FUCK JOE BIDEN!
THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY IS A SERVANT OF TECH BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS FOR BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS AND LA RAZA FOR 'CHEAP' LABOR ILLEGALS. MIDDLE AMERICA IS FUCKED WITH AN IRON POLE WHEN A FUCKING DEMOCRAT COMES INTO A ROOM!
BIDEN'S BIG BANKSTERS FOUGHT HARD AGAINST TWO YEARS OF 'FREE COLLEGE' AS THEY SUCK OFF BILLIONS FROM STUDEN DEBT.
MARK ZUCKERBERG FOUGHT AGAINST FREE EDUCATION BECAUSE HE AND JOE WANT TO IMPORT FOREIGNERS TO WORK IN TECH CHEAP. THESE PEOPLE GOT FREE EDUCATION AND KEEP WAGES HERE 'CHEAP'.
Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos—who, along with Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, paid zero in federal income taxes in recent years—went from $113 billion in net worth to $192 billion. Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, published an editorial Wednesday demanding that Democratic “progressives” give up their “dreams,” which “were never realistic” and “are now evaporating.” Instead, Bezos’s organ called for programs “on which people and businesses can rely,” i.e., programs approved by big business.
Biden accepts shreding of his social welfare/climate bill
The social welfare legislation touted by Bernie Sanders, House “progressives” and their pseudo-left supporters as proof that major reforms could be enacted through the Democratic Party has turned into an object lesson on precisely the opposite.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden held a series of closed-door meetings with congressional Democrats in which he announced that the price tag for his “Build Back Better” budget bill would be cut from $3.5 trillion over 10 years to between $1.75 trillion and $1.9 trillion. Even this drastically reduced figure depends on the sufferance of the most right-wing, unabashed lackeys of big business in the Democratic Party, particularly Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Weeks ago, Manchin declared that he would support only $1.5 trillion over 10 years and has since reiterated his opposition to any climate control measures at odds with the profit interests of the fossil fuel industry, as well as demands that any social welfare programs be means tested and include work requirements.
Manchin, a multi-millionaire coal company owner and recipient of millions in energy industry campaign donations, has been joined by Sinema, a former Green Party activist now lavishly funded by the finance industry. She has told lobbyists she opposes any increases in taxes on corporations or the wealthy and opposes the original bill’s provision for Medicare to negotiate reductions in drug prices with the pharmaceutical corporations.
Big Pharma has mobilized 1,500 lobbyists and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent Medicare from having the ability to negotiate drug prices.
According to the most recent Federal Election Commission reports in the third quarter, Manchin and Sinema together raised more than $400,000 from lobbyists and others in the influence industry as well as corporate and trade group political action committees. This is despite the fact that neither is running for reelection in 2022.
In all, Manchin raised nearly $1.6 million from July 1 to September 30, almost as much as he raised in the third quarter of 2018, when he was locked in a tight Senate race. This does not count the more than $200,000 raised by Manchin’s leadership PAC in July and August.
Sinema raised $1.1 million, including more than $125,000 from corporate and trade group PACs, lobbyists and others in the influence industry.
The gutted bill that Biden outlined on Tuesday, which Sanders and company are seeking to sell as “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people” since the New Deal, is far more Manchin’s legislation than Biden’s.
The justification given by Biden, Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and their fake left allies in the Democratic Socialists of America and similar organizations for taking orders from Manchin and Sinema is the need to secure all 50 Democratic votes in the Senate to pass the budget bill in the evenly divided chamber, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. The fact is, however, these politicians, and their right-wing counterparts in the House Democratic caucus, call the shots because they most directly express the ruthless policies of the corporate-financial elite.
The real authors of the Democrats’ social agenda, assuming the entire plan does not collapse in the coming days and weeks, are the corporate oligarchs who control both parties of American capitalism. They have no intention of ceding voluntarily to the demands of working people for decent wages, working conditions and living standards in the midst of a pandemic that has already killed, officially, nearly 750,000 people in the US. Nor are they prepared to accept any significant expansion of social programs.
Biden’s $3.5 trillion plan—itself a collection of half-measures, many involving new cash handouts and tax breaks for big business—would have barely scratched the surface of the social crisis devastating the population, and in no way challenge the colossal levels of social inequality and entrenched wealth of the ruling oligarchy. Indeed, as Biden has repeatedly said in his speeches pitching his plan as a “blue collar” agenda: “I’m a capitalist. I have no problem with people making millions and billions of dollars.”
