New Data Shows Mass Layoffs Are Imminent as Consumer Demand and Retail Sales Plummet
Matthew Desmond on ‘Poverty, by America’'
Matthew Desmond: The Privileged are Complicit in America’s Poverty Crisis
Kroger defends salary figures while employees say they are 'an out-and-out lie'
Economy in Transition | Ageing Populations | Inequality | Sustainability | Documentary
AMERICAN COMPANIES FIRST AIM TO MAKE THEIR PROFIT MARGINS BY SCREWING THE EMPLOYEE. HENCE OPEN BORDERS FOR 'CHEAP' LABOR.
EXPOSED: Wage Theft at One of America’s Largest Employers KROGER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTqrGBsUhAg
60% Of Americans Can't Afford Gas As Prices Explode And Stockpiles Collapse
Amazon announces 9,000 more job cuts as tech industry jobs massacre builds
Amazon announced Monday that it is laying off another 9,000 employees, bringing to 27,000 the number of staff the company has cut since the start of the year. The layoffs represent about 8 percent of the company’s global workforce. Amazon’s stock fell 1.25 percent Monday following the job cut announcement.
The latest round of cuts by Amazon signal that the jobs massacre in the tech industry is continuing unabated. On March 14, Meta said it was laying off another 10,000 workers. Four months ago Meta announced the layoff of 11,000 employees, 13 percent of its workforce.
Through March 20 more than 500 tech companies have laid off nearly 140,000 workers this year. This has been the largest contraction in the tech industry since the dot-com crash, with almost every major tech company announcing cuts. Significant job cuts so far this year have come at giants Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Twitter and IBM, who together account for nearly half of the layoffs in tech.
In a memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the latest cuts would impact workers mainly at Amazon Web Services, PXT, which handles human resources, advertising and the Twitch livestreaming division. He said the final decision on which jobs would be eliminated would be determined by mid-April. Citing the current economic “uncertainty,” Jassy said the company had “chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
In typical corporate speak the letter continued, “The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.” Needless to say this offers little comfort to workers whose lives are being upended.
The recent round of cuts will impact 2,300 Amazon workers in the Seattle, Washington, area, the company’s base of operations. This month Amazon announced the closure of eight Amazon Go convenience stores. It has also suspended construction on its highly touted HQ2 project in the Washington D.C. area. Some 8,000 workers were supposed to have started work at the complex in Arlington, Virginia, this summer. Meanwhile, Amazon issued a directive last month requiring employees to be in the office at least three days a week.
Last year, layoffs impacted workers at Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition activation division and then spread to those working on automated stores, drones and the consumer retail division as well as job recruiters. Cuts have so far not hit the company’s warehouse division.
Jassy said the company had not announced all planned layoffs in January because management had not completed its cost assessment at that time. “Rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence,” he wrote, “we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”
Amazon enjoyed a boom in sales and profits during the pandemic as online shopping increased. However, last year the company saw a loss due to declining online sales revenue and because of its investment in electric startup Rivian Motors. Amazon suffered a $5.4 billion loss when the share price of the vehicle company collapsed. Amazon has contracted for 100,000 delivery vehicles from Rivian.
According to website layoffs.fyi, 67 tech companies have announced 26,910 layoffs so far in March. This follows 84,714 tech layoffs in January and 36,491 in February.
March layoffs include:
- Better.com—3,000 layoffs.
- Xerox—800 layoffs in production, marketing and talent teams.
- Go to Group—600 job cuts following 1,300 announced late last year.
- Atlassian—500 jobs slashed as the business software maker is cutting 5 percent of its workforce.
- Thoughtworks—500 layoffs, the software consulting firm is laying off 4 percent of its global workforce.
- Sirius XM—475; 8 percent of its workforce.
- Informatica—450; 7 percent of its workforce.
- Pico Interactive—400; 20 percent of its workforce.
- Alerzo—400 job cuts, impacting full-time and part-time staff.
- Docusign—680; 10 percent of its workforce.
The latest layoffs take place amid continuing crisis in the world financial system with the takeover of Credit Suisse this weekend. This followed the collapse and takeover of Silicon Valley Bank, which further destabilized the tech industry.
