The never ending lack of privacy game has a new chapter, but this post isn't the end of the story. The NSA spygame is running through the courts. The latest ruling gives the NSA carte blanche by proclaiming the massive metadata collection is not in violation of the law.
This week in economic outrage has some real winners. Everyday there are so many injustices it is hard to keep up. Here are some cut to the chase boil downs of news and events you might have missed. As usual, corporations are running the government while the American people and labor be damned.
The House of Representatives is out to destroy the American Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Professional. Republicans passed H.R. 6429 with the oxymoron title, STEM Jobs Act of 2012. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and this bill gives 55,000 foreigners a year who graduate from an American university with a Masters or PhD in these fields an employment sponsored green card. Democrats didn't like it, not because it will labor arbitrage American Technical Professionals and lock out some Americans from even being accepted into Masters and PhD university programs. No, Democrats don't like the idea of separating the agenda of giving those here illegally legal status from the corporate lobbyist never ending demand for more foreign guest worker Visas and turning the American higher education system into a glorified green card ATM. Democrats believe they will never get their unlimited migration agenda through Congress without sacrificing the American Science and Technology professional to the globalization wolves.
The Senate Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing, Offshore Profit Shifting and the U.S. Tax Code. Did you know U.S. Multinational Corporations have more than $1.7 trillion in untaxed profits stashed as undistributed foreign earnings and keep at least 60% of their cash overseas? That these earnings have increased 400% in the last decade? That corporate tax as a percentage of total Federal revenues has dropped to only 8.9%?
It is clear to me that the root cause of many of the economic ills of 2008 was the "government subsidy" of immigration levels about ten times greater than our nation's immigration tradition. See Roy Beck's short YouTube video here: Our Immigration Tradition
When labor markets are glutted by an alphabet soup of work visa programs and the costs of the necessaries of life are bid upwards by the tidal wave of immigration, the "banker class" are the most significant beneficiaries. The U.S. middle class and lower class are the losers in this zero-sum game
Here is a collection of some of my published writings on these topics. I'm anticipating that there will be a big push for increased immigration in 2009, since both McCain and Obama's campaigns called for increased H-1B visas, for example. I wonder out loud if the voice of the middle class will be heard over the "soft rustle of lobbying dollars."
I went in for an interview for a job last week for which a recruiter from a local recruiting firm had submitted my resume. The recruiter had already placed someone from India in this particular downtown Seattle company about a month before. In fact, the Indian made note of all the interview questions that he was asked in order to get the job, and forwarded those questions, with the answers, to the recruiter in an email. This cheat-sheet was then forwarded to me via the recruiter, and I was even given contact information for this Indian so that I may get a first hand interview prep if desired.
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