90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, November 20, 2020

We Are Living In A Dystopian Nightmare....

Animal Farm is an allegorical novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945.[1][2] The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.

Lin Wood says he was ‘shocked’ by reaction of weak-kneed GOP, unwilling to expose alleged ‘election fraud’

In tweets posted Thursday, powerhouse attorney Lin Wood, one of the key figures in President Donald Trump’s 2020 legal election battle, doubled down on his assertion that President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election in a landslide.

Moreover, he bashed Republican officials on the state and national level for not being “willing to take action to expose election fraud.”

View his tweets below:

He wrote that he was compelled to “take action” on his own as a Georgia voter after he saw officials in Georgia and the National GOP ignore or dismiss the president’s allegations that a victory in the 2020 election had been stolen from...

Recently, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the creation of the “H-1B One Workforce” apprenticeship program designed to help more Americans enter industries frequently occupied by H-1B visa-holders. According to the agency’s press release, the program would fund “training for middle- to high-skilled H-1B occupations within key sectors in the U.S. economy, including information technology and cyber security, advanced manufacturing and transportation…” The $150 million-dollar program, we are told, is intended “to upskill the present workforce and train a new generation of workers to grow the future workforce…”

Sounds good for U.S. workers, it would seem, especially given the present state of our COVID-crippled economy. Not exactly. Like a lot of what’s traditionally come out of the H-1B-managing agencies, it is the usual suspects who look to be the real beneficiaries here.

Details are still sparse, but plenty of red flags present themselves in the new announcement. To start, the H-1B program channels the large majority of its foreign workers into the IT industry, not transportation or advanced manufacturing. This same problem arose last year when then-secretary Alex Acosta proposed an iteration of the program that included health care training; another industry not affected by H-1B workers.

So, taxpayer-funds will be going to industries without an H-1B problem. Not a giant public-policy mismatch, but one that’s glaring enough error to question whether helping H-1B displacement is truly the motivation here.

Further, apprenticeships are meant to teach new skills to less well-off young people and are almost always geared toward the trades, not IT. So, it is young, high school grads who will be benefiting here; not the recent college grads and veteran tech-workers that get pushed out by the H-1B and which DOL’s new program is ostensibly designed to help.

Being rarely qualified for IT work, high school grads are not a good fit for the type of job opening that H-1Bs fill. For instance, when the Obama Administration created a West Virginia-based initiative designed to supply IT education to high school grads, the results were essentially zero. The allotted funds would have been better utilized had they been applied towards retraining the same young people in, for instance, advanced manufacturing.

So, non-IT American workers unaffected by the H-1B will get the most benefit from the new program and all we have here is a misnomer. Not quite. It’s more serious than that. To the extent the program fails in its design to help the proclaimed worker-shortage in IT, it helps the key narrative of industry participants that there actually is such a shortage when there is none. As UC Davis computer science professor and seasoned Big Tech-critic Norm Matloff recently said about the new announcement: “Worst of all [about it] is the implied message that we have a tech labor shortage in the first place, which no study (other than industry-sponsored ones) has ever found.”

IT labor assistance programs actually have a long pedigree. They go back to when the H-1B got its first expansion after it was created in 1990. As part of that effort, Congress demanded from industry players some sort of retraining measure to ensure Americans could eventually re-join H-1B industries. That, however, was way back in 1998, a pretty long time for there to be a shortage in any market.

So, while DOL’s new effort might make the general working public feel good, these sorts of retraining programs only perpetuate the narrative that there is an IT labor shortage. This amounts to little more than a PR-benefit seemingly designed for Big Tech. Matloff is right about the nonexistent IT-worker shortage. The U.S. has plenty of them. For instance, minority IT grads apparently far exceed their numbers in Silicon Valley and tech hubs elsewhere.

There is yet another potential mismatch problem with the new announcement. As Matloff points out, workers seem to be promised “modern skills through relatively short-term training programs”, however, the jobs which H-1B-visa holders take up generally require a bachelor’s degree—although certainly not one from a top school; not even a middling one. With this timing mismatch, therefore, it’s difficult to see how DOL’s new program could effectively fill those jobs with ”retrained’ American apprentices.” They simply won’t be fully qualified.

But, again, this likely isn’t the point. Big Tech wants foreign workers, not U.S. ones, because their jobs are tied to their visa. Such guaranteed pliancy is coveted by the industry. They’ve even admitted as much.

Big Tech also wants to avoid U.S. workers because they are generally older. Foreign, mostly Indian, H-1B-holders are younger, and younger workers are always less expensive.

As already noted, it is certainly high time for DOL to first evaluate the way it approaches retraining programs before it pushes forward with the same old, same old. We’ve heard about the H-1B’s displacement and wage-levelling effects on the IT industry going all the way back to the 1990s. A working paper published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research still finds these dispossessing effects occurring. For instance, it found no broad offsetting benefits to the program nor that it fills real American tech-sector shortages as intended. It suggests in sum that the program’s basically a handout to the trillion-dollar tech industry.

The best restitution to affected U.S. IT workers, therefore, might be to scale the H-1B program back or eliminate it entirely. Oddly enough, right after this program was launched, DOL, along with DHS, announced regulatory reforms to the H-1B that are the most extensive and worker-friendly we’ve ever seen. Even more reason perhaps to remove the H-1B pretense from DOL’s new grant announcement.

Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.