The banking crisis and tech layoffs are the product of the relentless increase in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve, which has resulted in the shutting off of the easy money that had fueled growth in the tech industry. The interest rate hikes are part of a deliberate effort by the ruling class to undermine the militancy of the working class by increasing unemployment.
The layoffs in the tech industry foreshadow broader problems in the US economy. The tech and information industry accounts for 10 percent of the US economy and 8 percent of jobs, and far more counting jobs that support tech. Writing on the tech layoffs and the aftermath of the collapse of SVB the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The same tech industry-based economic engine that fueled the global economy on the way up—turning every invested dollar into what seemed like a buck and a half—is doing the opposite on the way down.” It continued, “The unraveling of Silicon Valley Bank began when interest rates rose, the ‘free money’ spigot shut off, and investment in startups crashed. The result was investors and companies drawing down their accounts at the bank.”
The tech sector cuts at Amazon come as the company is attempting to squeeze ever more production and profit out of its workforce in its warehouses. According to a recent report in the Guardian, injuries at Amazon warehouses are twice as high as at its major competitors. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued citations against Amazon at six warehouses in January and February of this year. The citations involved unsafe working conditions, ergonomics and failure to report injuries.
On February 1, OSHA issued a statement reporting that it found multiple risk factors for musculoskeletal injuries, including high frequency of lifting, heavy weight of items, “employees awkwardly twisting, bending and extending themselves to lift items” and long hours required to complete tasks. Examination of company log books revealed that Amazon employees experienced a high incidence of musculoskeletal disorders.
However, despite the numerous irregularities, OSHA has issued minimal fines. In the case of the most recent violations, just $46,875 in total was levied against three facilities, in Aurora, Illinois; Nampa, Idaho; and Castleton, New York.
Google lays off 12,000 workers as tech jobs bloodbath intensifies
Are you a Google or tech worker? Use the form at the bottom of this article to submit a report on the layoffs and working conditions.
With the announcement by Google parent Alphabet of 12,000 layoffs, the attack on jobs in the technology industry has been taken to a new level. The number of tech jobs eliminated in the first three weeks of the new year has already reached one third of the total of more than 241,000 industrywide layoffs in 2022.
While many of these job cuts are concentrated in the US, the assault on tech workers is global in character. In an email sent to Google employees on Friday, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that the layoff of 6 percent of the workforce would impact jobs internationally and “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.”
Pichai also said the layoffs were made “to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company.” In other words, as demanded by the financial oligarchy, the jobs of Alphabet employees are being sacrificed to ensure the profitability of the $1.27 trillion global technology conglomerate.
No one should underestimate the ruthlessness with which the corporate elite is pursuing its attack on jobs and living standards. While Pichai wrote, “We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected,” workers in New York City reported they learned about being laid off when they arrived at work on Friday morning and were denied entry into the company’s corporate offices.
With the Alphabet announcement, the number of tech job cuts this year reached more than 75,000, according to the Tech Layoff Tracker maintained by TrueUp. Among the other mass layoffs announced in 2023 are Amazon (18,000 jobs), Microsoft (10,000 jobs), Salesforce (7,000 jobs) and Cloud Software Group (2,000 jobs).
The layoffs at more than 200 other tech firms— including 1,100 jobs at Capital One, 950 jobs at CoinBase, 900 jobs at game company Black Shark and 800 jobs at Crypto.com—make up the balance of 50,000 eliminated positions.
The tech layoffs are both shocking and devastating to the workers affected, both directly and indirectly. A report in the New York Times on Friday said, “Millennials and Generation Z, born between 1981 and 2012, started tech careers during a decade-long expansion when jobs multiplied as fast as iPhone sales... Few of them had experienced widespread layoffs.”
Meanwhile, it is taking laid-off workers in all economic sectors longer to find new jobs. According to the US Labor Department, the number of unemployed workers who have been without a job for 3.5 to 6 months increased in December to 826,000, up from 526,000 in April.
The jobs massacre in the tech industry is the spearhead of a conscious policy by the ruling establishment to impose the inflation crisis on the backs of the working class. The Biden administration and the Federal Reserve—along with capitalist governments and central banks internationally—have been raising interest rates at a near-record pace to trigger a recession, increase unemployment and beat back the demands of workers for wage increases that keep up with the rising cost of living.
