ About Joe Biden PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images
JOHN BINDER
20 Nov 2020 1,181
5:19
American companies that do business and make their products in China are, by a majority, “optimistic” about a Joe Biden presidency, a new survey reveals.
The American Chamber of Commerce in a Shanghai, China, survey asked 124 business executives their opinions on a Biden presidency, to which a majority, nearly 63 percent, said they are “much more optimistic” or “more optimistic” about their doing business in the Communist country with the former vice president in the White House.
Likewise, the survey found that business executives do not expect Biden to impose more tariffs on China-made products — as President Trump did with billions of dollars worth of goods against the wishes of corporate interests.
CNBC reports :
“The majority of our respondents look at it as a positive,” Ker Gibbs, president of AmCham Shanghai, told CNBC in a phone interview. “The Biden administration would be a positive to the stability of the environment, the stability of the relationship.” [Emphasis added]
…
Under a Biden administration, only 5.6% of AmCham Shanghai survey respondents expect more tariffs . Instead, 70.2% anticipate new U.S. leadership will work more with other countries to put pressure on trade relations with China. [Emphasis added]
In August, Biden seemingly claimed he would repeal Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. Later, his campaign aides walked the statement back, and he has since not been definitive on whether he plans to keep the tariffs or throw them out.
Already, the Business Roundtable, which represents some of the nation’s largest multinational corporations, is pushing Biden to ease the tariffs imposed on Chinese products by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal :
“Unwinding the tariffs, especially with China, shouldn’t be a unilateral act,” said Josh Bolten, the BRT’s chief executive . “It should be an opening to begin a serious negotiation that the Trump administration attempted but in many respects made difficult through overly aggressive measures.” [Emphasis added]
…
On Monday, former George W. Bush administration Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made a proposal similar to Mr. Bolten’s. “I would only remove existing tariffs when we have extracted a reciprocal and tangible benefit from China , met by defined benchmarks in a phased bilateral trade agreement,” he said at conference. [Emphasis added]
…
Myron Brilliant, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s executive vice president, added his voice to the rollback call on Tuesday. “We would hope that China would agree to the importance of further efforts on structural reforms unaddressed by the phase-one agreement,” he said in an interview, “and that the U.S. and China can find the political space to pull back tariffs that are currently in place.” [Emphasis added]
Biden has promised the opposite approach to China that Trump has successfully implemented for almost four years. Whereas Trump’s focus was on an “America First” bilateral trade policy with other nation-states, Biden is promising the multilateral approach that has formed the Washington, D.C., free trade consensus for decades.
Many Senate Republicans have suggested that they are behind a return to the multilateral approach with Biden. Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a report this week wherein they declared their support for Biden’s strategy, the Wall Street Journal reports :
“It is our populations—the U.S. and Europe—that built the world order of today, not China,” said Sen. Jim Risch, the chairman of the Senate committee, in an interview. “The world order that we have, based on democracy and based on the rule of law, is where this planet should go if it’s going to have a future.” [Emphasis added]
…
If Republicans retain control of the Senate, Mr. Risch will continue leading the chamber’s foreign-policy committee, which President-elect Joe Biden also chaired during his Senate career. The Idaho Republican said the report wasn’t timed with the election or presidential transition but that he would be willing to work with a Biden administration on confronting China with more help from Europe . [Emphasis added]
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden transition team, said: “President-elect Biden agrees that we should stand together with our allies and partners to press China’s government to curtail its economic, human rights, and other abuses. And he looks forward to working with both parties in Congress to realize that approach.” [Emphasis added]
Since 2001, U.S. free trade with China has eliminated at least 3.4 million American jobs. In 1985, before China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) and before the U.S. normalized trade relations with China, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled $6 billion. In 2019, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled more than $345 billion.
Biden supported China’s entering the WTO and normalizing U.S. trade relations with China.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Report: Apple Is Lobbying Congress to Weaken Bill Against Chinese Slavery NG HAN GUAN /Getty
LUCAS NOLAN
21 Nov 2020 39
3:23
Lobbyists for Silicon Valley tech giant Apple are reportedly attempting to weaken a new law aimed at preventing slave labor in China, the Washington Post revealed on Friday.
