Democrats want to subject tech companies to mandatory "racial equity audits" conducted by their political allies, a move which could cement the party's control of Silicon Valley.
A small group of organizations with close ties to Democratic politicians and progressive donors conducts the majority of these audits, which advocates say are needed to promote racial justice. But in practice, equity auditors often push companies to hire more left-wing activists and former Democratic party officials, often from the auditing organizations themselves. The audits also call for the abolition of standards of "merit" and the ability for a special executive to veto any company project.
Racial equity audits are the chief service offered by "diversity, equity, and inclusion" consultants, a cottage industry connected by a revolving door of Democratic staffers and funded by liberal donors. Equity auditors have made a killing from school districts that pay handsomely for consultants to revamp curricula, the Washington Free Beacon has reported . Now, racial equity auditors are setting their sights on corporate America.
Democratic officials have called for audits of major companies. One proposal from House Democrats would fine companies $20,000 a day for not completing biennial, independent "racial equity audits." In June, five Democratic senators called on Google parent company Alphabet to conduct an audit. The Democratic letter cited Color of Change, a left-wing nonprofit pushing for audits.
Last week, Color of Change president Rashad Robinson was invited to testify to Congress and called for "independent auditors" to vet new products from tech companies before they’re released. Robinson did not mention that the "independent auditors" are closely affiliated with Color of Change.
In that hearing, Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) said Alphabet should "work with civil rights groups who have developed a framework to guide tech companies on how to conduct racial equity audits."
Booker's call appears to be a veiled reference to Color of Change, which released a "tech framework " explaining how companies should conduct audits. The framework calls for the destruction of an "objective definition of merit" in order to "attract Black talent." It also requires that every tech company employ an executive with power to veto any product they believe has a disparate effect on black users. Among other powers, the executive should have "hiring and firing power, power over promotions, and power over the flow of people, product, and money."
Color of Change also calls on tech companies to evaluate every employee in "anti-discrimination accountability systems" in performance reviews. According to Color of Change, tech companies should be required to avoid the use of any dataset that "is the product of real-world prejudice or further perpetuates discrimination," a vague definition that could be used to shut down almost any machine-learning research.
Beyond "hiring underrepresented groups," says Color of Change, organizations need to increase the "awareness" of all employees through "comprehensive racial justice trainings and initiatives." These trainings from outside groups will create "a critical mass of employees that are aware of the origins and effects of white supremacy and anti-Blackness across all vertical and horizontal work streams."
Color of Change has already succeeded in using racial equity audits to shape big tech policy. In 2018, it successfully pushed Facebook into completing an audit that called for more restrictions on Trump's posts. Color of Change itself pushed for Trump to be permanently banned from the platform. After the audit was released, Facebook hired an Obama administration Justice Department official to lead the company's civil rights strategy.
The audits fit within a broader push from Biden administration officials to promote racial justice goals in government policy. The Securities and Exchange Commission is pushing companies to include audit proposals from shareholders in their proxy statements. Federal Trade Commissioner Kelly Slaughter has argued her department has a mandate to tackle "structural and systemic racism."
Democratic officials and lawmakers have close personal and professional relationships with activist auditors. Laura Murphy, who pioneered corporate racial equity audits, was invited to conduct her first audit in 2016 by Vanita Gupta, a close friend who now serves as associate attorney general.
Before joining the Biden Justice Department, Gupta led the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a nonprofit that has called for tech companies to "reduce online activities and disinformation" that harm minority groups. The conference commissioned a report by Murphy on "Key Elements of a Civil Rights Audit." That report received input from powerful liberal groups, including the ACLU, Color of Change, Human Rights Campaign, NAACP, SEIU, and Voto Latino.
Color of Change is one of the most prominent members of Democracy Alliance, a network largely funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros. It also partners with two other Soros-funded groups, SOC Investment Group and the SEIU, to pressure public companies to comply with audits.
Supporters say racial equity audits are also good for business. Ford Foundation president Darren Walker claims audits can help "the nation’s most successful businesses to become better businesses," and that implementing the recommendations of audits could increase the United States' GDP by up to 20 percent.