Jerome Powell, US Federal Reserve chairman, stated this policy explicitly in a speech on January 10, when he said, “Restoring price stability when inflation is high can require measures that are not popular in the short term as we raise interest rates to slow the economy.”
The tight monetary policy is being felt most directly in the technology sector because the industry is being hit by the combined impact of increased borrowing costs, sharply lower stock market values and a reduction in business volume from the overall economic slowdown.
Alongside the assault on jobs there is a shift in workplace practices to attack the conditions of tech workers. In a comment in the New York Times on Sunday “titled “The Era of Happy Tech Workers is Over,” Nadia Rawlinson, former “chief people officer” at Slack, wrote, “The layoffs are part of new age of bossism, the notion that management has given up too much control and must wrest it back.”
While tech workers have been considered a relatively better-off section of the labor force, workers in the high tech industry are subject to the same laws of the capitalist profit system, based on the exploitation of the working class, as in all other sectors.
As Rawlinson writes, “After two decades of fighting for talent, chief executives are using this period to adjust for years of management indulgence that left them with a generation of entitled workers.” The days of remote work, WiFi compensation, meal stipends and other incentives are over, she insists, and “tech chief executives are now optimizing more for profitability than for growth, sometimes at the expense of long-held organizational beliefs.”
Behind these changes, Rawlinson says, are “activist investors” who have taken “prominent positions in their stocks” and have “called for the companies to slash costs, reduce nonstrategic investments and, notably in Meta’s case, aggressively reduce its workforce.”
There is no question that the layoffs and attacks on working conditions are being demanded by billionaires on Wall Street who seek to extract from the working class the combined $4 trillion in stock valuations they lost in 2022.
As one Google employee tweeted, “Imagine being 24 years and ten months at a company that has a 5 year stock vest schedule that fully vest on your 25 year... and being let go a month and change before 25... and the company that cut you made $198 billion last year. I HATE CAPITALISM.”
In every industry, the corporate and financial oligarchy wants the working class to pay for the global crisis of capitalism. In the auto industry, the electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian has announced the layoff of 6 percent of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan. EV manufacturer Tesla has announced a hiring freeze, with layoffs soon to come.
In December, Stellantis announced the indefinite shutdown of its Jeep assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois, with 1,350 workers set to be laid off when the plant idles in February. Shortly afterwards, CEO Carlos Tavares threatened that further job cuts “will happen everywhere as long as we see high inflation of variable costs.” This has already started, with workers at the Dundee, Michigan engine plant informing the WSWS that more than 100 workers are being laid off.
Layoffs have also been announced at Intel Corporation, Goldman Sachs, Bed Bath & Beyond and BlackRock, and job cuts are expected to be announced at the Washington Post any day.
The pro-corporate trade union apparatus is doing nothing to oppose the jobs massacre. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), which has recently made a push to organize tech workers, has responded with nothing but a tweet decrying the job cuts. In fact, the CWA bureaucracy has spent decades collaborating in the slashing of telecom workers’ jobs.
The Socialist Equality Party advocates the development of rank-and-file committees in all workplaces, controlled democratically by the workers themselves and committed to the needs of the working class, not corporate profit. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees has been established to coordinate and unify the struggles of workers in the United States and throughout the world against the attack on jobs, living standards and working conditions.
This must be connected to a struggle against the capitalist system. Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants exercise enormous power and control over the Internet. They are deeply integrated into capitalist governments and have collaborated in state censorship, especially of left-wing publications, including the World Socialist Web Site.
The tech industry can no longer be left in the hands of billionaire private owners like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Instead, these monopolies must be transformed into public utilities, collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class, as part of the socialist reorganization of economic life. Only in this way can the industry be run for the benefit of society as a whole and ensure free, democratic access to the Internet and other critical technologies.