According to press reports, Biden’s scaled back plan includes:
- Two free years of community college—eliminated
- Paid family leave to be cut from 12 weeks to as low as 4 weeks
- The child tax credit to be extended by only one year
- Inclusion of dental care under Medicare to be scaled back to an $800 voucher or eliminated; vision and hearing yet to be determined
- Medicare negotiations with Big Pharma to cut prescription drug prices doubtful
- Funding for elderly home care and public housing to be drastically slashed
- The Affordable Care Act to be extended for only three years
- Incentives and penalties to push utilities to switch from fossil fuel to clean energy—scrapped, along with proposals to replace the program with a carbon tax
- Modest increases in personal income tax rates for the wealthy, corporate tax rates and the capital gains tax—doubtful
- A program to monitor the bank accounts of the wealthy to spot tax evasion—drastically scaled back
One program that reportedly remains intact is universal preschool for three- and four-year-olds. That is transparently because the ruling class and both parties are determined to force more working class women into the workforce.
A program to address the urgent climate crisis—tragically demonstrated in devastating wildfires and floods fueled by global warming and the degradation of basic infrastructure—the poverty wages and sweatshop conditions facing workers, the gutting of public education, the decayed health care system, the lack of affordable and decent housing— merits, according to Biden and the Democrats, less than $2 trillion over 10 years.
This is less than $200 billion a year, while Biden and the Democrats support a military budget of $760 billion a year. The Federal Reserve spends $120 billion every month to prop up the stock market.
To add insult to injury, the Democrats’ gutting of their own bill in line with the demands of Wall Street coincides with a new report showing that US billionaires increased their collective wealth during the first 19 months of the pandemic by $2.1 trillion (an increase of 70 percent) —that is, more than the entire price tag over 10 years for Biden’s supposed new “New Deal. ”
Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos—who, along with Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, paid zero in federal income taxes in recent years—went from $113 billion in net worth to $192 billion. Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, published an editorial Wednesday demanding that Democratic “progressives” give up their “dreams,” which “were never realistic” and “are now evaporating.” Instead, Bezos’s organ called for programs “on which people and businesses can rely,” i.e., programs approved by big business.
The task now falls to Sanders and his “progressive” allies to sell this miserable bill to the public. On Tuesday, Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, told reporters, “I think we all still feel even more optimistic about getting to an agreement on a really transformational bill that will fundamentally lift people up.”
Sanders tweeted on Wednesday that the Build Back Better Agenda bill can “show working people that DEMOCRACY WORKS! A democracy which delivers for its people, the worst nightmare of the ruling class.”
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.
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.
Critics: Feds Side with Fortune 500 in War on U.S. Professional Class
Facebook has agreed to pay a tiny fine to close a federal investigation into alleged organized, persistent, and consistent discrimination against American graduates.
“Token fine, tip of the iceberg,” responded Jay Palmer, a former tech professional who now helps American and foreign white-collar workers file discrimination lawsuits.
“It’s not even a slap on the wrist” for Facebook, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “What the Department of Justice has said, whether they intended to say this or not, is that [anti-American] country of origin discrimination is fine …[because] if you get caught, the penalties assessed are de minimus,” he added.
“Everyone involved … knows that many, probably most employers, game the system to exclude qualified US workers from ever getting a shot at the open position,” tweeted Ron Hira, a professor at Howard University. The small fine and legal settlements do “nothing to fix the widespread scamming of the high-skilled immigration process,” he said.
The alleged discrimination was conducted while Facebook executives were hiring foreign visa workers for 2,600 permanent jobs that would provide them with green cards. If the Americans had won the jobs, many of Facebook’s foreign visa workers would have been sent back to their home countries.
A statement from the Department of Justice said:
The lawsuit alleged that, in contrast to its standard recruitment practices, Facebook used recruiting methods designed to deter U.S. workers from applying to certain positions, such as requiring applications to be submitted by mail only; refused to consider U.S. workers who applied to the positions; and hired only temporary visa holders.
The agency statement described the minor penalties to be paid by Facebook:
Facebook will pay a civil penalty of $4.75 million to the United States, pay up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of Facebook’s alleged discrimination, and train its employees on the anti-discrimination requirements of the [immigration law]. In addition, Facebook will be required to conduct more expansive advertising and recruitment for its job opportunities for all [visa worker] positions, accept electronic resumes or applications from all U.S. workers who apply, and take other steps to ensure that its recruitment for [visa worker] positions closely matches its standard recruitment practices.
The fine is a very small slice of the company’s value, and the lawsuit covered only cases from January 2018 to February 2019 — which is a very small share of jobs held by foreign workers at Facebook.
