Please do not even link to them frankly. You don't want to give them any publicity and links in fact do that via the technology of the Internets.
People do not realize that but when you link to something, that increases it's visibility in search engines and page rank. We seriously do not want to promote corporate lobbyists and their front men websites!
Link to Matloff's rebuttal or any of the other guest worker Visas experts, say Salzman of Urban insitute, Sloan foundation research and the GAO itself which clearly refutes these lobbyists propaganda papers.
Seriously, trust me, these lobbyists (NFAP) puke out spin after spin and most importantly, blanket Congressional staffers with flashy fliers and funnies promoting their spin. You want to promote the experts and the many other studies which refute these lobbyists claims, not point people to read the garbage they spew out.
Also, people, please see the user guide and format your links. You also have the rich text editor which has a nice little link button for you to use.
My impression is Congress (Dems) have leaders in key positions that are bought and paid for. Zoe Lofgren (CA-16th), is chair of the house subcommittee on immigration, which is under the House Judiciary Committee. Her donor class reads like a who's who of multinational corporations, heavy tech who are wanting corporate controlled unlimited migration for the purposes of labor arbitrage and technology transfer.
Pelosi I know blocks legislation that is highly popular and bi-partisan.
Harry Reid seems to be doing the same thing and almost worse.
So, the hierarchy of leadership and key positions within Congress I suspect in the issue. Kind of a party within a party.
The new excuse of the Senate must have 60 Democrats Senators to pass anything I find ridiculous. How is it Republicans managed to do so much without 60 when Bill was in office?
I think your Stimulus package note is a major one. We've had middle class economic indicators on the slide decades now. Economist after economist, expert after expert has testified why this is so. The reality is the middle class never recovered from the last recession, the housing bubble covered it all up. Yet all of those experts, their policy recommendations, those hearings and if there even is a resulting bill, goes to committee to die and the culprit is often the committee chair.
What they need to do is create jobs. They could do this with one very obvious area, which is to pump funds into rebuilding America's infrastructure. They could dump massive tax credits into US R&D (and this they would never do) but tie the jobs to US citizens first and foremost.
Even for short time stimulus, it's like they ignore their own Congressional Budget Office. It's like almost nothing is fact based. Even more frightening to me is just how many bills are written by lobbyists and how few bills are even scanned by Representatives before voting.
Last March, Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and claimed there was a desperate need to expand the US guest worker programs, in order to make up for sever shortages of US IT workers.
Bill Gates also claimed that the H1-B program actually creates more jobs for Americans
To prove his claim, Bill Gates cited a report created by a group called the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). The NFAP created a report titled "H-1B Visas and Job Creation." The report claims that for each H-1B visa requested by a corporation, that organization's overall hires have climbed by, on average, five-fold.
Note that, according the NFAP report, the H1-B does not even have to hired, just requested. It is just like magic. Unlike King Midas, those who hire H1-Bs don't even have to touch things to turn them to gold.
The report makes no mention of what types of additional job positions were created, and never makes a correlation between new positions created and the requesting of an H-1B.
The report also makes no attempt to explain why the same number of jobs could not be created by hiring an American instead of an H1-B.
To the best of my understanding, the methodology used by the NFAP works something like this: company A requests two H1-B workers in 2001, by 2007 company A has hired ten additional workers. From this, the NFAP concludes that hiring H1-Bs is hugely beneficial to US technology workers.
There is no mention of who funded the report. There is also no mention of who funds the NFAP. The NFAP is one of several think-tanks that always seems to have a special report handy, just in time to support whatever position Microsoft is taking at the moment. It is well known that Microsoft funds several think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.
Regardless of the report's credibility, data from this report has been cited in respected publications, such as The Economist, and as I mentioned, Bill Gates even cited data from this report in his testimony before the US congress.
Robert, I hear you. The Democrats have been demanding a return to power with promises of reform. The voters gave them back the Congress in '06 (albeit with a slim majority), But so far the results have been more than disappointing. Watching CNBC this morning, the big talk was that there could be a new round of "stimulus" checks coming. There was a person from the Obama campaign on there promoting the idea.
But here's the thing, while getting the check is nice, it is really a solution. Those checks simply serve as a temporary substitute of a proper wage increase or at the very least job security. With inflation growing and the drop in economic demand, Americans are forced to use their credit cards to make up the difference.
Bureau of Labor Statistics reports big drop in tech jobs Almost 50,000 IT positions lost in last 12 months
"Employment in the information industry declined by 13,000 in July and by 44,000 over the past 12 months. Telecommunications lost 5,000 jobs in July," according to the bureau.