'
After Microsoft announces 10,000 layoffs, CWA union endorses tech giant’s multibillion-dollar bid for video game publisher ABK
In a letter to European regulators, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union last month spoke in favor of Microsoft’s bid to acquire video game giant Activision Blizzard King (ABK) for $68.7 billion. If successful, the acquisition would create the world’s second-largest video game company behind the Chinese firm Tencent.
In the letter by CWA President Chris Shelton, sent on February 20 to Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the European Commission, the union declared it had entered “a dialogue with Microsoft that resulted in an agreement to ensure the workers of Activision Blizzard have a clear path to collective bargaining if the merger is completed.” Therefore, “Microsoft’s binding commitments will give employees a seat at the table and ensure that the acquisition of Activision Blizzard benefits the company’s workers and the broader video game labor market.”
The letter to the European Commission follows an earlier letter to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last June along the same lines. “We now support approval of the transaction before you because Microsoft has entered an agreement with CWA to ensure the workers of Activision Blizzard have a clear path to collective bargaining,” the union wrote at the time.
Surpassing Sony and Apple, Microsoft would own some of the most popular game franchises, such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Minecraft. The computer software monopoly, based in Redmond, Washington, currently has a market value of $1.85 trillion and is the third most valuable company on Wall Street.
Microsoft’s drive to gain a larger share of the global video game market—the industry is forecasted to generate nearly $600 billion annually by 2030—has prompted some of its competitors to object to the deal through the European and US trade regulators.
In December 2022, following early expectations that the European Commission, the executive of the EU, would accept the deal, the FTC filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Microsoft-ABK deal on the grounds that Microsoft would have near-unchallengeable market share, allowing Microsoft to lock consumers into its Xbox gaming ecosystem.
In response on January 17 of this year, the European Commission announced a formal objection to the merger, citing similar concerns as those of the FTC. Microsoft responded by offering concessions to ensure European regulators approve the deal, but objections by regulators persist. For example, the UK competition regulator issued a protest earlier this month.
The CWA’s intervention is highly significant. Many video game workers—among the most highly exploited in the software industry, with endless imposed overtime during the “crunch” periods preceding a game’s release—have joined or are seeking to join the CWA in order to counter brutal working conditions. In 2020, the CWA launched its Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE) program. It has amassed roughly 3,000 new members at ABK and more across various other tech companies and indie game development studios. In addition to the gaming industry, the CWA unionized 1,200 workers under the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) in 2021 at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
The calculations of the bureaucrats who control the CWA, however, are entirely different from the legitimate and progressive aspirations of the workers. Their support for the merger shows how they seek to use the framework of “collective bargaining” to establish a corporatist relationship with management, exchanging the union leadership’s support for massive profits for access to dues money from workers.
Last year, workers at ABK subsidiary Raven Software went on strike against the firing of 12 quality assurance workers. In addition to their reinstatement, strikers also demanded the resignation of then ABK CEO Bobby Kotick and the board of directors, the conversion of all contractors to full-time employees, improved representation, pay transparency and unbiased third-party audits. Afterwards, workers joined the newly-created Game Workers Alliance, a CWA subsidiary.
The CWA intervened to shut down the strike on January 22, 2022 without any of workers’ demands being met, only four days after Microsoft announced its bid for ABK. Five months later, the CWA signed a neutrality agreement with Microsoft, in which the company agreed not to do anything to deter union organizing efforts. Two weeks after that, the CWA sent its letter to the FTC.
There was a clear quid pro quo at work, in which Microsoft exchanged a neutrality agreement with the CWA in exchange for the bureaucracy’s support for the merger. There are no doubt other concessions that the CWA agreed to which have not been made public yet.
Such deals are often worked out by union officials in exchange for “neutrality agreements.” This included concessions agreed to by the International Association of Machinists in 2008 as part of the deal to bring it into Boeing’s newly acquired plant in Charleston, South Carolina, and a 2014 secret agreement between the United Auto Workers and Volkswagen.
The CWA, which only weeks prior had expanded into Microsoft-owned game company ZeniMax Studios, has hardly said a word about the 10,000 layoffs that Microsoft announced earlier this year. Its only public statement on January did not even make a show of opposing the layoffs, declaring instead that “Members of the ZeniMax worker bargaining committee will be developing proposals that reflect their needs and provide alternatives to layoffs.” In other words, they will propose cuts equal to the cost savings sought in layoffs by Microsoft.