The Washington Post reported, citing two anonymous congressional staffers, that Apple lobbyists are working to dilute the effects of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would require U.S. companies to guarantee that they do no use slavery or forced labor from the mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang, where it is estimated that the Chinese government has placed as many as 3 million people into concentration camps.
Apple relies heavily on manufacturing in China and human rights reports have reportedly identified instances where Apple’s supply chain has been fed by Uyghur forced labor that evidence suggests is tantamount to slavery. The difference between forced labor and slavery in international law is that, in the former, the individuals being forced to work are treated as persons, rather than property, by the state.
China insists that its concentration camps are “vocational training centers” for underprivileged minorities.
A study published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in March also identified Apple as one of 83 companies around the world whose products are being manufactured in factories using Uyghur slaves, not necessarily in Xinjiang. While China initially built the camps in Xinjiang – where survivors say they endured communist indoctrination, torture, rape, slavery, and medical studies indicating trials for live organ harvesting – after intense human rights condemnations, the Communist Party began shipping Uyghur workers to factories nationwide. The ASPI study revealed government incentives to companies to hire Uyghur slaves.
The congressional staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Apple was one of many U.S. companies opposing the bill as it is written.
The staffers declined to detail the specific provisions that Apple was trying to have changed or removed as they feared providing that information would identify them to Apple. But both stated that they believed Apple was attempting to water down the bill.
Cathy Feingold, director of the international department for the AFL-CIO which supports the bill, stated: “What Apple would like is we all just sit and talk and not have any real consequences. They’re shocked because it’s the first time where there could be some actual effective enforceability.”
Apple spokesperson Josh Rosenstock said that the company “is dedicated to ensuring that everyone in our supply chain is treated with dignity and respect. We abhor forced labor and support the goals of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. We share the committee’s goal of eradicating forced labor and strengthening U.S. law, and we will continue working with them to achieve that.”
Rosenstock added that Apple this year “conducted a detailed investigation with our suppliers in China and found no evidence of forced labor on Apple production lines, and we are continuing to monitor this closely.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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
Michelle Malkin: There Is NO American Worker Shortage
Earlier, by Michelle Malkin: A Day Without American Tech Workers
" We're full, our system's full, our country's full! " That was President Donald Trump last year at our southern border.
"Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families." That was Trump in January 2017 at his inaugural address.
"The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult... to earn a middle class wage." That was presidential candidate Trump in 2016 .
Contrast those clarion "America First" statements with the apparent hysteria of Trump's current acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney , who was caught on tape telling a private audience of elites in England last week: "We are desperate—desperate—for more people. We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we've had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants."
Mulvaney reportedly went on to push for "expanding" merit- and employment-based immigration to fill all the high-skilled jobs that Americans purportedly aren't capable of filling. By how much, for how long, in which visa categories and under what conditions this "expansion" should happen, Mulvaney is not reported to have detailed. (He will be featured at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning. It would be nice if someone asked him to elaborate, wouldn't it?)
"Running out of people" is typical Beltway swamp talk from a big business lobbyist trafficking in open borders "Chicken Little" alarmism. Has Mulvaney opened a newspaper or browsed the internet in the last 10 years? How about the last week? Over a 48-hour period, I compiled a Twitter thread of more than 50 stories of tens of thousands of recent U.S. worker layoffs in tech and other high-skilled industries. Among the U.S. corporations and institutions responsible for laying off, replacing , offshoring, and outsourcing tens of thousands of American jobs:
Wayfair , TripAdvisor, LogMeIn, Inc., Zume Pizza, VMWare, Shutterfly, Intel, Comcast, Xilinx, 23andMe, NortonLifeLock, AT&T, Macy's, Walgreens , Uber , Lyft , UCSF Medical Center, Baptist Health, Sysco, WeWork , American Family Insurance, Tennessee Valley Authority, Amway, UPS subsidiary Coyote Logistics, Comcast, Lime, Bird, Unicorn, Getaround, Cerner, Oracle, Samsung US, Edmunds.com, Textron Aviation, Morgan Stanley, Spirit AeroSystems, Mozilla, UiPath, Plexus, Cisco, Ancestry.com, Clover Health, State Street Corporation, Anthem, Transamerica, Verizon , MassMutual, Disney , Carnival, Abbott Labs, EmblemHealth, Harley Davidson, Cargill, Eversource Energy, Best Buy, Southern California Edison and Qualcomm .
