The Senate has voted to begin drafting a technology-funding bill with House leaders, amid elite and public concerns over China’s rapid advances.
But a deep political split was exposed during a staged cheerleading event on Monday.
Commerce Secretary Gine Raimondo held the event to urge legislators to finalize the technology bill that will spend at least $52 billion on domestic computer-chip factories, dubbed “fabs.”
However, a prominent investor wants to add easy-migration rules that would deliver more foreign graduates into the new government-funded tech jobs.
“Talent is everything,” interjected Eric Schmidt, who is an investor and a former CEO at Google:
We need this [funding] bill passed and we collectively have got to figure out a way to get all the really, really smart people in this area to work on this. That also, by the way, includes high skills immigration to get people who want to work in the United States to work in these fabs — and the citizenry in those states are going to benefit enormously from this as well.
Raimondo rejected the demand, diplomatically. “As a former governor, I could not agree more with you about that. These are jobs, these are good jobs and these are jobs Americans should have,” Raimondo said, before adding:
My observation is that there is broad agreement on the biggest parts of this [Biartisan] Innovation Act. We’ll disagree around the edges, but there’s broad agreement. The challenge is getting it done quickly.
Raimondo is a leader in President Joe Biden’s old-left East Coast wing, which wants to help raise Americans’ wages. Her wing has clashed repeatedly with the White House’s new-left progressive West Coast wing.
The West Coast wing favors more immigrant labor and consumers for wealthy investors. It is fronted by Vice President Kamala Harris and homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and is backed by Schmidt and other West Coast investors.
Schmidt is a former CEO of Google and is now a leading West Coast investor worth perhaps $30 billion. He is a career advocate of “high-skilled ” visa programs that are normally used by the Fortune 500 to import unskilled or mid-skilled foreign contract workers to take the career-starter jobs and the lower-management jobs needed by each generation of skilled U.S. graduates.
The visa programs — such as the H-1B visa and the Optional Practical Training program — have imported an army of more than 1 million foreign workers and managers for the U.S. technology sector, including for chip-maker Intel Corp .
These visa workers are n0-rights contract workers — not naturalized immigrants — so they are totally subordinate to CEOs and Schmidt’s investor class.
Their workplace subordination prevents the visa workers from acting like the U.S. professionals who are educated to argue in favor of quality, long-term research, security, and other vital needs against the short-term, green-eyeshade stock-market priorities embraced by CEOs and other executives.
But many U.S. professionals have been replaced by imported workers and managers who are under intense pressure to focus on their non-professional and self-serving career priorities , discriminatory views , job selling , and exclusionary networks .
The resulting loss of vital workplace tension between U.S. executives and U.S. professionals has helped to stifle innovation . It has also crashed a growing number of U.S. tech industries, including Boeing after the company managers allegedly downplayed critical flaws in its 737 MAX aircraft.
“It used to be when you raised your hand and said ‘We’ve got a problem here,’ the response was ‘Yeah, you’re right, we’re gonna fix it,'” said John Barnett, a quality control expert at Boeing. “After the merger with McDonnell Douglas … Boeing quit listening to their employees, so every time I raised my hands ‘Hey, we got a problem here,’ they would attack the messenger and ignore the message.”
“I’ve been working there in the Seattle area for a long time, and the environment that we ended up merging with [McDonnell Douglas] was so different,” said Cynthia Kitchens , a quality control manager from 2009 to 2016. She continued:
McDonnell Douglas was the ‘Good ole’ boys’ network. They weren’t respectful of our [professional] processes or of employees … Before we got like this, we just didn’t take shortcuts, because it just wasn’t the Boeing culture. No shortcuts: You do it right, and you build in the quality and the safety and the profits will follow. All that changed, and it was just heartbreaking.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” a former Intel employee told Breitbart News . 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.
Even as he calls for more Fortune 500 visa workers, Schmidt uses his wealth to directly fund promising U.S. and foreign entrepreneurs and researchers.
The Fortune 500 employment of visa workers also aborts the careers of young U.S. graduates who might someday build enough expertise and contacts to launch competing products and companie s.
For example, Atul Nanda is an Indian-born former visa worker who now works as a vice president at Google’s database company. He recently fired a team of U.S. database experts in the company’s “Looker” team — but only after they trained Indian visa workers, according to a March 21 report in MorningBrew.com:
Since its 2012 debut, Looker had been steadily expanding in staff and scope and had landed clients like Kickstarter, Asana, TaskRabbit, and Moderna. One of Looker’s goals is to help provide “scalable machine learning,” like allowing users to pair ML models with organized data sets. In theory, its software platform makes Google Cloud even more attractive to clients looking to parse their reams of data.