We're being set up for Congress to pass these in the Lame duck session after the election. They try it every year.
This time it's quite bad because Democratic leadership is quite in the bag. High tech lobbyists especially play both sides of the political fence and fund heavily the Democrats (as well as the Republicans).
You have to be on it now because last year they literally tried to throw them in after the bill had passed, by the conferees, into the India Nuclear Deal. John Cornyn (R-TX) did that (hey, he might lose his relection!) They will try games like that, in last minute manager amendments which no one can read, after bills have passed by selected conferees so even Congress doesn't get a vote...
They don't care about unemployment numbers. They do care when their phone and fax lines are shut down. I'm fairly certain it is the American people keeping these at bay.
Bear in mind the AFL-CIO was fighting for us like mad, in addition to some professional organizations, we even had labor economists, think tanks even speaking out and fortunately the huge groups against illegal immigration on top of it were fighting against this with a furry. So, that's a lot of phone calls, faxes and I'm sure that's the only reason this stuff was stopped.
Let's quickly nominate someone to run for the None of the Above party and see if we can win. I think we might be able to make a legal challenge for all uncast votes by claiming the None of the Above candidate of course would have those by the title and that is obviously the voter intent.
Well, nationalism is fairly inherent simply because the world is structured as a series of nation-states. Assuredly India and China are not working to make our national economics better or working America well off, they are working to grow into a world economic power. Surprise, surprise.
I think there is a world of difference between a nation representing it's citizens and something like Fascism.
I'm glad to see someone else say this about the Democratic party. I hate to say this but Democratic leadership is assuredly pushing guest workers, including Obama. What's even more frightening is the agenda is masked as comprehensive immigration reform and few realize (in the blogs) that those failed bills were loaded, positively loaded with guest worker Visas like the above. There are fighters on the Democratic side but they don't have much power. Bernie Sanders is one of labor's best advocates, especially professional workers but believe this or not, so is Chuck Grassley.
Myself, I assuredly have socialist political beliefs, but more along the lines of the Nordic countries, France, Canada and so on. That said, I notice that when policy is really wrong headed, the not bought and paid for politicians and both the grassroots of the left and the right seem to have points of agreement. I think trade is the place this is most obvious.
I believe the only alternative we all have is to focus on fact based posts and put a hell of a lot of pressure on our current choices.
While people are focused in on Obama, McCain, through his comprehensive immigration reform bill was pushing this agenda and little do people realize most of those bills were written by the US Chamber of Commerce and Compete America (high tech lobbyist group), plus immigration attorneys (who you might view as the great slave traders of the modern era, this is huge money to them). So, McCain is in the tank too.
The only thing I can think of is to make people aware of what is going on, give them platforms where they can freely express their opinions and share information and hopefully build up public demand for real policy.
If Democrats lose this election things like the above are assuredly why. I'm starting to not believe in Red States/Blue States, more wondering if because there isn't a party who really represents what most of America wants in terms of policy, people are going to the voting booth, flipping a coin and voting accordingly.
I believe Obama has already made it clear that he supports an increase in guest workers. This should come as no surprise. It takes a lot of money to run a presidential campaign, and that means you have to take money from lobbyists, and you owe a lot of favors.
Remember, in the early 1990s, how Hillary was pushing national health-care, then she suddenly stopped? It turns out she stopped right after taking $850K from the health care industry.
I am not saying the republicans are any better, but I think it would be naive to think the Democrats will save us.
Full disclosure: I expect Obama to win, but I do not like Obama, or McCain.
The only reasons that the lid has not been ripped off the current H-1B caps are:
1) Record US unemployment
2) Election this November
The over-whelming majority of US politicians want this, even though they all realize that many of the constituents do not want this. Both presidential candidates want more guest workers.
Not to worry, palms have been greased, India can be fully confident that the new administration, no matter who gets elected, will be guest worker friendly.
As someone who has traded in the futures markets, what I saw this past year was not exactly new. Oil, like many other commodities, go through seasonality cycles. For example, corn has this big blow up peaks in the months between June through early September. Oil and gasoline go through peaks and valleys as well. Yet, saying this, these cycles also work within lager trends, of which oil is in a northward motion of one. Since it was in an uptrend, when it's seasonal highs arrived, one should've expected all-time new peaks to be achieved. Goldman Sachs figured this when they said oil would reach $100 a year or so back. Seasonality plays with both technical analysis and fundamental supply & demand laws. Oil could even reach $80 or lower (doubtful), but then it will have to deal with the longer-termed trend which is very powerful. Add in the fundamentals, and we're still on track towards $200 oil. Of course, with the recent news of the Israelis preparing for an attack on Iranian nuclear development sites, that $200 could come a lot sooner!