The most recent entry in my U.S. worker layoffs thread came in Monday from Expedia, which announced it is laying off 12% of its information technology workforce (roughly 3,000), including 500 employees at its Seattle headquarters. Tip of the iceberg. As leading American workers' employment attorney and Protect US Workers advocate Sara Blackwell (right) points out, "so many companies are able to conduct this awful business model under the radar." And they get away with it because it's legal, workers are silenced, and most Americans "just do not care because it does not yet touch them personally."
Do we " need more immigrants, " as Mulvaney claims? Marie Larson, an American mom who founded the American Workers Coalition with Barbara Birch and Hilarie Gamm, told me: "I talk to Americans almost daily who are being discriminated against, who keep getting laid off by Indian managers, who have to train their foreign replacements to get the much-needed severance packages, who have to pull kids out of college because they can't afford it, even having to sell their houses. These are STEM workers, who got the 'right' degrees and did everything they were supposed to do, only to have our government turn their back and sell out to big businesses push for even more H-1Bs." Tech firms cut 6 4,166 American jobs in 2019, up 351% from 14,230 in 2018.
Are we so "desperate" for more bodies to "fuel economic growth?" Let's recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B , H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn't include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign "students" now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows f oreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.
"We" ordinary Americans don't need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal ) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They've been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation's Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
Remember: The only persistent tech worker shortage in America is a shortage of workers at the wage employers want to pay. Beltway swampers gnashing their teeth over barren American worker recruitment pools are full of it.
Michelle Malkin [ Email her ] is the author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores . Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin is also the author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies, ,Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs, and Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers.
Malkin is author of the book, "Open Borders, Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction," available directly from VDARE.com in hardcover . To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com .
Apple CEO Tim Cook, the architect of the multinational corporation’s China outsourcing scheme, was one of the biggest proponents of the amnesty for 4.4 million illegal aliens while Big Agriculture donors lobbied lawmakers to pass the farmworker amnesty.
Exclusive–JD Vance: Border Crisis Is Result of Corporate Donor Control NBC/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
JOHN BINDER
19 Mar 2021 65
4:04
JD Vance, the author of the New York Times best-selling book-turned-movie Hillbilly Elegy , says the current crisis of illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico border is a result of corporate donor control over Washington, D.C., politicians.
During an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily , Vance told Breitbart News Editor in Chief Alex Marlow that the donor class has driven the nation’s illegal immigration crisis occurring at the southern border, where the Biden administration is releasing thousands of border crossers into the U.S. interior, often not tested for coronavirus.
LISTEN:
Breitbart · J.D. Vance – March 19, 2021
“There are two things I’ve noticed about the immigration debate that has just really bothered me. The first is that it’s often driven by donors, primarily Democratic donors, but unfortunately, donors on the right as well who want cheap labor,” Vance said:
I’ve heard them talk about this when they don’t think anybody’s listening … they want cheap labor and they don’t care what consequences follow for their own country so that they can get that cheap labor. [Emphasis added]
Secondly, Vance said the donor class has weaponized the immigration issue against American citizens — silencing those with the label “racist” for questioning the level of immigration that the U.S. should admit annually. A majority of Americans, 75 percent , want to reduce legal immigration levels below its current 1.2 million per year rate.
“The second thing is the way that they use the charge of racism to silence American citizens who just want to live in a safe country, in a country with good wages, in communities that don’t have a ton of heroin and meth,” Vance said:
I just find this so disgusting, it’s so vile because it takes something that is good about America, our compassion for our fellow citizens — that racism charge silences them for fear of offending people, for fear of coming across the wrong way , for fear of being painted as somebody who doesn’t care about the other folks who live in your country and it does it at the service of those corporate donors who just want cheap labor . [Emphasis added]
It’s just such a disgusting thing to take what’s best about the American people and the American citizen and turn it around on them so that they don’t push back against these corporate donor policies . [Emphasis added]
Vance said the current illegal immigration surge “is because our country is controlled by corporate donors of both parties, but especially right now on the left.”