[…]
One of Looker’s major selling points is its highly trained customer-support team. That’s something Atul Nanda, VP of Google Cloud Support, stressed in an internal town hall one week after the layoffs.
“Looker has a Department of Customer Love, which is more than just a department name and sets the culture—it’s the secret sauce, it’s the DNA,” Nanda said. “With every acquisition, there’s an evolution process we go through, and sometimes these innovation processes can be difficult. In this case, for Looker, we needed to bring Looker into alignment for the rest of GCP [Google Cloud Platform]. And I am hoping that we can do our very best to preserve that culture of DCL, which is just admirable, to say the least.”
The workplace dominance of the investor-minded CEOs has ensured the has U.S. fallen behind China’s 5G technology , even as China focuses its effort on developing artificial intelligence, new weaponry, and commercial aircraft.
The post-1990 damage from the visa-worker programs has also been worsened by investors’ repeated claims that U.S. manufacturing could be exported to China without damaging U.S. research capabilities.
But the transfer of the U.S. manufacturing sector provided a foundation for Chinese engineers and scientists to gradually build a vast range of products — and to develop new technologies that threaten much-touted American dominance.
Meanwhile, the loss of the U.S. manufacturing sector also destroyed the economic and engineering foundation for private-sector U.S. researchers, even as U.S. universities imported more Chinese and European scientists to take U.S. science careers.
Schmidt twice acknowledged the disastrous mistake that has been pushed by investors for 15 or more years. “We made a mistake collectively,” he told Raimondo. “This bill addresses that,” he said, adding:
… the key thing that this money does is … it provides funding for expansion of these [fabs] but it also provides funding for basic research, basic strategy, and basically get us to where we should have been because of the mistake we made maybe a decade ago. Why is that important? When you study fabs they are a process of continuous improvement, every single day, over and over and over again.
Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) is the leading GOP Senator in the debate. He dodged Schmidt’s migration demand as he told the group that “American leadership in science and technology, especially the emerging technologies that will dominate the 21st century is vital to both the future of the American economy and to our competitiveness with China.”
But he echoed Raimondo, saying “it’s essential that [the bill] be bipartisan.”
The call for bipartisanship is a coded disagreement with the Democratic-drafted House version of the bill, which would allow Fortune 500 CEOs to import many more foreign workers for a vast range of white-collar jobs. Breitbart News reported on February 1:
The draft “America COMPETES Act of 2022” would allow foreigners to win an uncapped number of green cards by studying to become ordinary chemists, doctors, engineers, and statisticians — or accountants, tax experts, computer security experts, statisticians, ecologists, and many other types of professionals.
“It’s insanity — the idea that you would create a bill that supposedly improves America’s competitiveness [against China] by outsourcing all of the [skilled] labor is just nuts,” said Rosemary Jenks, government relations director for NumbersUSA. “It’s dystopian.”
The bill emerged from the House shortly after the Senate blocked the Build Back Better bill, which tried to create new pipelines for foreign graduates to get U.S white-collar jobs.
On February 7, Young told Punchbowl News that if Congress wants to import workers, “we need to do it smartly, in order to once again ensure that those new workers aren’t competing with our existing workers for jobs, competing for wages and salaries.”
Other Democrats are concerned about the economic damage caused by the huge and growing population of no-rights visa workers. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), for example, has co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that would modestly curb the loss of jobs to H-1B contract workers .
There is no politically feasible way for legislators to develop a visa program for “high skilled workers” without it being used to push skilled Americans out of many white-collar jobs, said Rob Law, a policy expert at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
If you look at the H-1B program, they use glossy language like “Best and Brightest” … But there’s nothing top-tiered about it. There are no protections [for skilled Americans]. There are no recruiting requirements … There’s nothing that puts pay at a premium, and so the system is used to import a large foreign worker population that is rather indistinguishable [from Americans].
The foreign workers must be compliant because they depend on their CEOs to get the big, deferred-compensation bonus of green cards for themselves and their children, Law told Breitbart News:
The way the employment-based immigration system is, with the employer in charge of the visa … the foreign worker is going to be obedient. They will not push back, they won’t offer alternative suggestions from what their bosses are offering up, they’re not going to seek out a new job … They are going to stay put and their compliance and their immobility is the price for them getting to work in the United States and the potential prospect of a path to citizenship.
