Nike Buys Slaves, You Don’t, Wake Up — We reported this July 24 but we’ll reiterate. An investigation by Forbes has revealed that Nike literally buys slaves to make its products. This occurs in China and the slaves are Moslem Uighurs. Among the ways these slaves are advertised is from online postings proclaimingThe advantages of Xinjiang workers are: semi-military style management, can withstand hardship, no loss of personnel … Minimum order 100 workers!
Does Nike brand its Uighur slaves with this? Just don’t it.
If you buy Nike products you support slavery. Before you read this maybe could plead ignorance but now, not so much.
Not everything made overseas is with slave labor, and there are things you have little choice in buying. Branded apparel is not one of them, though, especially when it comes from a brand that might be the biggest hypocrite in merchandising history.
It’s not hyperbole to say that if you buy Nike you support slavery.
Remember that next time someone talks about “white privilege”. Especially if it is from a guy who became an even bigger one-percenter when he figured out a new scam after he lost a step on the gridiron, or from a billionairess who got her wealth pandering and promoting perversion.
Really, how many slaves have you ever owned? Infinitely less than Nike.
Theranos Director Blasts Trump, Mattis Likes His $$ — Gen. Jim Mattis joined the Marines Corps Reserve in 1969 then commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1972 missing out on Vietnam. He rose through the ranks becoming a four-star general in 2005.
In the right vs Theranos guy
If one wants to be a cynic one can say his most notable achievement was coining the phrase “no better friend, no worse enemy” with regard to the Marines.
After retiring from the military, Mattis joined the boards of General Dynamics, a major cog in the military-industrial complex, and Theranos, a bio-tech firm that, well, you can read about it here and elsewhere.
Mattis pushed to have Theranos’ blood-testing tech used by combat troops. That would not have been a good thing.
President Trump upon his election naively picked the Mattis as his Secretary of Defense. After two tension-filled years Mattis quit when Trump insisted on troop withdrawals from the Mideast. Mattis returned to General Dynamics and more big bucks.
But hey, he’s a patriot. Don’t criticize or question those making our (and others) bombs and guns.
As rioters loot businesses, burn churches, abuse citizens and ambush police, Mattis is now blaming Trump. How dare he defend the public! How dare he divide the nation! Hey General, the only major pol in D.C. that could have stopped Derek Chauvin was Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Mn). Just saying.
Of course, these riots have nothing to do with the murder of George Floyd. It’s a planned insurrection and if it wasn’t Mr. Floyd’s death it would have been something else. Yes, General, use of the military is warranted although we strongly suspect that the gang at G-D is sympathetic to the insurrection. Anything to get rid of an obstacle to overseas wars, right?
Theranos Director Blasts Trump, Mattis Likes His $$
Globalist Panic That Trump Might Cut Tech Foreign Workers
By Joe Guzzardi
Time is short to the (June 22) expiration of President Trump’s Executive Order that suspended some immigration, and expansionists are pulling out all the stops. At stake is employment-based visas’ short-term future, specifically whether the White House will permit this year’s annual 85,000 allotment of foreign-born H-1B workers to enter.
A recent Forbes story written by immigration advocate Stuart Anderson claims that since the tech sector unemployment rate is low and declining – 2.8 percent in April versus 3 percent in January – the Trump administration would be remiss to include the employment-based H-1B visa as part of a suspension strategy. To make his point, Anderson selectively chose data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey that supports his perspective.
But the bigger picture that Anderson ignored is the most important one. Employment statistics vary from month to month; employers lay off U.S. tech workers, but retain cheaper imported workers. But the addition of 85,000 H-1B visa holders will represent a permanent fixture in the labor market, because the H-1B is a dual-intent visa, meaning that holders can enter the U.S. on temporary status while simultaneously seeking lawful permanent residency. In other words, the new H-1B visa holders aren’t going home.
If tech employers are truly stretched thin, as they allege, their first consideration should be to tap into the hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers that H-1B visa holders have, over the last three decades, displaced. The list of corporations that use the H-1B visa to exile U.S. workers to the sidelines, after forcing those fired Americans to train their foreign-born replacements, is longer than Wilt Chamberlain’s arm. Among them are nationally known names like Disney, Apple, Facebook, Starbucks, Uber and Walmart.
A newcomer to the list is the Tennessee Valley Authority which announced earlier this month that it would outsource 20 percent of its highly skilled, American-born technology workforce to Capgemini, CGI and Accenture, companies headquartered in France, Canada and Ireland, respectively.