The CWA has sold out one strike after another in companies where it has long had a presence. This includes the shutdown of the strike by 40,000 Verizon workers in 2016 and the strike in 2019 by 22,000 AT&T workers in the US South.
Those tech workers who have joined the CWA or who will decide to join the CWA at Microsoft and ABK will now have to grapple with the problem of the union bureaucracy, which uses them as pawns to establish close and lucrative working ties with management. To fight this, it is necessary to learn from the example of unionized autoworkers, railroad workers and others and form rank-and-file committees to oppose both management and the betrayals of the pro-company union bureaucracy.
SILICON VALLEY IS NOW INDIA EAST!
IT'S NOT JUST HIGH TECH JOBS THEY GET. IT'S ALL BANKS, INCLUDING WELLS FAROG AND BANK OF AMERICAN, WHICH ONLY HIRES INDIANS.
And these Indians, the team that I work with, they cannot even speak a single sentence in English without making any mistakes.
“The B-1 visa is the main vehicle to cheat American [college graduates] out of jobs,” said Jay Palmer, an expert on forced labor and human trafficking, and a former advisor to President Donald Trump. He continued:
Lawsuit Exposes B-1 Visa Fraud in College-Grad Jobs
American professional Michael Harmon has just earned about $1 million by exposing visa fraud within an Indian company that does subcontract work for Fortune 500 companies.
The company defrauded the government by importing Indian college-graduate workers on B-1 visas that are only for non-working business visitors. Harmon exposed the visa fraud and earned a share of the $9.9 million federal fine with his Qui Tam lawsuit.
The Department of Justice said:
L&T Technology Services, LTD (“LTTS”), a company based in India, with U.S. offices in Edison New Jersey, has agreed to pay $9,928,000 to resolve allegations that between 2014 and 2019, LTTS underpaid visa fees owed to the United States by acquiring inexpensive B-1 visas, rather than more expensive H-1B visas, in alleged violation of the False Claims Act.
“The B-1 visa is the main vehicle to cheat American [college graduates] out of jobs,” said Jay Palmer, an expert on forced labor and human trafficking, and a former advisor to President Donald Trump. He continued:
Companies encourage [foreign] individuals to get a B-1 visa to come to the United States and work. They work these workers on 1099s [as contractors] with no benefits and they pay them through third-party consulting companies. Sometimes, the worker will be able to get an Individual Tax Identification Number and work undetectably for 10 years.
The fraud behind this visa is more rampant than any other visa we have in the United States.
Palmer applauded Harmon the whistleblower, saying, “Being a whistleblower is not an easy task — you have to have intestinal fortitude.”
Several other B-1 qui tam lawsuits are being litigated.
Palmer is familiar with the B-1 fraud because he works with many Indians who have overstayed their visas and are looking for ways to get legal status.
The B-1 fraud is easy to accomplish and rarely detected or penalized by federal agencies, Palmer said:
All you have to do is have an outbound and a return flight to the United States –that’s all. What they do is they get an outbound flight [to the United States]… and they cancel their return, get the money and go to work.
They’re coming over here legally but becoming illegal [by working]. When they’re over here, they’re getting driver’s licenses, some are even getting Social Security numbers … they’re not supposed to, but they’re still issued.
They come to the United States and they never leave. Most people working in a convenience store are over here on B-1 visas [often working for foreign managers with E-2 visas]. Hundreds of thousands are working on white-collar jobs.
The fraud is difficult for ordinary Americans to detect — even when it is happening in the next cubicle.
The commonplace B-1 fraud is disguised amid the churning population of 1.5 million-plus foreign graduates who are working in the United States under a wide variety of legal visas.
Those temporary work visas include H-1Bs, TNs, L-1s, J-1s, and the “Optional Practical Training” work permit for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges. The legal visa workers often switch workplaces because they are employed by Indian-owned subcontractors, and often go home to avoid an obvious overstay of their temporary visas.
The B-1 fraud problem is further hidden by foreign graduates who overstay their visas to become illegal gig workers in the layers of subcontractors under Fortune 500 companies.