It's no secret that I'm voting for Obama versus McCain, but I gotta say if he sells us out to this awful treasonous labor deal, then he's no better than his Republican counterpart. Indeed, if the Democrats, long the party proclaming to be defender of the labor faith, do absolutely nothing about these damn deals, then perhaps it's time I start rethinking my party affiliation! Maybe the whole party system is so jammed up with corruption and corporate payola, that we need a real new party. Nationalism has been tainted as something racist or far right wing/Nazi, something I've never bought into. For me nationalism should be revered in this day and age of multinational corporations, where it shouldn't be about ethnic politics but the protection of the nation and the promotion of the welfare and national good.
While after some time, I suspected Hillary would have been slightly better, she is head of the India PAC in the Senate and promised the same damn agenda to the same damn lobbyists. Yes, through local lobbying bodies foreign nations work to get their agenda through our Congress. It wasn't until Obama, backed by Google as one of the most publicized, pretty much superseded Hillary in promising these lobbyists their agenda, but she too is not the middle class savior on this. If she was, that should would be a turn around and lord knows this positions affected the primaries.
Not a damn thing unless Hillary Clinton can force the Democratic Party to actually vote for their nominee.
As to whether folks are 'outraged' we are going to get an opportunity to find out this election....
Maybe.
I can see McSame and 'More of the Same' Obama agreeing not to talk about this issue at all. It would be in both their interests not to do so. Lou Dobbs would probably be the only MSM head to talk about it.
But this cycle or more probably next this issue will surface. And drag under anyone on the wrong side. Or so I believe anyway.
I'll have more to say about Indymac in my last installment regarding the FDIC. I have no problem disagreeing with Roubini's statement above, and I will explain why then -- probably this weekend.
and the placement on the roller coaster looks about right.
I think we need to examine PPP more and other metrics that are more global focused to see how this choo choo is chained together.
Please do not even link to them frankly. You don't want to give them any publicity and links in fact do that via the technology of the Internets.
People do not realize that but when you link to something, that increases it's visibility in search engines and page rank. We seriously do not want to promote corporate lobbyists and their front men websites!
Link to Matloff's rebuttal or any of the other guest worker Visas experts, say Salzman of Urban insitute, Sloan foundation research and the GAO itself which clearly refutes these lobbyists propaganda papers.
Seriously, trust me, these lobbyists (NFAP) puke out spin after spin and most importantly, blanket Congressional staffers with flashy fliers and funnies promoting their spin. You want to promote the experts and the many other studies which refute these lobbyists claims, not point people to read the garbage they spew out.
Also, people, please see the user guide and format your links. You also have the rich text editor which has a nice little link button for you to use.
My impression is Congress (Dems) have leaders in key positions that are bought and paid for. Zoe Lofgren (CA-16th), is chair of the house subcommittee on immigration, which is under the House Judiciary Committee. Her donor class reads like a who's who of multinational corporations, heavy tech who are wanting corporate controlled unlimited migration for the purposes of labor arbitrage and technology transfer.
Pelosi I know blocks legislation that is highly popular and bi-partisan.
Harry Reid seems to be doing the same thing and almost worse.
So, the hierarchy of leadership and key positions within Congress I suspect in the issue. Kind of a party within a party.
The new excuse of the Senate must have 60 Democrats Senators to pass anything I find ridiculous. How is it Republicans managed to do so much without 60 when Bill was in office?
I think your Stimulus package note is a major one. We've had middle class economic indicators on the slide decades now. Economist after economist, expert after expert has testified why this is so. The reality is the middle class never recovered from the last recession, the housing bubble covered it all up. Yet all of those experts, their policy recommendations, those hearings and if there even is a resulting bill, goes to committee to die and the culprit is often the committee chair.
What they need to do is create jobs. They could do this with one very obvious area, which is to pump funds into rebuilding America's infrastructure. They could dump massive tax credits into US R&D (and this they would never do) but tie the jobs to US citizens first and foremost.
Even for short time stimulus, it's like they ignore their own Congressional Budget Office. It's like almost nothing is fact based. Even more frightening to me is just how many bills are written by lobbyists and how few bills are even scanned by Representatives before voting.
Last March, Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and claimed there was a desperate need to expand the US guest worker programs, in order to make up for sever shortages of US IT workers.