The imported, dependent, and compliant workforce is bad for innovation, Law said: “It kills innovation and it destroys or erodes the environment that led to the groundbreaking developments generated by Americans in America, whether it is technological advances or advances in the sciences.”
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
The self-serving economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point. It is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages , raises their housing costs, and shoves tens of millions of Americans out of the labor force.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity , reduces their political clout , undermines U.S. workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic strategy also kills many migrants, splits foreign families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.
Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls . The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing , anti-establishment , multiracial , cross-sex , non-racist , class-based , bipartisan , rational , persistent , and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.
THERE IS A COMMONALITY AMONG THESE PIG TECH BILLIONAIRES: THEY ALL WANT JOE BIDEN'S OPEN BORDERS AND LIFT ON VISA CAPS SO THEY CAN HIRE CHEAPER LABOR.
SILICON VALLEY HAS IMPORTED THOUSANDS OF INDIANS TO TAKE OUR TECH JOBS BECAUSE THEY WILL WORK CHEAPER THAN AMERCANS.
JOE BIDEN WANTS TO UP THOSE NUMBERS.
MARKY ZUCKERUNT'S INDIANS PLAYING COURT TO THE JERK
Democrats, Big Tech Billionaires Unite to Keep DACA Illegal Aliens in U.S. Jobs 780 Frazer Harrison/JIM WATSON/JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
JOHN BINDER
Democrats and billionaire executives for giant tech corporations are urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to keep illegal aliens, enrolled in former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, in American jobs.
In July, Judge Andrew Hanen ordered President Joe Biden’s administration to shut down the DACA program by blocking the federal government from allowing new applicants, illegal aliens who have not previously been enrolled, onto the program’s rolls.
Months later, in September, Biden’s DHS issued a draft regulation that would effectively preserve the DACA program that has allowed more than 800,000 illegal aliens to remain in the United States and hold American jobs since 2012.
In a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), along with a number of House Democrats, urged the Biden administration to move forward with the regulation and expand the program to include more illegal aliens.
The Democrats write :
To preserve family unity, we urge you to update the DACA threshold criteria to include individuals who had lawful status on June 15, 2012. One of the threshold criteria in the proposed rule is that DACA applicants must have “had no lawful immigration status on June 15, 2012, as well as at the time of filing of the request for DACA.” We ask that DHS to update these criteria to allow individuals who had lawful status in the United States on June 15, 2012, but subsequently lost such status by the time of their request, to qualify for DACA . This update could be accomplished by changing the above criterium to read: “had no lawful status at the time of filing of the request for DACA.” [Emphasis added]
…
We also encourage you to consider adopting additional changes to DACA eligibility requirements that would enable more Documented Dreamers to utilize the protection this program offers if the unlawful status requirement were revoked. Specifically, we urge you to consider removing the threshold criteria that require requestors to have continuously resided in the United States from June 15, 2007 to the time of filing of the request. We also support adjusting the dates in the threshold criteria to provide relief for individuals who arrived in the United States after 2007. These adjustments would help a greater number of Documented Dreamers access relief and avoid accruing unlawful status. [Emphasis added]
Likewise, executives at Amazon, Google, Cisco, the Intel Corporation, IBM, and Meta Platforms have sent a letter to DHS asking that DACA work permits be preserved and that Congress grant amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.
“DACA recipients help us innovate on behalf of customers and are a critical part of our diverse workforce,” the executives wrote. “… DACA recipients enrich our companies and the economy in different ways.”
Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.
Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs, while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , and widens regional wealth gaps . It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture , and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
Lawsuit: Google Uses ‘Bait-And-Switch’ Tricks to Keep Customers Away from Restaurants’ Websites Carsten Koall /Getty 2:45
A lawsuit filed by a Florida restaurant chain alleges that Google purposefully directs users to “unauthorized” Google-branded food ordering webpages where it uses restaurants’ names “without their approval,” a tactic the lawsuit describes as a “bait-and-switch.”
Ars Technica reports that Google is being sued by a Florida restaurant group called Left Field Holdings, which runs Lime Fresh Mexican Grill franchises. The lawsuit alleges that the tech giant is setting up unauthorized pages to collect food orders rather than directing users towards the restaurant’s website. The lawsuit alleges that Google employs “bait-and-switch” tactics by placing an “Order Online” button at the top of restaurants’ profile panels on Google Search, leading users to think they are ordering directly from restaurants instead of giving Google a cut of the action.
