Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Ben Franklin to Tech Lobby: "Go Fly a Kite"

“Laws without morals are useless.” –Benjamin Franklin



There are no laws against greed, hubris and arrogance. Nor are there any laws to protect educated Americans from unfair employment practices manufactured by the crony-baloney bipartisan tech lobby (TechNet) to replace millions of American technology jobs with cheap, dubiously skilled foreign labor. Of the shortage of scientists in the United States, University of California-Davis computer science Professor Norman Matloff called it "Baloney. We have plenty of engineers. All you have to do is look at starting salaries. They're not going up, and they would be if there was a shortage."


In short, the tech lobby, seeking to get Congress to approve legislation that would displace educated computer scientists, is signalling 30-40 million educated white collar professionals to GO FLY A KITE. No wait – make that “go fly an ‘infinite’ number of kites (Bill Gates, March 2007 Senate hearing to lift visa cap restrictions.) Swell, cool bunch, this TechNet and their supporters, eh?

By denying that millions of American computer scientists are ‘skilled’ enough and by hiring cheap foreign labor, upper middle class professionals and their families have had it with the old tech lobby formula to eradicate their peers, as it seeks to displace our scientists and executives. As David Sirota says recently in his article published last week in the San Francisco Chronicle


“A rule of thumb for understanding American politics: The federal government only reacts to popular will when the upper-middle professional class starts making noise. Everyone else’s voice falls on deaf ears. This is an unfortunate reality, but it is reality.”


April 1st was the official deadline for corporations to file for more H1b’s to replace American computer scientists in both large and small businesses across the country. Hiring managers at Microsoft, Oracle, Intel and other high-tech companies rushed applications to U.S. immigration officials seeking permission to hire H1B foreign visa employees. Pending legislation in Congress to lift the cap for an ‘infinite’ number of visas is a dream comes true for the new American Colonial Ruling Class Elite. But who are these self-appointed elite deciders and why don’t they want to hire and offer good compensation plans to educated American computer scientists?



Here is what one HR Professional from Atlanta, GA had to say: “As a Human Resources rep, I see how the H-1B visa and employment based green card programs actually work in tandem to displace U.S. white collar workers from their jobs and even their careers. H-1B is a dual intent visa, so employers may sponsor H-1Bers for an EB green card for legal permanent resident status. Companies routinely game the labor certification process for GC sponsorship to defraud qualified citizen job applicants. Citizens should demand that both the H-1B and EB green card programs be abolished.”



Meanwhile, Microsoft insists they pay well and welcome ‘skilled’ programmers to email their resumes in response to their H1B unfair employment displacement practices. Newly appointed board members may have influenced the Damage Control Unit at Microsoft, which has gone so far as to extend a slippery olive branch to ‘any computer scientist’ to email their resume to human resources…you know, to voluntarily place themselves on the permanent “Do Not Call list”…monitored exclusively from that dark place called HUMAN RESOURCES where intellectual capital and productivity hit the road.



Gene Nelson, who holds a doctorate in biophysics, is a Silicon Valley unemployed 55-year-old veteran of the information technology industry, said because of H-1B visas, "We're just not getting a crack at the jobs." His most recent stint of employment, which ended in December, was as a seasonal worker at a winery, where he earned $12 an hour. "The bottom line is these are good American jobs that aren't going to Americans," he said.



But all across America, millions of educated, unemployed or vastly underemployed professionals like Gene Nelson hope for this to change. With limited information and no access into the closed door senate hearings and backroom deals of the tech lobby, educated scientists share the hope that Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and the majority of bipartisan friends of this invitation only, elite circle jerk will, over the next few months, read news of defeat for anti-American bills like STRIVE, the Skil Bill, and all pending legislation written to kick America’s upwardly mobile middle class to the curb.

I hope David Sirota is right when he says that the federal government only reacts when the upper middle class starts making noise, because for guys like Gene Nelson, that day could not come soon enough. And I hope that most Americans recognize the 'cool kid' and soulless undeclared and declared presidential candidates influencing these bills are in fact in support of them.


-2Truthy



http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_5564770?nclick_check=1
http://www.princeton.edu/~blinder/
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:HPqE8yHYsdIJ:davidsirota.com/index.php/windows-into-populisms-rise/+david+sirota+sfgate+1b&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:6FipwGG5rk8J:www.technet.org/news/article/%3FpostId%3D7615+al+gore+technet&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Learn more about how destructive this "government subsidy" called H-1B is. A good place to start is the http://www.JobDestruction.com website. Another excellent website is http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

You may learn more about my activism by googling on such terms as "Abramoff Visa" or use my name
"Gene Nelson" and "H-1b" I'm the unemployed Ph.D. cited in the text at this website.

I may be emailed at c0030180-at-airmail-dot-net.