The pressure campaigns on major companies have already paid off. Airbnb, Facebook, and Starbucks all conducted audits in the last three years. BlackRock is conducting one, and Citi announced its commitment to "becoming an antiracist institution" and retained Covington & Burling for a racial equity audit after pressure from SOC Investment Group. And Amazon and Facebook have already hired former Democratic officials for senior roles.
Rep. Banks Introduces GOP Bill to Curb Fortune 500’s Use of Visa Workers Aijaz Rahi/AP Photo 7:32
GOP centrists in the House have introduced legislation to shut down the visa worker pipelines which stall innovation by feeding hundreds of thousands of subservient foreign graduates into the Fortune 500 careers needed by U.S. professionals.
“Big Tech is setting aside some of the most lucrative and valuable career opportunities in America and giving them exclusively to foreign guest workers,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who chairs the conservative Republican Study Committee. He continued:
They’re cutting out Americans to save a few bucks. It’s domestic outsourcing. This shocking disregard for American workers and their role in our nation’s future is unpatriotic. We must fix Big Tech’s incentives, so they begin putting Americans first.
The American Tech Workforce Act would end President George W. Bush’s “Optional Practical Training” (OPT) pipeline, and curb the similar H-1B program.
The two programs keep roughly 1 million foreign graduates, mostly Indians, in U.S. white-collar jobs. This imported workforce shoves at least one million Americans out of upwardly mobile careers, decent homes, and security for their families.
The pro-American bill will be opposed by business groups, universities, and by many Republicans and Democrats. Already, top Democrats have included a huge expansion of the visa worker programs in their Build Back Better bill.
But the visa programs are so unpopular that even President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputy has called for reforms .
However, the donor-dependent GOP leadership prefers to downplay the pocketbook damage caused by migration and to instead focus public attention on border chaos. This silence continues despite the GOP’s growing need to win more swing-voting suburban Americans, many of whom are losing careers and homes to the Fortune 500’s visa workers.
The Banks bill is backed by several immigration reform groups.
“The American Tech Workforce Act of 2021 would end OPT and put American workers and the rule of law first,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations at NumbersUSA. She continued:
Chairman Banks’ legislation would help ensure that Big Tech companies can no longer use the H-1B program as a cheaper alternative to hiring American workers, which would also protect foreign workers who are too often exploited by unscrupulous employers. This bill is an opportunity for all Representatives to make clear that they stand with American workers.
The first wave of co-sponsors for the bill include Reps. Mary E. Miller (R-IL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Eric Crawford (r-AR), Steven M. Palazzo (R-MS), Kevin Hern (R-OK), Austin Scott (R-GA), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Dan Meuser (R-PA), Beth Van Duyne (R-TX), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA).
A statement from Banks’ office described the bill’s contents:
Creates a wage floor for [85,000 annual] H-1B visas set at the higher of the annual wage last paid to an American worker who filled the position or $110,000 (adjusted for inflation). Creates a true marketplace where eligible visa applications are awarded based on the highest bidder. Eliminates the Optional Practical Training program that allows [annually at least 200,000] foreigners that came to the U.S. under a student visa and have graduated to work in the U.S. for up to three years if they have a STEM degree and allows their employers to avoid paying payroll taxes on the visa-holder’s wages. Limits the ability of Big Tech firms to contract with third-party companies to fill spots with H-1B recipients sponsored by the third-party company by limiting the maximum validity period of the visas to 1 year. The visa programs are widely used by many Fortune 500 companies and their tiers of Indian-run outsourcing firms. The companies which use the most H-1Bs and OPTs include banks, insurance companies, airlines, retailers, healthcare providers, manufacturers, and especially, technology companies.
Imported Indian visa workers “have influence in the entire [information technology] market in America,” said Aabha, an Indian in North Carolina, adding:
Every position that is a manager position or at least senior president position in every company that I’ve interviewed, it’s an Indian. For sure it’s an Indian, and they do not take the people that are qualified now, they are taking people who they can get [faked] reference [and] … get some sort of kickback from.
