Cohen & Grigsby: Serfing The Net And Making Excuses

“A man can be an imbecile and survive, but as soon as his heart stops functioning, the creature is dead.” (‘House’ did not say that)
-Jean Jacques Rousseau

In this day and age when the term Social Contract is synonymous with a myriad of sociopathic activities like the Bush Regime’s business dealings with Blackwater and Corporate America’s legalized, highly orchestrated collusion with the Department of Labor to discriminate against America’s professional middle class, where is the righteous indignation from our citizens (are you listening progressive blogosphere?) and the spineless Democratic frontrunners who seek our votes in 2008?


This week, Cohen & Grigsby is defending its feudal practice to instruct corporations on how to make abject peasants out of American engineers by avoiding to hire them in the first place. Despite their “ill chosen” language, the law firm maintains that it gave proper advice. Here is some of that proper advice from Lawrence Leibowitz, the V.P. of Marketing as captured on Youtube:

"Our goal is clearly NOT to find a qualified U.S. worker... our objective is to get this person a green card…”

While the United States continues to rack up its unemployed computer scientists and educated professionals who are replaced by outsourcing and H-1B foreign labor here, "free trade" economists who recommend suppressing wages and wiping out the middle class assured us at the same time that America was “benefiting greatly” from the work visa programs and outsourcing.


In the now infamous, must read article entitled Pearl Street Scam, blogger friend Citizen “Sleuth” Carrie revealed how the DOL conspires to help companies reject American employees by running phony job ads on behalf of the cheaper, coveted H-1B workers. How might a brokering law firm retained by H-1b sponsoring companies profit from such noble activity?
But what else is it that makes corporate America hate their own neighbors so much to devise these schemes to sell out the middle class? As Naomi Klein points out in her discussion with John Cusack about her new book Shock Doctrine, one need look no further than to the corporate and enabling media players; who are these complicit tech players and self-described progressive media who profit?


In his article entitled “The Great American Job Sellout”, Thomas Heffner confirms what everyone else outside of the Silicon Valley venture capital community doesn’t hear about -- the pressure from Feudalist Empire inspired, elitist, “free trade” venture capitalists who prefer to hire foreign workers than their peers while oh-so-coincidentally, State Department officials officially look the other way:

“The mindless chatter continues. Just the other day Ambassador David Gross, U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy in the State Department, declared outsourcing to be an economic efficiency that works to America's benefit. There is no sign of this alleged benefit in US jobs statistics or the US balance of trade.”

Heffner explains that, as a consequence, tech jobs in the U.S. are falling as a percentage of the total and raises the question everyone should be asking: if our corporations and venture capitalists don’t want to hire their neighbors, why should American taxpayers subsidize employment for foreign labor from India and China? The answer may rest with Rousseau’s telling, quaint notion of intelligent local community being at the very heart of commerce and civility –- something that elite corporatists and media prefer to kill. In Chapter II “The Death of the Body Politic” from The Social Contract, Rousseau observes:

“The principle of political life dwells in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the heart of the state; the executive power is the brain, which sets all the parts in motion. The brain may become paralyzed and the individual still live. A man can be an imbecile and survive, but as soon as his heart stops functioning, the creature is dead.”

Psssst…Wanna make a fast buck and live the high life? Forget about the noble study of engineering or computer science. Go to law school and learn how to throw your neighbor under the bus, brag about it – hell, even make a video about it. Or, at least that’s the credo that Lords of the Manor law firms like Cohen & Grigsby and their smug corporate Kings appear to be living by, as they facilitate the demise of America’s middle class for their own personal gain.

Ain’t that America?

Our politicians may be deplorable, but what’s passing for business and media “leadership” these days is the twenty-first century social contract equivalent of soulless, sociopathic, Gambino/Soprano styled “made” pompous men and women who are complicit in this modern day Death of the Body Politic.
-2Truthy