At least 120 workers learned they will lose their jobs later this summer, and the TVA informed the Engineering Association/Local 1937 that eventually another 100 jobs will be outsourced. Last month, affected workers were advised that they too would be required to train their replacements, a procedure deceptively labeled “knowledge transfer.” The TVA is a federally owned corporate agency originally designed to bring jobs to the impoverished Tennessee Valley during the Great Depression. Although TVA employees are unionized, they still can’t escape the foreign worker displacement scourge. Similar public utility displacement programs played out in California when Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric fired their U.S. tech workers and either outsourced their jobs or imported H-1B workers.
Originally, Congress created the H-1B visa program to complement the U.S. workforce. Instead, loopholes encourage abuses, pave the way for employers to bump Americans and deny opportunities to recent college graduates. Moreover, a relatively new displacement vehicle that creates roadblocks for young Americans is the never-congressionally approved Optional Practical Training Program. Initiated by the Bush 43 administration, and kept through President Trump’s three-plus White House years, OPT allows a maximum three years of employment to alien U.S. college graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math. OPT provides generous tax subsidies to employers and has mushroomed into a huge foreign-born worker bonanza. More than 1.5 million OPT STEM workershold jobs that should go to Americans.
Despite what elitists, globalists, immigration lobbyists and the American Immigration Lawyers Association claim with their misleading reports and cherry-picked statistics, no intellectually sound argument that favors more H-1B visas, or more of any employment-based visas, can be made.
The ball is in President Trump’s court. He can either fulfill his 2016 campaign promise to “forever end” the H-1B visa or allow himself to be ridden roughshod over by anti-American worker advocates that include his son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner. Last year, more than 900,000 new temporary work visas were issued, and more than 1.8 million work permits were granted or renewed. That’s a total of 2.7 million overseas workers entering an economy that today has more than 36 million unemployed. Among those 2.7 million were nearly 190,000 in the professional category, mostly H-1Bs. They joined approximately 500,000 settled H-1B workers.
American workers always deserve to come ahead of imported labor. Today, with the nation in the grip of the most painful economy since Herbert Hoover’s presidency, American employment must be the nation’s top priority.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Globalist Panic That Trump Might Cut Tech Foreign Workers
Dems Hate America, The Proof –Here’s a story that you likely missed. When the cost of oil crashed in March, President Trump sought to restock the strategic petroleum reserve. The Democrats killed the $3 billion deal a week later. They called it a bailout for big business. Leave aside a purchase at what was thought at the time a bargain basement price to fill a strategic need is anything but a bailout, failing to recognize that a strong domestic oil industry is necessary to our security is rather anti-American. It’s almost treasonous.
The treason party
But they did it. No harm though. When the price of oil went negative, Trump offered to let the oil companies use the strategic reserve for storage, and the oil firms took him up on it using oil in lieu of dollars to pay the rent. Win-win all around, it seems. It was actually kind of brilliant on Trump’s part.
One downside is that the original plan called for filling the reserve to its capacity which would have required 77 million barrels The new plan calls for the storage of just 30 million barrels and, of course, the oil companies continue to own the stored oil.
Still the Democrat Party sabotaged a plan to increase our security at a bargain basement price and help an essential, job-intensive industry. We’ll call it treason.
Diamond Princess Coronavirus Benchmark — Stocks have fallen more than 4,000 points in eight days as of 11 a.m., Feb. 28 on Coronavirus COVID-19 fears. Is the sell-off rational? Frankly, if this thing is going to be an apocalyptic disaster, we’d be less worried about our investments and more interested in stocking up on alcohol wipes and food supplies.
OK, and alcohol without the wipes.
What good is money going to be at the end of the world?
And if this in not going to be the apocalypse, the market is going to be totally cooking when certainty returns in a few months.
So is it the apocalypse? The Diamond Princess seems a good indicator. The British-registered vessel operated by Princess Cruises packs 3,700 passengers and crew in a space about three football-fields long and and height of a mid-sized skyscraper. It’s more densely populated than any city in the world.
The virus is believed to have crept onto the ship on Jan. 20. It was discovered 16 days later. As of yesterday — 38 days after the virus arrived — 705 cases have been confirmed which is about 19 percent of the population with five deaths, the latest being a British man. That’s a .07 percent fatality rate so far.
Johns Hopkins is providing good data regarding the spread of the disease and that can be found here.
Concern is required but panic is not. The stock market will come back, and food and alcohol will not go to waste.
