Wells Fargo Must Die — Wells Fargo has been ordered to pay $3.7 billion for numerous crimes including wrongfully foreclosing on homes, illegally repossessing vehicles,incorrectly assessing fees and interest, and charging surprise overdraft fees.
The fines were levied by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The CFPB went too easy. The corporation should have been sent into oblivion and its officers to jail.
The only difference between what Wells Fargo did and that of a burglary is scale. The publicly traded, Wall Street-respected, establishment-protected corporation caused far more misery and suffering than the local lowlife could ever dream.
Let Wells Fargo die.
Tradition should be turned on its head in any legal proceeding in which they are involved with the presumption of guilt the standard.
Corporations like this are why some find socialism attractive.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new chief executive officer, and the firings he immediately called for that included H-1B visa holders, as well as the tech industry’s mass, across-the-board layoffs, raise a three-decade-old question: should the H-1B visa be eliminated, and should U.S. tech workers be put first in line for the white-collar, well-paid jobs?
Musk, who completed his $44 billion Twitter takeover last month, declared that he would end lifetime bans from his platform and tweeted that diverse viewpoints would be welcome. He has a golden opportunity not only to end censorship and restore free speech as he’s promised, but to also hire U.S. tech workers when workforce needs again grow.
Going forward, Musk would have a chance to replace the Twitter employees that he’s fired with U.S. tech workers. The firings – about half the Twitter staff, or around 3,700 employees – are allegedly a cost-cutting measure. He summarily dismissed big earners like CEO Parag Agrawal, $30 million annually; Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, $18.9 million; Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, $17 million; and General Counsel Sean Edgett, whose salary is unknown, but likely in the same range as his peers. A class action lawsuit was filed against Twitter in San Francisco federal court claiming that the employees were not given the mandatory 60-day notice prior to the layoffs.
Many of the fired Twitter workers may be in the double-whammy vortex. As H-1B employees, unless they find another job within 60 days or successfully change their immigration status, they must leave the U.S. or risk deportation. H-1B holders who are legally required to leave must depart and not overstay their visas which the federal government clearly identifies as temporary. The U.S. Immigration and Immigration Services estimates that about 8 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, between 625 and 670, have H-1B visas.
Tech and social media are either laying off workers by the thousands or imposing hiring freezes. With Intel’s 20 percent slash, Snapchat’s 20 percent cut and hiring freezes at Amazon and Apple, H-1B holders are on edge. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, cut 11,000 jobs, 13 percent of its staff, after Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his so-called metaverse project was a $15 billion bomb. Meta/Facebook is in a tough spotvis-à-vis its H-1B layoffs. Per the Department of Labor classification, this means 15 percent or more of Meta’s full-time employees are H-1B nonimmigrant workers.
For more than 30 years, Silicon Valley and other employers have falsely claimed that without nonimmigrant H-1B visa employees, their businesses would suffer. Yet now, with widespread tech layoffs that include H-1B holders, admitting 85,000 international workers in 2023, the visa’s annual cap, would further hurt U.S. tech workers who are either displaced and forced to train their replacements or denied interviews. Because H-1B employees are cheaper to hire than U.S. tech graduates, the corporate elite prefer them over more skilled, more well-educated Americans.
The Wall Street Journal hosted a panel discussion that featured two advocates who favor expanding the H-1B program and one critic who urges major reforms. The advocates, David Bier, the Cato Institute’s immigration studies associate director, and Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s managing director of immigration and cross-border policy, argued that the H-1B visa cap should be increased and that their labor market presence makes America a more prosperous place.
The critic, Dr. Ron Hira, Howard University, political science associate professor and Economic Policy Institute research associate, countered that the rigged H-1B system is a transfer-of-wealth scam that makes the employers wealthy winners, and the workers, low-wage losers. Dr. Hira added that employers aren’t required to prove that a U.S. worker shortage exists before hiring an H-1B, that H-1B workers’ wages are set too low, and that the compliance system doesn’t hold employers accountable. “Guest-worker programs are supposed to fill domestic labor shortages. The H-1B program does not fill shortages,” Dr. Hira said.