Google train (Alex Wong /Getty)
The order button sends users to a food.google.com page where users can select items from the restaurant’s menu and then order the food via third-party services like Postmates, DoorDash, and UberEats. As the order is not placed directly with the restaurant via their own website but with a third-party service like UberEats, the restaurant is losing a percentage of the sale. Third-party delivery serives take a commission ranging between 15 to 30 percent from participating restaurants.
The lawsuit alleges that Google “prominently features” restaurants’ names on its order page aiming to “deliberately confusing consumers into entering and interacting with its websites.” The lawsuit is seeking class-action status on behalf of other restaurants affected by Google’s ordering system.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement:
Our goal is to connect customers with restaurants they want to order food from and make it easier for them to do it through the ‘Order Online’ button.
We provide tools for merchants to indicate whether they support online orders or prefer a specific provider, including their own ordering website. We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature.
Other tech companies have employed similar tactics to take a cut of online restaurant ordering sales. In 2019, Grubhub was criticized for purchasing domain names that resembled those of particular restaurants without the restaurants’ involvement. Last year, the city of Chicago sued Grubhub and DoorDash for “unfair and deceptive” practices.
Read more at Ars Technica 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
Never Enough: Woke Google Sued by Black Employees for ‘Racism’ Drew Angerer /Getty 4:06
Despite its status as one of the wokest companies in the world, including maintaining an official program to inject critical race theory into the field of programming, tech giant Google is facing a major lawsuit alleging it discriminates against black employees.
Even among the far-left tech giants of Silicon Valley, Google has a reputation for wokeness. The company invited Robin DiAngelo to give a talk on “white fragility” years before her presence became commonplace in corporate boardrooms. Its managers gave employees instruction manuals on recognizing “white dominant culture .” It maintains an entire program dedicated to “machine learning fairness ,” the new academic disclipine attempting to blend critical race theory with computer science . And documents released through James Damore’s class-action lawsuit in 2018 revealed an atmosphere of unchecked, rampant hostility towards white males within the company.
Google walkout protest (Bryan R. Smith/Getty)
As a whistleblower told Breitbart News in 2017, senior leaders at Google “focus on diversity first and technology second .”
Even with this track record, it appears Google cannot escape the litigious machine of Diversity Inc. The tech giant is now being sued by a black female employee who alleges that the company engaged in “systemic racism” against her. Employee April Curley is represented by notorious attorney Ben Crump.
Via the Daily Mail:
April Curley, 34, began working for Google in 2014 but was fired in September 2020.
On Friday, she said managers at the search engine company actively thwarted their career ambitions — steering them to lower-level jobs, paying them less and denying them opportunities to advance because of their race.
‘While Google claims that they were looking to increase diversity, they were actually undervaluing, underpaying and mistreating their black employees,’ said Ben Crump, Curley’s lawyer Never Enough: Woke Google Sued by Black Employees for ‘Racism’ a high-profile civil rights advocate who has represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among others.
In a TikTok video, Curley blamed allegedly racist attitudes at Google for the high dropout ratio of black employees at the company, alleging that the company “hates” black women.
“Black women are solely seen as DEI experts, and are expected to advance diversity initiatives across the organization internally and externally,” said Curley.
“Black women are sold a dream that if they do all the things, then they’ll be promoted. And that’s not what the data shows. They hate us.”
In a tweet, Curley also claimed that Google has “never, and I mean f***ing never” hired a student from a historically black college into a tech role.
The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, and claims Google has a “racially biased corporate culture” that favors white males.
Google is a diverse company. Nearly 50 percent of its new hires in 2020 were “Asian+,” a category that includes both east Asians and Indians.
As of last year, 42.3 percent of all its employees, including CEO Sundar Pichai, fell into this category, while whites made up just 50.4 percent of the workforce. When non-tech jobs are excluded, the ratio of Asian+ to white employees increases rather than decreases, 48.3 percent to 46.6 percent. At the leadership level, Google is 29.4 percent Asian+ and 65.5 percent white.
Compared to the general U.S. population, this means non-white employees are heavily overrepresented at Google at both the leadership and general levels. According to census data , the U.S. is 72.4 percent white and 4.8 Asian.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook’s Goal Is to Register 4 Million (ILLEGAL) Voters ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS /Getty 2:46
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned an op-ed for USA Today this week in which he announced this his company is implementing strategies that will educate Americans on the importance of voting this November. The company’s goal is to register four million new voters for the 2020 election. Zuckerberg also stated that Facebook may censor posts from politicians that violate community guidelines.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned an op-ed in USA Today that was published this week in which he explained the various ways in which Facebook plans to “strengthen democracy” ahead of the November elections.