The penalty is one-tenth of the fine imposed on auto-developer Tesla for allowing racial discrimination against one of its employees.
And the federal agencies will not expand the investigation: “Other than the provisions included in this Agreement, IER shall not seek on behalf of the United States or any individuals any additional funds, injunctive, or other relief from Facebook based on the underlying allegations in the complaint.”
Facebook did not even have to admit legal wrongdoing. “This Agreement does not constitute and shall not be construed as an admission by Facebook of any act in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1324b or guilt or liability for any violation,” the settlement said.
The company will “continue our focus on hiring the best builders from both the US and around the world, and supporting our internal community of highly skilled visa holders who are seeking permanent residence,” a Facebook flack told media outlets.
The lawsuit was filed by President Donald Trump’s deputies amid the public pressure to live up to his pro-American campaign rhetoric.
Fortune 500 companies — and their many, many subcontractors — now employ more than 1 million imported contract workers in salaried jobs and in a pyramid of subcontractor jobs throughout the United States.
“This isn’t a few workers here or there,” Hira tweeted. “The scale and scope of harm to US workers is massive.”
“What we saw with Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “There is a broader push to foreignize all higher-skill jobs, so that companies can hire any foreigner they want, at any wage they want,” he said.
The discrimination is made possible by the federal government’s vast network of visa worker programs, including the H-1B, L-1, B-1/B-2, and Optional Practical Training programs. Those visa-worker programs allow U.S. companies and their subcontractors to hire foreign graduates with dangled promises of very valuable green cards.
These foreign contract workers are not immigrants. But the dangled cards are a huge incentive for them because they want to become immigrants, and to bring their families — and all of their future children — out of their home countries.
The executives are very eager to pay their workers with green cards, which are provided by government agencies. This outside payment allows the executives to cut payroll costs and inflate their Wall Street values by $25 billion for every $1 billion not paid to American graduates.
The resulting “green card workforce” is a labor force of indentured workers that is competing for jobs against the free-market population of American graduates. That must be an unfair fight because the Americans must be paid in dollars that would otherwise inflate the companies’ stock values, while the green-card workers are being paid in cheap legal documents provided by the federal government.
Many of those foreign workers are erroneously touted as “high-skilled.” But the vast majority are only mid-skilled workers from lower-grade colleges hired by software-sweatshops for routine software upkeep jobs in place of skilled, free-speaking American graduates. Very few of these imported workers hold O-1 “genius visas.”
Foreign-born-workers are a “green card workforce” and labor force of indentured workers competing for jobs against the free-market population of American graduates. (AFP)
“My experience with the people from [India] is that they have no basic [information technology] knowledge,” said Mary from central New Jersey, an immigrant software expert. “They will say they have all this experience [to get hired] and then try to learn on the job. If you ask them a question, they can’t answer you. So what is happening is that we’re training them … [even though] we have our jobs — and their jobs — to do.”
The structural discrimination against Americans occurs in many professional careers, not just in software.
For example, the Department of Justice launched its case when Facebook tried to discriminate against Americans seeking an arts director job at the huge company. Similarly, many Americans who want to work in banks, or as scientists, doctors or nurses, or as teachers and academics, lose their careers and wealth to the imported visa workers from China and different regions of India.
The discrimination is multi-level, and includes much ethnic or regional favoritism by imported Indian and Chinese hiring managers. For example, immigrant managers can hire many co-nationals once they get post-graduate degrees from U.S. universities, regardless of fraud or inferior academic records.
Similarly, the pipeline of foreign workers into U.S. companies encourages taxpayer-funded U.S. universities to help train and win jobs for fee-paying foreign graduates, rather to promising young people in their home state.
Moreover, foreign-born managers in Fortune 500 companies can fire Americans so they can privately sell the jobs to co-ethnics via transactions in their home country’s economy. Indian hiring managers will sell jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, one Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,” he said.
“Once you’ve created an Asian or an Indian [workplace] culture, American college students no longer have a chance of getting jobs in these companies,” said Palmer.
Indian high tech workers provide a ready and willing workforce for the U.S. market (AP)
The discrimination has a larger impact on black Americans and on women, many of who are ostracized in workplaces dominated by Indian and Chinese managers and workers. “They’re very clannish. … They will push Americans out and make a group of their own,” Mary said. “When they’re talking in their Indian language, I have to ask them, ‘Can you speak English?’” she said. “I’m an outsider to them,” she added.
The discrimination has compressed salaries for many American graduates, partly because rejected Americans flood back into other careers. This shift spikes the wage-cutting competition for the non-technical jobs sought by many other American graduates.