The Fortune 500 lobbies strongly favor the visa programs, which provide them with a huge flood of subservient gig-workers.
Companies often favor foreign workers over U.S. graduates because the foreign graduates are working to win government-supplied green cards. This means they are cheaper to hire, can be fired and sent home without appeal, and are utterly subservient to U.S. managers. So the foreign graduates are willing to work long hours, cannot quit to join a rival company, rarely testify in courts, and cannot act like the U.S. graduates who are professionally required to argue against cost-cutting managers in favor of raising product innovation, safety, quality, and security.
The resulting damage is exemplified by Boeing’s cost-cutting executives, who boost the company’s short-term profits by discarding U.S. professionals and hiring Indian contractors to perform core engineering tasks. The short-term policy contributed to the Boeing 737 Max air crashes in 2019 that slashed roughly $100 billion from Boeing’s stock market value.
Similarly, U.S. tech firms boosted profits by hiring Indian and Chinese visa workers — and allowed Chinese firms to take the lead in critical 5G communications technology .
Because the value of the dangled green cards is so huge, most of the Indian visa workers accept jobs in a U.S.-based, Indian-run, unregulated, isolated, sweatshop economy of subcontractor kickbacks, cliques, fraud, backstabbing, and blame-shifting, according to numerous Indian sources who speak to Breitbart News. “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million,” an Indian visa worker told Breitbart News .
Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages , and raises their rents .
Migration also curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , widens regional wealth gaps , radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture , and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial , cross-sex , non-racist , class-based , bipartisan , rational , persistent , and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (October 28, 2021) – Hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals, primarily from India and China, are working in the United States via the controversial Optical Practical Training program (OPT). This program allows individuals who entered on student visas to obtain work authorization for up to three years after graduation. OPT was not enacted by Congress – the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) developed the program at the request of Silicon Valley tech moguls who sought a means to overcome annual caps in the H-1B foreign worker program. In this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jon Feere, the Center’s Director of Investigations and former ICE Chief of Staff, discusses the national security and labor issues stemming from the size and lack of sufficient oversight of the OPT program. He describes the fraud and lack of transparency in the program, including the large number of fake companies listed as OPT employers. Feere also discusses "Operation OPTical Illusion", an effort last year by ICE targeting thousands of foreign nationals who have effectively disappeared after listing such fake employers on their record in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a national security database created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The first round of arrests took place in Massachusetts, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Florida, and the Washington, D.C. area. Those arrested included foreign nationals from India, Libya, Senegal, and Bangladesh. Though DHS and ICE leadership announced that was Phase One of the operation, there is no evidence that this critical investigation has continued under the Biden administration. In place of a closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, shares comments made during the Center’s recent panel on "Amnesty Reform and the Border" , by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) on what his state is experiencing as a result of the administration's asylum policies.
90% OF THE EMPLOYEES OF BIDEN'S CRONY MARK ZUCKERBERG'S FACEBOOK WERE BORN IN INDIA!
Joe Biden Seeks Indian Votes with Amnesty, Work Permits for India ’ s Graduates AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.
NEIL MUNRO
Joe Biden is promising to deliver more of India’s contract workers — plus an unlimited supply of tech graduates — to the small but growing Indian community in the United States.
“He will increase the number of visas offered for permanent, work-based immigration based on macroeconomic conditions and exempt from any cap recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields,” says a new page on Biden’s campaign website. The page is titled “Joe Biden’s Agenda for the Indian American [sic] Community.”
The document touts his choice for Vice President, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Her mother was Indian, and he promises to put Indian visa workers on a fast track to green cards:
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
By Michelle Malkin and John Miano
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street JOHN BINDER
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports :
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms . A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley , including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on Wall Street, according to CNN analysis , and Wall Street executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes Alexander Nazaryan administration takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “ Bad Faith .”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan Knight , whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election, Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists .
The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican operatives at the General Services Administration . And agency review is an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy .
Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger , a progressive activist who worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap . She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal , a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks .
There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to be surprising to progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the agency review teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America . Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican .
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor . Many of these officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller , a former Treasury deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities.
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