Bill Gates also claimed that the H1-B program actually creates more jobs for Americans
To prove his claim, Bill Gates cited a report created by a group called the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). The NFAP created a report titled "H-1B Visas and Job Creation." The report claims that for each H-1B visa requested by a corporation, that organization's overall hires have climbed by, on average, five-fold.
http://www.nfap.net/pdf/080311H1-B.pdf
Note that, according the NFAP report, the H1-B does not even have to hired, just requested. It is just like magic. Unlike King Midas, those who hire H1-Bs don't even have to touch things to turn them to gold.
The report makes no mention of what types of additional job positions were created, and never makes a correlation between new positions created and the requesting of an H-1B.
The report also makes no attempt to explain why the same number of jobs could not be created by hiring an American instead of an H1-B.
To the best of my understanding, the methodology used by the NFAP works something like this: company A requests two H1-B workers in 2001, by 2007 company A has hired ten additional workers. From this, the NFAP concludes that hiring H1-Bs is hugely beneficial to US technology workers.
There is no mention of who funded the report. There is also no mention of who funds the NFAP. The NFAP is one of several think-tanks that always seems to have a special report handy, just in time to support whatever position Microsoft is taking at the moment. It is well known that Microsoft funds several think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.
http://nfap.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution
Regardless of the report's credibility, data from this report has been cited in respected publications, such as The Economist, and as I mentioned, Bill Gates even cited data from this report in his testimony before the US congress.
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11016270
http://tinyurl.com/269wcq
Robert, I hear you. The Democrats have been demanding a return to power with promises of reform. The voters gave them back the Congress in '06 (albeit with a slim majority), But so far the results have been more than disappointing. Watching CNBC this morning, the big talk was that there could be a new round of "stimulus" checks coming. There was a person from the Obama campaign on there promoting the idea.
But here's the thing, while getting the check is nice, it is really a solution. Those checks simply serve as a temporary substitute of a proper wage increase or at the very least job security. With inflation growing and the drop in economic demand, Americans are forced to use their credit cards to make up the difference.
and they are claiming there is a shortage. Unbelievable!
I have read on other boards that Rangel and Pelosi are going to try to ram the Columbia free trade deal thru during the lame duck session
We're being set up for Congress to pass these in the Lame duck session after the election. They try it every year.
This time it's quite bad because Democratic leadership is quite in the bag. High tech lobbyists especially play both sides of the political fence and fund heavily the Democrats (as well as the Republicans).
You have to be on it now because last year they literally tried to throw them in after the bill had passed, by the conferees, into the India Nuclear Deal. John Cornyn (R-TX) did that (hey, he might lose his relection!) They will try games like that, in last minute manager amendments which no one can read, after bills have passed by selected conferees so even Congress doesn't get a vote...
They don't care about unemployment numbers. They do care when their phone and fax lines are shut down. I'm fairly certain it is the American people keeping these at bay.
Bear in mind the AFL-CIO was fighting for us like mad, in addition to some professional organizations, we even had labor economists, think tanks even speaking out and fortunately the huge groups against illegal immigration on top of it were fighting against this with a furry. So, that's a lot of phone calls, faxes and I'm sure that's the only reason this stuff was stopped.
Let's quickly nominate someone to run for the None of the Above party and see if we can win. I think we might be able to make a legal challenge for all uncast votes by claiming the None of the Above candidate of course would have those by the title and that is obviously the voter intent.
Well, nationalism is fairly inherent simply because the world is structured as a series of nation-states. Assuredly India and China are not working to make our national economics better or working America well off, they are working to grow into a world economic power. Surprise, surprise.
I think there is a world of difference between a nation representing it's citizens and something like Fascism.
I'm glad to see someone else say this about the Democratic party. I hate to say this but Democratic leadership is assuredly pushing guest workers, including Obama. What's even more frightening is the agenda is masked as comprehensive immigration reform and few realize (in the blogs) that those failed bills were loaded, positively loaded with guest worker Visas like the above. There are fighters on the Democratic side but they don't have much power. Bernie Sanders is one of labor's best advocates, especially professional workers but believe this or not, so is Chuck Grassley.
Myself, I assuredly have socialist political beliefs, but more along the lines of the Nordic countries, France, Canada and so on. That said, I notice that when policy is really wrong headed, the not bought and paid for politicians and both the grassroots of the left and the right seem to have points of agreement. I think trade is the place this is most obvious.
I believe the only alternative we all have is to focus on fact based posts and put a hell of a lot of pressure on our current choices.