Dice.com collects data on technology workers’ salaries. In 2019, the site showed that U.S. tech workers’ wages had dropped in value from 2009 to 2018 because inflation had exceeded the wage gains. The salaries had risen from $78,845 in 2009 to $93,244 in 2018, slightly below the inflation rate.
The discrimination is economically damaging because it gives the top executives far more control over their workforces. For example, after many companies were caught operating an anti-employee cartel hiring system in the early 2000s, the executives decided to hire more of the compliant and no-rights foreign workers. This hiring shift was welcomed by executives because the foreign workers will not leave the company until they get their green cards after several years.
“This is calculated,” said Palmer, who works with possible plaintiffs for the Consumer Awareness Group. “This is all planned in boardrooms, authored by managers … This is designed to break the back of the professional class.”
“They don’t have power over American professionals — but they do have power over the H-1Bs,” Palmer said.
“It is class warfare,” said Lynn: “The goal is to displace Americans that corporate executives view as expensive and undeserving, and easily replaceable with foreign workers that are more pliant and less expensive.”
That C-suite warfare against graduates is damaging the United States, Lynn said, because “American professionals are the ones that bring the innovation, and they’re being pushed out of the workplace.”
This subservient foreign workforce reduces professional-style competition within each company, and technology competition within each industry sector. Armondo from Texas told Breitbart that Indian-managed workplaces destroy U.S. professionalism:
That’s the way they operate — they will go over your head and start sabotaging you. They are trying to do everything they can to keep their job. … They are under a lot of pressure and are limited on what jobs they can get because of the visa. … The Indian managers know they have inexperienced people who can’t do crap, but they don’t fire them … An Indian manager does not fire them even because he knows this guy has a family and is married and they are not going to throw an Indian on the street.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” an American professional told Breitbart. However, the rules are different in an office run by Indian managers, he said:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
“I saw this over and over at Intel,” he said. “God help you if you make the mistake of questioning somebody[‘s judgment in an Indian-run office] … everybody else rallies around [the person] and [claims to] fix the issue. So it’s like, it’s effing unbelievable. It’s the most frustrating thing.”
In turn, the reduced competition reduces innovation in many sectors where China’s government-backed companies — and their U.S.-trained workers — are making progress, for example, in 5G wireless gear, in artificial intelligence, and in quantum computing.
The reduced competition also ensures more consolidation among politically powerful companies. That consolidation can drive up prices, profits and stock values — so diverting potential wealth from other sectors of the economy or from heartland regions to the coastal states.
This political consolidation also reduces competition as upstart innovative companies can be quietly forced to sell out to the major companies.
It also gives the companies more political power in D.C. to pass laws that will enable more discrimination.
The foreign workers also create their own political lobbies — usually with cooperation from diplomats from their home country — to grow their numbers at the expense of American graduates.
The existence of the visa workers also gives federal and state government — and company CEOs — an excuse to avoid recognizing painful flaws in the education and training sectors.
Similarly, the flood of imported workers allows investors, CEOs, and legislators to ignore productivity problems in the healthcare sector and in the science sector. These lobbying groups have repeatedly stymied popular reforms of the visa worker laws, and a now pushing to expand the outsourcing process in the pending reconciliation bill.
The Fortune 500’s hiring strategy increasingly leaves the United States dependent on imported workers for core tasks, said Krikorian, adding:
It’s even worse than dependence on foreign sources of energy because we can always dig another hole and find more energy … Once [critical careers are built on foreign labor], you almost have to start from scratch to develop a domestic workforce in these technical and scientific fields … [and] what large scale immigration does is take away the incentive for business and educators and society in general to do what’s necessary to develop the staff for core jobs like this.
The economic damage will be difficult to stop, say advocates.
Multiple private lawsuits are raising the cost of discriminating against American graduates.
President Donald Trump promoted deep reforms of the green card workforce — but only in the last year of his presidency. Most — but not all — of those changes were quickly dropped by President Joe Biden’s deputies.
“It requires both some changes to the law that Congress has to do, as well as serious enforcement by the executive agencies, which we almost never see,” said Krikorian. “Do our leadership classes actually care about protecting American jobs, or is that something that, at most, they pay lip service to?”
But the media buries the problem because “most reporters do not understand that the issue is between the executives and the professionals,” said Palmer.
The fight is not primarily about immigration, he said. “This is a labor issue — this is about basically locking out college graduates, locking out the middle class.”
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
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.
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.
Biden’s Chief of Staff Worked on Behalf of Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas
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.
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