Zuckerberg specifically noted that Facebook will encourage users to register to vote. The company has set a goal of 4 million new voters registered for the 2020 election. Various election-focused resources will be available to users at the top of the Facebook News Feed until voting occurs in November.
To achieve this, we’re creating a new Voting Information Center with authoritative information, including how and when to vote, as well as details about voter registration, voting by mail and information about early voting. We’ll also include posts from state election officials and verified local election authorities. We’ll show this center at the top of the Facebook News Feed and on Instagram to make sure everyone gets a chance to see it.
Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook will begin to hold politicians accountable for certain content that they share on the platform. Zuckerberg suggested that he is sympathetic to requests to censor politicians that violate community guidelines.
Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content. We have rules against speech that will cause imminent physical harm or suppress voting, and no one is exempt from them. But accountability only works if we can see what those seeking our votes are saying, even if we viscerally dislike what they say.
Zuckerberg also noted that Facebook will introduce a feature that will allow users to block political advertisements from their feed.
By giving people a voice, registering and turning out voters, and preventing interference, I believe Facebook is supporting and strengthening our democracy in 2020 and beyond. And for those of you who’ve already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you — so we’re also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads. We’ll still remind you to vote.
Breitbart News reported this week that Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson argued recently that tech giants like Google and Facebook have too much control over the internet.
Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.
Australian Watchdog Sues Facebook Over Scam Advertisements Drew Angerer /Getty 3:39
Australia’s competition watchdog has filed a lawsuit against Facebook (now known as Meta) alleging that the social media giant failed to prevent scammers promoting fake ads on its platform.
Reuters reports that the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) has filed a lawsuit against Facebook alleging that the social media giant failed to prevent scammers from using its platform to promote fake ads to unsuspecting users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is applauded as he delivers the opening keynote introducing new Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram privacy features at the Facebook F8 Conference at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on April 30, 2019. – Got a crush on another Facebook user? The social network will help you connect, as part of a revamp unveiled Tuesday that aims to foster real-world relationships and make the platform a more intimate place for small groups of friends. (Photo by Amy Osborne / AFP) (Photo credit should read AMY OSBORNE/AFP/Getty Images)
The advertisements regularly endorsed cryptocurrency or money-making schemes and featured famous Australians to fool users. The lawsuit filed in the Federal Court alleges that Facebook “aided and abetted or was knowingly concerned in false or misleading conduct and representations by the advertisers.”
ACCC chair Rod Sims stated: “The essence of our case is that Meta is responsible for these ads that it publishes on its platform. It is alleged that Meta was aware … scam ads were being displayed on Facebook but did not take sufficient steps to address the issue.”
Facebook stated that any ads that are designed to scam users or mislead them violated the platform’s policies and that the company uses technology to find and block such ads. Facebook added that it had “cooperated with the ACCC’s investigation into this matter to date.”
In an email to Reuters, Facebook stated: “We will review the recent filing by the ACCC and intend to defend the proceedings,” refusing to comment further.
The ACCC stated that the ads used images featuring Australian business leaders, TV hosts and politicians and linked to fake news articles including fake quotes from the Australian personalities with the aim of having users deposit funds into fake schemes
Sims stated: “We are aware of a consumer who lost more than A$650,000 ($480,000) due to one of these scams … this is disgraceful.”
Facebook is no stranger to Australian courts. After Mark Zuckerberg’s internet giant claimed it didn’t collect data on Australian users, a judge called the argument “divorced from reality.” As Breitbart News reported in February:
The OAIC announced its lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s company in 2020, alleging “serious and/or repeated interferences with privacy in contravention of Australian privacy law.” The OAIC aimed to sue Facebook Inc. in the U.S. and its Irish subsidiary. The Masters of the universe have attempted to have the case against it thrown out claiming that it does not collect or hold personal information in Australia so cannot be sued under Australian laws.
This argument was thrown out by the Australian court this week, describing Facebook’s case as “divorced from reality.” Justice Nye Perram said in his reasoning for the ruling:
“There is a readily available inference that Facebook Inc installs cookies on devices in Australia on behalf of Facebook Ireland as part of its business of providing data processing services to it. Further, it is clear that Facebook Ireland’s use of cookies (installed and removed by Facebook Inc) forms an important part of the operation of the Facebook platform. It is not an outlier activity. It is one of the things ‘which makes Facebook work.'”
