90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Dear Gun Grabbers, Your Agument Is Invalid...

Either That Or To Remain Intellectually Consistent, You Must Now Endorse Legal Automatic Weapons...

5 Facts That Gun Grabbers Hate:

REPORT: High-Ranking Obama Official Has Lawyered Up – Uses Her Right To Remain Silent.

Check it out. What follows are the answers from former Obama official Susan Rice that D.C. Whispers indicated a year ago was among those the administration was willing to let take the fall for multiple egregious surveillance program misdeeds intended to manipulate the 2016 Election.

Susan Rice has now lawyered up and is refusing to answer even the most basic questions regarding her role in those alleged crimes as the following report outlines. Note as well the emphasis on the Grassley-Graham memo – another thing of importance that was covered by D.C. Whispers first:

THE SILENCE OF SUSAN RICE

By letter to Susan Rice dated February 8, 2018, Senators Grassley and Graham posed 12 numbered questions. I posted the Graham/Grassley letter in “Rice papers the file.” By letter dated February 23, 2018, white collar criminal defense lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler has now responded to the Grassley/Graham letter on Rice’s behalf. I posted Ruemmler’s letter nearby this morning in “Susan Rice responds, sort of,” and am embedding it again at the bottom.

Let’s take an inventory of Rice’s response to the questions: answered, partially answered, answered narrowly, or not answered. I have italicized my accounting below, subject to further thought and analysis:

Question 1. Did you send the email attached to this letter to yourself? Do you have any reason to dispute the timestamp of the email?

Answered.

Question 2. When did you first become aware of the FBI’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia?

Not answered.

Question 3. When did you become aware of any surveillance activities, including FISA applications, undertaken by the FBI in conducting that investigation? At the time you wrote this email to yourself, were you aware of either the October 2016 FISA application for surveillance of Carter Page or the January 2017 renewal?

Partially answered.

Question 4. Did anyone instruct, request, suggest, or imply that you should...

The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, in which the American government pays American employers to discriminate against American workers has grown rapidly in recent years, and during FY 2017 it used nearly $2 billion swiped from trust funds for the elderly to favor 240,000 alien college grads over an equal number of U.S.-resident grads.

It is hard to believe, but true; employers of foreign students who have a decree from a U.S. institution are given an 8.25 percent tax break if they hire an alien, rather than a U.S. college grad with the same skills, and paid at the same salary, as we described in some detail in a recent posting.

When we wrote the prior article, we were working with out-of-date numbers; subsequently we secured estimated FY 2017 data that shows that some 240,000 American workers are adversely impacted by this program (shouldered out of jobs by the subsidized aliens); earlier data set that number at 140,000.

The subsidies to hire the foreign alumni are extracted from the Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance Program trust funds and were estimated to be in the area of $1.155 billion in that article. It is now clear that in FY 2017 the total subsidies came to something like $1.98 billion, or close to $2 billion.

The program, as we noted earlier, has had silent but bipartisan support; it was created by the Bush II administration without any congressional authorization, was subsequently expanded by the Obama administration, and has been tolerated by the Trump administration.

The employers benefiting from the subsidies directly, and universities benefiting indirectly, know all about the program, which is all but unknown to the older Americans subsidizing it, and is similarly unknown to the young U.S. college grads who are hurt by it. Given this twisted political dynamic, inertia, and the total silence of the media on this point, the program persists and grows each year.

Estimation Techniques: Jobs Lost. There is an obscure USCIS document that shows the number of approvals of Employment Authorization Documents by category, "EADS by Classification and Basis for Eligibility, Oct. 1, 2012 - June 29, 2017", that Daniel Costa of EPI pointed out to me.

It shows the numbers of OPT/EADs (usually good for one year) issued to F-1 college grads, as well as the number of extensions for F-1 alums who had studied science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM), and each of these, recently, has been good for two more years. So I added the most recent regular OPT and STEM/OPT estimations to the prior year's STEM extension data to get a current estimate of the number of subsidized jobs held by OPT aliens (and thus denied to U.S. workers) at the end of FY 2017.

Data were available for only the first nine months of FY 2017 so, assuming a constant flow of these applications, I multiplied the available number by 1.333, which produced this:
Estimated regular OPT for FY 2017: 153,646
Estimated STEM extension for FY 2017: 44,073
Reported STEM extensions for FY 2016 : 45,184
Total: 242,903

This I have rounded down to 240,000 to account for...