In what has become an annual display of businesses’ addiction to cheap labor, commerce leaders are lobbying the acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Chad Wolf, to increase the H-2B visa cap. The H-2B is a seasonal, temporary, nonagricultural visa with a current 66,000 cap, and is frequently used in landscaping, hospitality and construction industries – blue-collar jobs where wages have been stagnant for years. Last year, the cap was increased by 30,000 visas.
Adding foreign-born workers to an economy that President Trump touts as the greatest in America’s history would be counter-productive and hurtful to middle-class U.S. workers who are just starting to benefit from a tight labor market. A record-high 158.8 million Americans are currently employed.
The H-2B visa has a long history of being used by employers to pass over qualified Americans and, under the false labor shortage narrative, hire instead cheap, pliant foreign-born labor. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report confirmed that multiple employers in numerous states violated wage, housing and documentation standards among H-2B workers. And a Buzz Feed News exposé based on Labor Department statistics and titled “All You Americans Are Fired” found that “many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers….”
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that mass immigration, which the U.S. has experienced for decades, adversely affects the wages of Americans who compete directly with new immigrants for employment. Expansionists argue that immigration grows the economy, a half-truth. More people mean a bigger economy, but per capita income suffers. From the CBO: “And there are many new immigrant workers to compete with. Immigrants account for about half of all newcomers to the workforce each year.” The CBO concluded that wages are negatively affected in whatever category in which American workers must compete in a labor market artificially inflated by mass immigration.
The degree to which Americans have suffered because of a surfeit of immigrant labor is eye-opening. Census Bureau data from the first quarter of 2019 show that 5 million adult immigrants without a bachelor’s degree have been allowed to settle in the country just since 2010. As a result, wages have stagnated or declined for the less educated. Since 2000, the bottom quarter of earners saw just a 4.3 percent real-wage increase – equivalent to an annual raise of just 0.2 percent. An immigrant labor overage most adversely affects teenagers, U.S.-born blacks and other minorities.
Despite pleas from big business that H-2B visa hikes are necessary to offset an acute labor shortage, and even avoid bankruptcy, numerous nonpartisan studies find no evidence of scarcity. Among other respected bipartisan organizations, the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal, pro-immigration, Washington, D.C.-based research firm found “no evidence at all of labor shortages in the labor market.”
The H-2B visa has been so flawed for so long, and has been so harmful to American workers, that even hard-core pro-immigration Democratic senators have written to Wolf and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia urging them to reject corporate crocodile tears about worker shortages. Calif. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Conn. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Ill. Senator Richard Durbin, all of whom throughout their long congressional careers have consistently voted in favor of more employment-based visas, joined their Republican colleagues Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley and Ark. Sen. Tom Cotton to object to increases in the existing 66,000 cap. In their letter to Wolf and Scalia, the senators asserted that the H-2B visa incentivizes employers to hire foreign nationals and pass over qualified Americans.
President Trump is the wild card in the equation. From time to time, the president has demonstrated an understanding about how excessive immigration hurts American workers. But President Trump’s recent comments about the need for more skilled immigration, talking points taken straight from the Chamber of Commerce’s playbook, have the pro-American labor lobby on edge. As is often said around Capitol Hill, when it comes to President Trump’s thinking, no one ever knows.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Uber, the multinational ride-hailing company that burst onto the scene in 2009, and made Yellow Cab passé, has, at least superficially, enjoyed a phenomenal success record. Only a little more than a decade after its formation, Uber operates in more than 60 countries, 785 municipal centers and has an estimated 110 million worldwide users.
The San Francisco-based Uber also, like its Silicon Valley neighbors Facebook, Apple, eBay, Google and Yahoo, among others, has displaced its U.S. software engineers with H-1B visa holders. Like its corporate partners-in-crime, Uber denies the charges that it laid off Americans in favor of employing foreign nationals.
But in its investigative journalism story, TheMercury News reported that Uber’s Sept. 10 filing with California’s employment regulator showed that in August it had laid off 88 workers from its San Francisco offices, and in October would lay off 320 more in its San Francisco and Palo Alto offices. Most were senior software engineers.
During 2019’s first three quarters, Uber filed about 1,800 preliminary applications with the Labor Department for H-1B visas for new software engineer jobs and about 1,500 for new senior software engineer jobs, proof that the company hopes to hire visa holders to replace the outgoing U.S. tech workers.
More evidence that money motivates the cheap labor-addicted Uber: its applications put nearly half the senior software engineer positions at the Labor Department’s Level 2 wages, the same level it listed for more than half of the non-senior jobs: a minimum of $109,242 for employment in Palo Alto and $121,077 in San Francisco.