Read more at Reuters 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
Project ‘Iliad:’ Amazon Deployed Sneaky Tactics to Make It Harder to Cancel Prime Membership AP Photo/Charles Krupa 2:39
A recent report reveals that Amazon intentionally made it harder for users to cancel their Prime membership, resulting in a drop in cancellations of 14 percent in 2017. Amazon’s project “Iliad” may be a perfect example of “Dark UX,” web design tricks that purposefully confuse or mislead customers.
Business Insider reports that according to internal documents obtained by the outlet, Amazon purposefully drew out the process of canceling a Prime membership under a project named “Iliad.” The project developed multiple layers of questions and new offers that were offered to Prime members that attempted to cancel their membership, reducing Amazon’s member churn considerably.
An employee carries a package at the distribution center of US online retail giant Amazon in Moenchengladbach, on December 17, 2019. (INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images)
Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin press event ( Joe Raedle /Getty)
After the project launched, the number of Prime cancellations dropped by 14 percent in 2017 as fewer members managed to get to the final cancelation page. These types of UX designs are referred to as “Dark UX.” The Creative Momentum describes Dark UX as “any unethical web design trick designed to confuse and deceive users. It forces visitors to take actions against their wishes to benefit the business. This may mean asking for more information than is relevant to a transaction, eliminating important navigation elements to reduce site abandonment, or opting users into receive promotions by default.”
Multiple complaints have been filed with the FTC in recent years demanding an investigation into Amazon Prime’s cancelation process and its use of “dark patterns.” The Norwegian Consumer Council alleged in January 2021: “Throughout the process, Amazon manipulates users through wording and graphic design, making the process needlessly difficult and frustrating to understand.”
An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the cancelation process for Prime is “simple and transparent and clearly present customers with choices and the implications of those choices.”
Jamil Ghani, VP of Amazon Prime, said in a statement: “Customer transparency and trust are top priorities for us. By design we make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up for or cancel their Prime membership. We continually listen to customer feedback and look for ways to improve the customer experience.”
Read more at Business Insider 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
Researchers: Amazon Continues to Work with Chinese Suppliers Linked to Uyghur Slave Labor Camps Alex Wong/Getty 3:43
E-commerce giant Amazon has reportedly continued to work with companies in China that have been accused of using Uyghur slave labor, according to research by the Tech Transparency Project. According to the report, the Amazon suppliers make products marketed under the “Amazon Basics” label.
NBC News reports that e-commerce and tech giant Amazon has continued to work with companies in China accused of using forced Uyghur Muslim labor as part of their business operations. A report from the Tech Transparency Project, a research group run by the nonprofit Campaign for Accountability, found that Amazon’s list of suppliers includes five companies previously linked to “labor transfer” programs in China.
Amazon delivery driver ( PATRICK T. FALLON /Getty)
TOPSHOT – A demonstrator wearing a mask painted with the colours of the flag of East Turkestan and a hand bearing the colours of the Chinese flag attends a protest of supporters of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and Turkish nationalists to denounce China’s treatment of ethnic Uighur Muslims during a deadly riot in July 2009 in Urumqi, in front of the Chinese consulate in Istanbul, on July 5, 2018. (OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images)
The suppliers reportedly aid in the production of Amazon-branded devices and products should under the Amazon Basics label. The report further warned that some of Amazon’s third-party sellers could be offering products made using labor from the Xinjiang region of Western China.
Researchers from the Tech Transparency Project wrote in the report: “The findings raise questions about Amazon’s exposure to China’s repression of minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang — and the extent to which the e-commerce giant is adequately vetting its supplier relationships.”
In a statement, Amazon said: “Amazon complies with the laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which it operates, and expects suppliers to adhere to our Supply Chain Standards. We take allegations of human rights abuses seriously, including those related to the use or export of forced labor. Whenever we find or receive proof of forced labor, we take action.”
Breitbart News has reported extensively on China’s human rights abuses of Uyghur Muslim slaves, many of which are forced into labor camps. In April of 2021, Breitbart News wrote:
Unspecified sellers in China are increasingly using online venues to advertise Uyghurs for sale in “batches of 50 to 100 workers,” Sky News revealed on Friday.