The huge flood of foreign college graduates is forcing down the workplace clout and the salaries of American professionals because the foreign workers will accept very low salaries to stay in the United States. In February, Bloomberg News reported:
In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.
The government-delivered inflow of foreign workers is pushing many Americans out of white-collar technology jobs and into lower-wage, blue-collar jobs.
“I have seen the [hiring] system in the backend, and it is so appalling to see that there is so much [resume] forgery being done, there’s so much of corruption being done, that it is almost to the level back in India,” Aabha, an Indian contract worker in North Carolina, told Breitbart News. She continued:
I have met so many [American] people who are graduates and so much more knowledgeable than the Indians that I see in my regular day — and they are [saying] like “Okay, because we are not experienced, we are not getting [U.S. technology] jobs.” So they decide to do a blue collar job. They’re walking into Walmart, they’re walking into Best Buy.
And these Indians, the team that I work with, they cannot even speak a single sentence in English without making any mistakes.
Yet President Joe Biden’s officials are trying to import as many foreign workers as they can, even as Fortune 500 companies fire thousands of American professionals.
“The top 30 H-1B employers hired 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 and laid off at least 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023,” said an April 11 report by the left-wing Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Those layoffs include many visa workers, who are required by law to return home once their job disappears.
In response, Biden’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency is allowing the laid-off H-1B visa workers to get six-month B-1 visas so they have more time to win new jobs that are also being sought by U.S. graduates.
“[We are] aware, of course, of the many recent layoffs in the technology sector, [so] we published options and useful information for [foreign] employees across the country facing termination and those in this vulnerable situation,” said USCIS director Ur Jaddou said April 11.
“Searching for employment in the United States does not fall under the meaning of a legitimate business activity for the purpose of B-1 visa eligibility,” responded Elizabeth Jacobs, a lawyer with the Center for Immigration Studies.
Very few of the illegally-working B-1 graduates are deported, mostly because of Silicon Valley’s huge influence in the White House and in both parties. This week, for example, Indian media outlets reported that four House members from California are pressuring USCIS to ensure that laid-off Indian workers are not sent home. The legislators are Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Ro Khanna, Jimmy Panetta, and Kevin Mullin.
The Democrats’ support for foreign workers over their own swing-voting, college-educated voters could be an opportunity for GOP strategists. But GOP leaders show no willingness to reject the cheap-labor demands of their own business donors.
Biden’s federal agencies also make the white-collar fraud easier by bundling B-2 tourist visas with the B-1 visitor visas, Palmer said. “They should separate these and charge more for them,” he said.
“The United States issued over 16 million of these [B-1/B-2 visas] a year and they’re nontraceable, basically — this is the same visa that some of the 9/11 terrorists came in on,” Palmer added.
Breitbart has covered some of the many cases of B-1 fraud within the Fortune 500’s pyramids of Indian-managed subcontracting companies and gig workers.
In 2013, another Indian firm paid a fine of $33 million for cheating the government as it allegedly replaced American hires with smuggled Indian college graduates. But most of the B-1 fraud is tolerated by agencies, prosecutors, and politicians. In 2019, Breitbart News reported;
Infosys, one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies, allegedly cheated 500 American graduates out of jobs over 11 years from 2006 to 2017 — and will only have to pay $800,000, without admitting guilt, in a settlement with California’s attorney general.
The attorney general, Xavier Becerra, now runs the Department of Health and Human Services for President Joe Biden.
However, under President Donald Trump, the reform-minded officials in the agencies began to crack down on the B-1 fraud. “They tried but it didn’t work,” Palmer said.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, immigration chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats
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.
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
By failures of border security, a lack of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States and huge numbers of visas for high tech workers, the lives and livelihoods of Americans and their children, are being stolen by America’s corrupt political elite who are doing the bidding of those who provide them with huge “Campaign Contributions” (Orwellian euphemism for bribes) pursue legislation that is diametrically opposed to the best interests of America and Americans.