“They have people in their ears who have a lot of money and who want cheap labor and who want a lot of illegal immigration,” Vance said of House and Senate Republicans who are advocating providing amnesty to illegal aliens at the moment.
“When you dangle the promise of amnesty, it invites millions of other people to come,” Vance said.
Federal immigration officials apprehended almost 100,000 border crossers in February, an increase of 170 percent compared to the same time last year. The total number of illegal aliens who successfully crossed the border, undetected, since October 2020 has surpassed 118,000, Breitbart News exclusively reported .
Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled House — with support from 30 House Republicans — passed two amnesty bills this week. One of the amnesties would put about 4.4 million illegal aliens on track for American citizenship while the other would provide green cards to up to 2.1 million illegal aliens claiming to have worked on farms.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, the architect of the multinational corporation’s China outsourcing scheme, was one of the biggest proponents of the amnesty for 4.4 million illegal aliens while Big Agriculture donors lobbied lawmakers to pass the farmworker amnesty.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
Apple CEO Tim Cook Boasts About His Social Justice Initiatives Matt Dunham/AP
LUCAS NOLAN
19 Mar 2021 148
3:54
In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted about his company’s social justice initiative amidst the coronavirus pandemic.
In a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal , Apple CEO Tim Cook reflects on the last year and the effect of the coronavirus pandemic, which he says was a year where “critical conversations about equity and systemic injustice attained both new urgency and a well-deserved central role in our national conversation.” Cook goes on to discuss how the virus affected the world, and how “structural discrimination” resulted in some people being affected more negatively than others. Cook writes:
In simple theory, a disease should affect all of us equally. But in plain fact, the opposite is true. We have all seen, in real time, how structural discrimination and obstacles to opportunity do their work in a crisis. In our communities, every burden—from rates of infection and care outcomes, to economic adversity, to the challenges of virtual learning when schools are closed—falls heaviest on those for whom true equity has always been farthest from reach. As someone who grew up during the civil-rights movement, it has been frustrating to see how much work is still to be done but heartening to see the degree to which people of good will have set aside comfort with the status quo to march and to demand something better.
Cook stated that Apple’s approach to times of crisis is asking “how can we help?” which has resulted in investments in social justice and racial equality initiatives. Cook states:
And it’s led us to undertake major new investments through our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. These projects include the Propel Center in Atlanta, which we’re helping to build in partnership with the country’s historically Black colleges and universities, to support the next generation of leaders of color in fields ranging from machine learning to app development, entrepreneurship to design; and our first Apple Developer Academy in the U.S., in downtown Detroit, home to more than 50,000 Black-owned businesses and no shortage of great ideas for the app economy.
Despite Cook’s dedication to social justice and racial equality, it appears that this dedication does not extend outside of America. It was reported last year that iPhone manufacturers in China were using forced labor from Uyghur Muslims held in Chinese concentration camps. Breitbart News reported at the time:
The Tech Transparency Project (TTP) is a non-profit watchdog group that has challenged claims by Western tech companies like Apple that their supply chains are completely free of forced labor. On Tuesday, TTP showed documents to the Washington Post that demonstrated thousands of Uyghurs were sent to work for Lens Technology, one of the oldest suppliers for Apple, Inc.
Apple consistently claims it has “zero tolerance for forced labor” and conducts vigorous reviews to ensure no Uyghur labor is used in its products, and repeated that denial in response to the Washington Post report, but TTP said its documents prove there are indeed thousands of Uyghurs working at Lens Technology plants.
“Our research shows that Apple’s use of forced labor in its supply chain goes far beyond what the company has acknowledged,” TTP director Katie Paul told the Washington Post.
“Apple claims to take extraordinary measures to monitor its supply chain for such problems, but the evidence we found was openly available on the Internet,” she added.
Read more at Breitbart News here , and read Cook’s full op-ed in the Washington Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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