The Journal debate represents the challenge that H-1B critics face. No matter how many H-1B visa holders lose their jobs, or how economically depressed the tech sector is, the demand for more visas will remain. Pro-immigration media supporters like the Journal, immigration advocacy groups, lawyers, corporate America and the powerful Chamber of Commerce will incessantly lobby Congress for more, more, more H-1B visas.
Ray Marshall, President Jimmy Carter’s Labor Secretary and University of Texas Professor Emeritus, gave a no-frills summary of the H-1B that its advocates should heed: “One of the best con jobs ever done on the American public and political systems…H-1B pays below market rate. If you’ve got H-1B workers, you don’t have to do training or pay good wages.” Musk has an opportunity to set an example for Meta and others to follow: hire U.S. tech workers.
Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Russia Ruble Rule Heralds Hard Times — Russia is demanding that it’s oil and natural gas be purchased with rubles and not dollars or euros, and they are serious.
We’ll have to think more about what we eat and where we eat and what we buy and where we vacation.
Really you don’t have to blow $8,700 for a week at pervo-run Disney World, when it will be far more memorable — and cheaper — to rent a cabin on a lake and teach your kids to fish.
Moderna CEO Deletes Twitter Account — Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, has deleted his Twitter account dumped about $230 million in stock over the last year.
Groupon Selling Nike, Which Means Nike Is Not Selling — Groupon, the website that lets merchants move underselling merchandise, is offering Nike products. Just do it? Just sayin.
We will not do it, for what it’s worth. Nike uses slave labor. Nike — and Coca Cola for that matter — support slavery.
A tragedy occurred outside of Holtville, California, when a northbound big rig rammed into the driver’s side of an SUV that pulled out in front of the semi-truck, killing 13 people. This tragic event morphed into the surreal when we learned that the SUV was packed with 25 people who had been smuggled into the United States.
That’s right, 24 passengers and a driver packed like sardines in a vehicle designed to hold eight adults at maximum. Perhaps the driver who hailed from Mexicali, Mexico, was distracted when he pulled out in front of the semi making its way down Route 115. Anyone who has been in a Ford Expedition has to be thinking to themselves, HOW? How do you get 25 people into a vehicle like that?
Well, you start with ruthless, morally shipwrecked cartels that make steep profits trafficking humans across the border. Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies recently wrote that cartels expect to make $2,500 per individual smuggled from Mexico. When we do the math, that SUV had a human cargo valued around $60,000.
To give an example of just how revolting this incident is, one has to go back to the American slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to History.com, slave ships could be either “tight pack” or “loose pack.” A tight pack could hold more slaves than the loose pack, because the amount of space allocated to each slave was considerably less, but more slaves would die on route to the Americas. It would appear the cartels these days have chosen the tight pack model.
Next, you have to look at the people making the journey to enter the U.S. illegally. Coming from Mexico, they have to fork over the $2,500 and be willing to place their lives in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers. How many other deprivations do they suffer along the way, and what motivates them to do so?
The motivation is to rush to the border and be physically present in the U.S. while the Biden administration plays musical chairs with immigration policy. Will the Biden administration win sweeping amnesties for illegal aliens, or will it fail to deliver on its promises? Many people are betting on the former and are engaged in a desperate and dangerous run to bust through the border in an attempt to claim a chair when the music stops.
Since Jan. 20, Americans have become more apprehensive of the Biden administration’s plans to make sweeping changes to immigration. The majority of Americans are in fact becoming more restrictionist as opposed to expansionist in their views.
The Rasmussen Immigration Index for the week of Feb. 14 – 18, 2021, fell to 86.0, and it’s fallen by nearly 15 points since the week before the November election. This shows voters want tighter immigration control from President Biden’s administration. Right now, the Immigration Index is the lowest since it began in December 2019.