MICHAEL CUTLER
Report: Facebook to Cut Thousands of Jobs in Latest Corporate Downsizing
February 22, 2023
(Reuters)—Facebook-parent Meta Platforms Inc is planning a fresh round of job cuts in a reorganization and downsizing effort that could affect thousands of workers, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last year, the social media giant said it will let go of 13% of its workforce, or more than 11,000 employees, as it grappled with soaring costs and a weak advertising market.
Meta plans to push some leaders into lower-level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management between top boss Mark Zuckerberg and the company's interns, the Washington Post reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
(Reporting by Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
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.
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
By failures of border security, a lack of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States and huge numbers of visas for high tech workers, the lives and livelihoods of Americans and their children, are being stolen by America’s corrupt political elite who are doing the bidding of those who provide them with huge “Campaign Contributions” (Orwellian euphemism for bribes) pursue legislation that is diametrically opposed to the best interests of America and Americans.
MICHAEL CUTLER
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Claims No Amnesty Ensures Midterm Defeat for Democrats
The Facebook-funded FWD.us investor advocacy group is touting the claim that Democrat turnout will drop in 2022 if the party cannot pass an amnesty through Congress.
But that claim is toothless, in large part because recent polls show that many Americans of Latino ancestry are increasingly voting for the GOP, precisely because GOP leaders oppose the amnesty-amplified wave of cheap labor into their communities.
The claim is being made by pro-migration groups, including the leaders of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) which denounced the Senate’s parliamentarian’s decision to exclude the parole amnesty for 6.5 million illegals from the draft Build Back Better spending plan.
NDLON declared Thursday night:
Democrats’ excuses for their failure, for their incompetence, and for their insincerity will be the ammunition used by xenophobes in the Republican Party to retake control of the federal government in upcoming elections. Inaction on immigration legalization risks further propelling Trumpism in every possible way … No more excuses. Where there is a will, there is a way.
The NDLON group represents illegal migrants, most of whom work for very low wages, and none of whom can vote in U.S. elections.
Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) is making the same claim, according to Bloomberg, which reported that he “warned that Democrats would face wrath from voters in the 2022 elections if they don’t secure a citizenship path”
But the NDLON claim is being echoed by the politically powerful investor class, who use imported workers, consumers, and renters to spike the value of their Wall Street investments.
Todd Schulte is the president of the FWD.us advocacy group for investors, which gets about $30 million a year from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to push for more migration. On Thursday night, he tweeted:
Schulte’s deputy also pushed a hard line:
Unsurprisingly, FWD.us has a hidden agenda in the amnesty debate.
The establishment media extensively cover the proposed parole amnesty for 6.5 million illegal migrants. But the media largely ignores two other proposed changes to immigration laws that would deliver huge benefits to West Coast investors who created the FWD.us advocacy group in 2013.
For example, the BBB legislation would allow the White House to provide green cards to millions of favored migrants, including perhaps three million “chain migrants” selected by recent immigrants. This open-doors policy would provide investors with millions of new profit-generating consumers, renters, and workers.
The BBB legislation would also allow President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies to sell green cards to at least one million migrants who have taken many of the Fortune 500 jobs sought by skilled U.S. college graduates. This change would allow Fortune 500 companies to hire many more foreign graduates with dangled offers of fast-track green cards. These workers are usually imported via the visa worker programs, such as the H-1B and Optional Practical Training program.
But those two benefits for the Fortune 500 investors may be dropped if the Democrat senators cannot also get their amnesty for illegal migrants.
On Friday, an advocacy group for corporate-funded immigration lawyers urged Congress to keep pushing the green card giveaway, even after the amnesty was nixed:
“The corporate guys are riding on perceived sympathy for the illegal alien population in order to get their immigration giveaways,” said Robert Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
The Hispanic population knows immigration is a pocketbook issue for them as well, and mass illegal immigration — plus legal immigration — hurts the economic opportunities of Hispanic Americans or the black community, or any people who typically are competing at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
The Senate’s debate referee has not issued any judgments on the two green card proposals.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters. The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.
FWD.us’also spotlights many family dramas amid the inflow of border migrants. This focus helps keep reporters from recognizing the huge pocketbook impact of the establishment’s economic policy of mass migration. The resulting family-drama coverage also keeps many young progressives from noticing that the extraction migration policy drives up their rents and cuts their salaries.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at other sites.
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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