But Ron Hira, a Howard University associate professor and H-1B expert, told The Mercury News that the Labor Department says that any software engineer’s job description that includes “senior” in its title should command a Level 3 wage, $132,184 in Palo Alto, and $147,597 in San Francisco.
Uber is just one more craven employer to terminate qualified Americans and replace them with pliant foreign workers. For example, in 2015, Toys “R” Usand Disney laid off their most experienced employees and, after forcing the outgoing Americans to train their less qualified replacements, filled the jobs with H-1Bs visa holders. Before and after 2015, the pattern of Americans out, visa holders in has been well established.
In its November 2019 report, Challenger Gray & Christmas, Inc., a global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm, stated that the tech sector announced 7,292 cuts in November. Furthermore, through November, tech companies estimated that they would reduce their payrolls by an additional 63,447 jobs. Tech’s annual job slashing total is 380 percent higher than the 13,222 cuts it announced during the same period in 2018 – 380 percent higher!
With H-1B visa abuse finally on Americans’ radar, President Trump is on the spot to deliver on the grandiose campaign promises he made to get tough. From candidate Trump’s March 2016 press release: “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”
Author, lawyer and long-time H-1B critic John Miano put together a list of seven steps that the president could take that include working with Congress to write legislation that would prevent foreign nationals from displacing Americans. But President Trump’s early promises have proven empty; he’s done little to alleviate the scandalous displacement of U.S. tech workers.
The H-1B visa benefits only the foreign nationals who come to the U.S. to take good jobs and the employers that hire them. The big losers are displaced Americans who will struggle to find new jobs. Also, on the stick’s short end are recent university STEM graduates who will be shut out because of employers’ cheap labor addictions. Congress and President Trump have, so far, refused to protect Americans.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Not good. We went to the Walmart site. The same peanut oil was $32.48.
To get the free next-day shipping we needed $35. The site suggested a few items to bring it up to what was needed. We added a bottle of bleach for $2.67.
One can always use bleach.
So for $5 less than Amazon, Walmart gave us our peanut oil and a bottle of bleach.
Turning the calendar from October to November brought more than trick-or-treaters, pumpkins, and leaves to rake. It also brought a wave of important economic updates that delivered more treats than tricks and helped the stock markets reach new highs.
Those new highs may be causing you to feel a bit wary, however, wondering if the end is nearing for what is now the longest bull market ever recorded. Should new highs be feared or embraced? Since 1980 the S&P 500 Index historically has generated above-average returns one year after reaching a new high. New highs have been a normal by-product of bull markets, and we should expect to see more.
There are several reasons to expect this bull market may deliver more new highs in the months ahead. Overall, the U.S. economy remains on solid ground with no sign of imminent recession. Gross domestic product for the third quarter came in better than expected despite businesses’ weak capital investment related to the U.S.-China trade conflict. The consumer remains the anchor of the U.S. economy, as shown in recent strong consumer spending data. Job growth in October was solid, even when considering the General Motors strike (which is over), and wages continued to rise.
Recent trade headlines also reflect encouraging progress. President Trump and China President Xi likely will sign a preliminary trade agreement within the next month or so. The most contentious issues will need to be worked out in future negotiations, but any de-escalation of the current trade tensions will be welcome. Resolving the trade dispute may encourage companies to invest more, which could drive stronger economic growth and corporate profits and help push stocks higher.
Doing its part, the Federal Reserve (Fed) gave investors what they were hoping for and cut interest rates for the third time this year. Stocks historically have responded well one year after cuts that were also characterized as a “gradual mid-cycle rate adjustment.”
We are entering what historically has been the best performing six months of the year for stocks. When we add that positive seasonal factor to the overall good health of the U.S. economy, support from the Fed, and progress on a trade agreement, it appears this bull market may have more left in the tank. At the same time, we cannot dismiss potential risks to markets, most notably the possible unraveling of the U.S.-China trade pact, lackluster economic growth in Europe and Japan, stalled corporate profit growth, and the potentially contentious upcoming U.S. presidential election campaign. After a relatively calm and steady stock market advance this year, a pickup in market volatility would be totally normal.
We should continue to watch for signs of excesses in the economy that could lead to a recession and bring this record bull market to an end. For now, there don’t appear to be any worrisome cracks in a strong economic foundation, and the backdrop for stocks appears to remain favorable.
Lumber Mills Return To USA — The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 25 that lumber mills are closing in British Columbia and opening in the USA.
Mills with capacity to produce 5.5 billion board feet a year are being built in the South, as well as facilities that turn trees into pulp for paper and cardboard, according to Weyerhaeuser Chief Executive Devin Stockfish.