The administration is playing with dynamite, and has pinned itself in a corner that leaves two ways out. They can either abolish the border or enforce our immigration mandates to the fullest extent of the law. To do anything less is to invite more tragedy the likes of which we saw last week.
It is not just traffickers who profit off this immoral trade. There are a dozen industries that profit from cheap, compliant and easy to abuse labor. When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, there were roughly 750 meat packing plants across the country. My mother worked the front counter of a local one called Lustig’s. The work and pay were good.
Today, 80 percent of our beef products come from three companies. The work and pay are bad. These huge factory meat processors rely on a steady stream of illegal aliens. Their business model would not work without them, and only when compelled to do so by ICE raids are they inclined to pay more, offer benefits and improve work conditions to attract a native workforce.
Neoliberal technocrats also are culpable in this and other tragedies stemming from the trafficking of illegal aliens. These are the toadies that carry the water for the oligarchs who seek to maximize profit via the unbridled movement of people and capital across international borders. They despise the concept of the nation state with its quaint and, in their minds, antiquated concepts of societal norms and democracy. They filter and shape the news and commentary to fit their deranged world views. And in this way, they are most culpable in all of this.
Kevin Lynn is the executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform. Contact him at klynn@pfirdc.org.
Corporate Fascist America, OWS Was Right — The mask is off corporate America and the means it plans to use to control the populace comes right out of 1984 or maybe the Book of Revelation.
Will it demand a mark on our hands for us to buy and sell? It seems they may soon have the power if they don’t already.
What makes us laugh is the idealistic socialists who think they have won something. They really think the reach of the Gates and Bezos and Buffet will decline.
For the record we still maintain the vote fraud was real and massive, and Biden is an illegitimate president. Saying this was once solidly protected speech.
Prominent politicians, though, that would be you Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John “Fascist” Fetterman, are saying it should be a crime. If the Democrats pack the courts, as some think, maybe it will be in a few months.
Dominion Voting Systems is threatening lawsuits left and right against those saying there are problems with their machines.
Rather than using courts to squelch the questions, the matter would once have been resolved by examining the machines as was done in Antrim County, Mich.
Of course, Dominion refutes what was found in Antrim County, but shouldn’t that just mean more investigation? Why the, rather fanatical, opposition to examining machines and ballots?
The matter would be far more likely to get resolved and the nation united.
But that’s not going happen. It’s not the will of the plutocrats.
The laugh’s on you Occupy Wall Street. And us too, for that matter. Actually, on everyone who is not in line for a six-figure government pension.
Chinook Block II Will Keep Delco Plant Busy Until 2035 Says Boeing — Boeing Defense has been boasting on Twitter that the latest version of it Chinook H-47 helicopter will keep its plant in Ridley, Pa. busy for the next 15 to 20 years.
Boeing says 542 aircraft will be coming to the plant for upgrades which include new rotor blades, a new drivetrain, an enhanced fuselage and redesigned fuel tanks.
The Block II will replace the F model and carry 2,000 pounds more bringing the maximum load to 22,000 pounds.
The Chinook first flew on Sept. 21, 1961.
Chinook Block II Will Keep Delco Plant Busy Until 2035 Says Boeing
Aqua Backing Carolyn Comitta — Carolyn Comitta, who is seeking to replace fellow Democrat Andy Dinniman to represent the 19th District in the Pennsylvania Senate, is backed by Aqua America.
The Bryn Mawr-based, now-national water company that once called itself Springfield Water Co. and the Philadelphia Suburban Water Co. but now calls itself Essential Utilities gave a grand to Carolyn in April. Wonder why they want her to win.
Could it have anything to do with their lust for the locally owned Chester Water Authority?
Guess we know where Carolyn, who now represents the 156th District in the State House, comes down on the matter.
Hey did you see where Aqua — excuse us Essential Utilities — is making beaucoup bucks supplying water to frackers in the Marcellus Shale? Not that we have any problem with it but we kind of wonder how much that warms the hearts of Dinniman’s voters.