Recently, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the creation of the “H-1B One Workforce” apprenticeship program designed to help more Americans enter industries frequently occupied by H-1B visa-holders. According to the agency’s press release, the program would fund “training for middle- to high-skilled H-1B occupations within key sectors in the U.S. economy, including information technology and cyber security, advanced manufacturing and transportation…” The $150 million-dollar program, we are told, is intended “to upskill the present workforce and train a new generation of workers to grow the future workforce…”

Sounds good for U.S. workers, it would seem, especially given the present state of our COVID-crippled economy. Not exactly. Like a lot of what’s traditionally come out of the H-1B-managing agencies, it is the usual suspects who look to be the real beneficiaries here.

Details are still sparse, but plenty of red flags present themselves in the new announcement. To start, the H-1B program channels the large majority of its foreign workers into the IT industry, not transportation or advanced manufacturing. This same problem arose last year when then-secretary Alex Acosta proposed an iteration of the program that included health care training; another industry not affected by H-1B workers.

So, taxpayer-funds will be going to industries without an H-1B problem. Not a giant public-policy mismatch, but one that’s glaring enough error to question whether helping H-1B displacement is truly the motivation here.

Further, apprenticeships are meant to teach new skills to less well-off young people and are almost always geared toward the trades, not IT. So, it is young, high school grads who will be benefiting here; not the recent college grads and veteran tech-workers that get pushed out by the H-1B and which DOL’s new program is ostensibly designed to...

President Donald Trump’s campaign legal team on Thursday released new affidavits alleging election irregularities while also making serious accusations of nationally coordinated fraud by local election officials to obscure a Trump “landslide.”

The press conference, led by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and held at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, went well over 90 minutes and proved to be as fiery as it was lengthy.

“President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it,” Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, said at one point.

The legal team said it will present evidence in new court cases asking judges for restraining orders and temporary injunctions to block certification of the election results in several close battleground states where former Vice President Joe Biden currently leads Trump.

Time is critical, as states have until Dec. 8 to certify their vote in the presidential race. The Electoral College will meet Dec. 14 to elect a president.

Here are key highlights from the lawyers’ press conference.
1. Enough to Overturn Election

The most significant claim made by Giuliani was that affidavits obtained by the president’s legal team will provide enough evidence to overturn the election. Major media outlets called the election for Biden on Nov. 7, saying he was projected to win more than the necessary 270 votes in the Electoral College.

The former mayor said the fraud was clear in Democrat-run cities in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“We have more than double the number of votes needed to overturn the election in terms of provable illegal ballots,” Giuliani said of cities in the six states. “All you got to do to find out if I’m misleading you at all is to look at the lawsuits. Look what’s alleged. Look at the affidavits. Maybe we can supply more affidavits. In order to do it, I have to get permission from the people.”

Giuliani said most of those who agreed to sign affidavits feared threats and other harassment if their names became public through the media.

Trump’s legal team said it has 220 sworn affidavits from residents across multiple states; the ones made public are from residents of Pennsylvania and Michigan.

However, all the affidavits would be part of the court record.

Giuliani said the campaign’s investigators also found evidence of fraud in New Mexico and Virginia.

According to one affidavit, a supervisor told Michigan election workers not to request photo identification from voters, which is required by state law.

Another affidavit claims that election workers in Pennsylvania were instructed to assign ballots without names to random people. This resulted in thousands of Pittsburgh residents showing up to vote only to be told that they already were marked as having voted, the lawyers said.

One election supervisor in Michigan told workers—according to a third affidavit—to alter the dates on mail-in ballots to make it appear the ballots had arrived earlier.

Giuliani said that as many as 100,000 absentee ballots should have been disqualified in Wisconsin, a number that easily would give the state to Trump.

Trump also should have carried Pennsylvania by 300,000 votes, he said.
2. ‘Trump Won in a Landslide’

Powell described the problems with Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of voting machines, and what she said were the company’s ties to the socialist government of Venezuela.

“This is stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating, and the most unpatriotic act I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in in any way, shape, or form,” Powell said of the alleged widescale fraud, adding:

I want the American public to know right now, we will not be intimidated. American patriots are fed up with the corruption from the local level to the highest level of our government. We are not going to be intimidated. We are not going to back down. We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it.

Powell alleged the massive influence of money from Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China to interfere in the U.S. election. She added that “no one should want a coronation of a president” under these suspect circumstances.

“There should never be another election in this country—I don’t care if it’s for dogcatcher—using a Dominion machine and Smartmatic software,” Powell said.

Dominion Voting Systems entered a 2009 contract with Smartmatic, which builds and implements electronic voting systems, and provided it with optical scanners used in the 2010 election in the Philippines, Accesswire reported.

Lawsuits in the Philippines ensued over glitches and allegations of fraud. An independent review of source codes used in the machines found numerous problems, saying: “The software inventory provided by Smartmatic is inadequate, … which brings into question the software credibility.”

Smartmatic’s chairman, Mark Malloch-Brown, is a member of the British House of Lords. He also is a member of the Global Board of the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations, The Associated Press reported.

In a response to a request for comment from The Daily Signal, Dominion referred to information from a press release it issued earlier this week.

“There have been no ‘raids’ of Dominion servers by the U.S. military or otherwise, and Dominion does not have servers in Germany,” the release says, adding later:

Dominion and Smartmatic do not collaborate in any way and have no affiliate relationships or financial ties. Dominion does not use Smartmatic software. The only associations the companies have ever had were:

—In 2009, Smartmatic licensed Dominion machines for use in the Philippines. The contract ended in a lawsuit.

—In 2010, Dominion purchased certain assets from Sequoia, a private U.S. company. Smartmatic, a previous owner of Sequoia, pursued legal actions against Dominion.
3. Biden’s ‘Freudian Slip’

Giuliani noted that the danger of mail-in voting has been cited by such liberal sources as former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat; former Supreme Court Justice...