“On Chinese websites, there are dozens of postings advertising Uighur [sic] labour, in batches of 50 to 100 workers,” Sky News reported on April 16. “Baidu, the company hosting the job postings, did not respond to a request for comment.”
Baidu is a Chinese multinational technology company providing Internet-related services, including China’s top search engine.
The Baidu advertisements suggested Uyghur laborers were under “tight political and social controls,” according to Sky News, which noted that one posting stated the “security of workers will be guaranteed by the government.” Sky did not mention the ads suggesting the workers would be compensated in any way.
Roughly 10 million Turkic-speaking Uyghurs live in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost territory bordering Central Asia. Provincial Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Xinjiang have detained 1-3 million Uyghurs and other mainly Muslim minorities in state-run concentration camps since at least 2017, according to estimates by human rights groups and foreign governments. The Chinese government officially denies the camps are meant to exterminate Uyghur identity, though it admits to trapping Uyghurs in the camps.
Read more at NBC 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
DOJ: Google Abuses Attorney-Client Privilege to Hide Documents Justin Sullivan /Getty 2:36
The Department of Justice has accused tech giant Google of training employees to hide business communications from legal review “by using false requests for legal advice.” The DOJ has informed a judge overseeing an antitrust case against the Masters of the Universe that the company trains employees to add lawyers to written communications and seek legal advice even when not required so it could invoke attorney-client privilege when documents are requested as part of an investigation.
Engadget reports that the DOJ is accusing tech giant Google of specifically instructing its employees to protect business communications from discovery in legal disputes “by using false requests for legal advice.” The news comes shortly after the DOJ informed a judge overseeing the antitrust case against Google that the company directs its employees to add in-house lawyers to written communication, apply attorney-client privilege labels to them, and request legal advice even when it’s unnecessary.
Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, speaks at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco on 28 June 2012 ( KIMIHIRO HOSHINO/AFP/GettyImages )
Noogler Hat for new Google employees (Flickr/ banky177)
The DOJ is asking the judge in the antitrust case to sanction the company “for its extensive and intentional efforts to misuse the attorney-client privilege to hide business documents relevant” to the case. Lawyers wrote in the brief that the DOJ claims Google refers to the practice as “Communicate With Care” and has been a common practice since 2015. New employees are instructed to follow the practice without any discussion on whether it should only be used when legal advice is truly needed.
The same recommendation was reportedly made to teams handling search distribution for the department’s antitrust cases. Google allegedly told these teams to follow the same practice for any written communication containing revenue-sharing agreements and mobile application distribution agreements in an effort to protect them from discovery in cases of legal disputes.
A Google spokesperson commented on the situation, stating:
Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation, and suggestions to the contrary are flatly wrong. Just like other American companies, we educate our employees about legal privilege and when to seek legal advice. And we have produced over four million documents to the DOJ in this case alone — including many that employees had considered potentially privileged.
Read more at Engadget here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Economy Politics Tech antitrust DOJ Google Masters of the Universe monopoly Sundar Pichai
Schweizer Hits Another Home Run on Biden-China Corruption By John Dale Dunn
Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win
by Peter Schweizer
352 pages, hardcover $18.25, Kindle $14.95 ISBN-10: 0063061147 Harper, 2022
Peter Schweizer is an Oxford graduate, former Hoover Institution Fellow, and cofounder and president of the Government Accountability Institute of Tallahassee, Florida. He is a widely read and interviewed investigative journalist and has authored popular and well received books on political corruption: Clinton Cash , Extortion , Throw Them All Out , and Architects of Ruin .
The book is the usual fare from Schweizer — based on well documented and researched financial records that support assertions of the author. In this book, the focus is corruption in high places that results from cozy entanglements with China. This book focuses on the Chinese communist connections for good reasons: China has set about a long-term effort to compromise the political, business, cultural, academic, and scientific elements of America as a set up for creating global Chinese hegemonic control and dominance. The Chinese have accomplished a great deal in the decades since the ill begotten Kissinger Nixon opening to China in 1972, followed by the Clinton-Bush acquiescence to admission of China into the World Trade Association that was finalized with favored status in 2001.
Through these decades, the wolf, bear, coyote China has gradually expanded its dominance of world trade and economics by stealing intellectual property, using bribes and influence-purchasing, and standard espionage and propaganda methods.
The point of Red-Handed is exposing the participation of persons of influence in the West who have been compromised by Chinese efforts to buy influence and power — on a scale not previously seen.