While people are focused in on Obama, McCain, through his comprehensive immigration reform bill was pushing this agenda and little do people realize most of those bills were written by the US Chamber of Commerce and Compete America (high tech lobbyist group), plus immigration attorneys (who you might view as the great slave traders of the modern era, this is huge money to them). So, McCain is in the tank too.
The only thing I can think of is to make people aware of what is going on, give them platforms where they can freely express their opinions and share information and hopefully build up public demand for real policy.
If Democrats lose this election things like the above are assuredly why. I'm starting to not believe in Red States/Blue States, more wondering if because there isn't a party who really represents what most of America wants in terms of policy, people are going to the voting booth, flipping a coin and voting accordingly.
I believe Obama has already made it clear that he supports an increase in guest workers. This should come as no surprise. It takes a lot of money to run a presidential campaign, and that means you have to take money from lobbyists, and you owe a lot of favors.
Remember, in the early 1990s, how Hillary was pushing national health-care, then she suddenly stopped? It turns out she stopped right after taking $850K from the health care industry.
I am not saying the republicans are any better, but I think it would be naive to think the Democrats will save us.
Full disclosure: I expect Obama to win, but I do not like Obama, or McCain.
The only reasons that the lid has not been ripped off the current H-1B caps are:
1) Record US unemployment
2) Election this November
The over-whelming majority of US politicians want this, even though they all realize that many of the constituents do not want this. Both presidential candidates want more guest workers.
Not to worry, palms have been greased, India can be fully confident that the new administration, no matter who gets elected, will be guest worker friendly.
As someone who has traded in the futures markets, what I saw this past year was not exactly new. Oil, like many other commodities, go through seasonality cycles. For example, corn has this big blow up peaks in the months between June through early September. Oil and gasoline go through peaks and valleys as well. Yet, saying this, these cycles also work within lager trends, of which oil is in a northward motion of one. Since it was in an uptrend, when it's seasonal highs arrived, one should've expected all-time new peaks to be achieved. Goldman Sachs figured this when they said oil would reach $100 a year or so back. Seasonality plays with both technical analysis and fundamental supply & demand laws. Oil could even reach $80 or lower (doubtful), but then it will have to deal with the longer-termed trend which is very powerful. Add in the fundamentals, and we're still on track towards $200 oil. Of course, with the recent news of the Israelis preparing for an attack on Iranian nuclear development sites, that $200 could come a lot sooner!
It's no secret that I'm voting for Obama versus McCain, but I gotta say if he sells us out to this awful treasonous labor deal, then he's no better than his Republican counterpart. Indeed, if the Democrats, long the party proclaming to be defender of the labor faith, do absolutely nothing about these damn deals, then perhaps it's time I start rethinking my party affiliation! Maybe the whole party system is so jammed up with corruption and corporate payola, that we need a real new party. Nationalism has been tainted as something racist or far right wing/Nazi, something I've never bought into. For me nationalism should be revered in this day and age of multinational corporations, where it shouldn't be about ethnic politics but the protection of the nation and the promotion of the welfare and national good.
While after some time, I suspected Hillary would have been slightly better, she is head of the India PAC in the Senate and promised the same damn agenda to the same damn lobbyists. Yes, through local lobbying bodies foreign nations work to get their agenda through our Congress. It wasn't until Obama, backed by Google as one of the most publicized, pretty much superseded Hillary in promising these lobbyists their agenda, but she too is not the middle class savior on this. If she was, that should would be a turn around and lord knows this positions affected the primaries.
....it?
Not a damn thing unless Hillary Clinton can force the Democratic Party to actually vote for their nominee.
As to whether folks are 'outraged' we are going to get an opportunity to find out this election....
Maybe.
I can see McSame and 'More of the Same' Obama agreeing not to talk about this issue at all. It would be in both their interests not to do so. Lou Dobbs would probably be the only MSM head to talk about it.
But this cycle or more probably next this issue will surface. And drag under anyone on the wrong side. Or so I believe anyway.
None of the production / consumption data explains price for
my pay grade.
For a view of production - so called peak oil
http://polizeros.com/2008/01/15/peak-oil-oil-production-chart/
For a look at consumption see:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/steo - go to the Oil tab on right.
For Price, go to the Oil Price Tab.
Clear legitimate and at least gets to the crux of the issue, it's in the percentages and the premiums.
I'll have more to say about Indymac in my last installment regarding the FDIC. I have no problem disagreeing with Roubini's statement above, and I will explain why then -- probably this weekend.
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