Mr. Schweizer had a big scandal to investigate but a good team of researchers to help him organize the exposé — an exposé that warns of short-term and long-term danger for the survival of Western nations and the ascendancy of a savage and murderous Chinese communist tyrannical autocracy stained by a history of ethnic, religious, and domestic pogroms, persecutions, and genocide of immense and barbaric proportions that are numerous and stunning, extending forward from the millions of deaths of Mao's Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese from starvation and systematic political purges to modern-day activities that subjugate Tibet, Hong Kong, the domestic religious minorities while pursuing external influence and dominance.
Now under new leadership, China continues to commit atrocities domestically and expand its influence in foreign political and economic matters, which raises the question — how do the compromised oligarchs of the West who are ensnared in the Chinese web of influence sleep at night or excuse their complicity? Is money enough to justify complicity with barbaric malevolence? When does the complicity become the role of accessory to crimes ranging all the way to treason?
With the foregoing in mind, the best this review can do is identify and briefly describe and introduce evidence of the treasonous or traitorous American perps who have sold their positions, stature, and influence to the Chinese political peddlers. Mr. Schweizer's systematic reviews and investigative revelations include the following (in order of the chapters) — and after every short summary comes my choice of a few words to describe the corruption and treason:
An introduction featuring the ROPE, alluding to the apocryphal commie saying that the capitalists will sell the communists the rope they can use to hang the capitalists. This chapter is a warning and an exposition of how brutal and cruel socialist systems can infiltrate and influence — ultimately devour civil society from the inside. How American core concepts can be compromised with cheap talk and promises — brutality can dominate civility, and culture can be eviscerated by aggressive activist advocacy of Marxist nonsense. The key, though, is the complicity of American citizens. (vice, infidelity and treachery)
A chapter on the evil and corrupt Biden family and its selling out to worldwide opportunities for corruption, but particularly Chinese influence-peddling. (decadence and depravity)
A wearying and maddening description of the corruption and pandering, grifting, and shilling by the denizens of capitol hill — Feinstein and family, Swallwell, Pelosi and family, McConnell and Chou, former congress people like Senators Boehner, Lott, Breaux, Baucus, and of course a long list of congressmen, also from both sides of the aisle — all selling their souls and positions of trust. (degradation and degeneration)
The culture of power and money lust of the American Corporate Community and its major players — BlackRock , Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter, and Musk — and, of course, Gates — that draws them to a plutocracy that would never hesitate to betray America for a financial advantage or an opportunity to be a part of a global powerhouse oligarchy complicit with and colluding with malefactor government tyrannies. (avarice, cupidity, and rapaciousness)
The special place of diplomats and the chattering class as the lubricant for the social and societal resets best exemplified by pretentious poseurs like Kissinger, with so many others that the author exposes as self-promoting narcissists who achieve a grandeur that they consider to be well deserved, a grandeur usually as part of the dominant oligarchy — the list of exposed poseurs by the author is impressive because they saturate public life. (egoist and megalomaniac)
A special chapter set aside for the Bush and Trudeau families, who have been served by their associations with China at the expense of their home countries. (betrayers and quislings)
Academia, for various reasons, provides excellent examples of the perfidy of betrayal, but of course academics consider themselves beyond such pedestrian concepts as loyalty, fealty, family, tradition, constitutional government, since they are pursuing the greater good...and their greater good. They also identify themselves as "experts," essential to the survival of the world and progress of mankind, although many have no marketable or real-world valuable skills. (overweening, smug, and vainglorious)
Mr. Schweizer saves the last chapter for a grand summary and proposal to reverse the corruption he's put on display that endangers the survival of America. The key phrase he uses is "Elite Capture," and the elites are vulnerable. He warns that republics are easy prey for autocrat countries' intel and military influence-peddling and sabotage.
· Clean up the lobbying and influence-peddling in D.C., and enforce foreign agent registration.
· No lobbying and influence-peddling by foreign intel and military entities.
· Clean up research and academics from influence-peddling and ban joint research.
· Ban foreign military and intel company listings on the stock exchanges.
· Engagement with foreign governments is a dangerous business. Stop the looseness.
· Transparency and all conflicts declared on all "experts" proposed by media, government, or academia.
· Most of all, a return to the constitutional concepts of limited government and strict equality under the law, equal administration of the laws, no favorites or exceptions.
Mr. Schweizer has received deserved praise for this excellent book, which is a product of extraordinary research. I hope my introduction results in your decision to read it. Three hundred fifty-two pages of your time.
Image: Marc Nozell via Flickr , CC BY 2.0 .
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