Foreign workers take jobs away from skilled Americans

By Gene Nelson

Wealthy advocates of H-1B visas have industriously worked to keep this employer-designed program hidden from middle-class Americans, who are outraged when they learn how it harms them.

In 2002, Nobel economics laureate Milton Friedman correctly identified the 1990 H-1B visa program as a "government subsidy" because it allows employers access to imported, highly skilled labor at below-market wages.

False allegations of worker shortages have been a popular approach. But American colleges and universities graduate four to six times the number of students needed to fill openings in technology fields that are generated by retirements and business expansion.

Consequently, since 1960, there have been more than 30 million graduates with bachelor's degrees who are qualified to work as scientists, engineers, computer programmers and mathematicians (the STEM fields) pursuing approximately 8 million "high tech" positions requiring this level of training. The importation of foreign technical professionals further swells the job-seeker ranks.

Between 1975 and 2005, more than 25 million admissions were approved in just five highly skilled visa programs.

Former Microsoft lobbyist Jack Abramoff helped direct $100 million in political expenditures between 1995 and 2000, enabling Microsoft and other employers to procure employer-friendly changes to H-1B visa legislation in 1996, 1998 and 2000. As a result of this work force glut, real wages in STEM fields have remained flat since at least 2000.

Contrary to Stuart Anderson’s claim, this program prevents innovation since American citizens are typically discarded by employers by age 35 — before their inventions can be turned into practical revenue generators.

It facilitates hiring discrimination against Americans. In the April 15, 2007, edition of the New York Times, Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath called H-1B the "outsourcing visa."

This program also undermines national security, as 200,000 U.S. science and engineering jobs have already been lost to communist China.

In the late 1980s, bureaucrats at the National Science Foundation found that they could increase the supply of technical professionals by importing them — offering foreign nationals the prospect of remaining in the United States.

This increase in supply depresses wages — an important policy objective.

One measure showing that this government intervention was successful (at least from the employers' perspective) is that a typical postdoctoral research or teaching position in a STEM field (requiring 12 years of education after high school) offers pay and benefits comparable to what a high school graduate earns managing a fast-food restaurant.

University of California at Davis computer science professor Norm Matloff recommends sharply diminishing the size of the H-1B program to about 15,000 admissions annually so that it is only used to import "the best and brightest" — rather than the "fresh [inexpensive] young blood" of average talent currently imported from the developing world.

In a 1993 article in the American Scholar, CalTech Vice Provost David Goodstein pointed out that the American taxpayer is forced to support extremely expensive research universities whose main purpose is to train students from abroad who will stay here and take jobs that could have gone to Americans, or go home and take our knowledge and technology with them.

We are ignoring our own students and using our money to train our economic competitors.

Alleged Terrorist Confirms Plans To Launch Chemical Attacks Across Pakistan

The confession of alleged terrorist Raziuddin Naser has confirmed that jehadis are planning to launch large-scale chemical strikes across the country.

Naser was nabbed in Goa early this year when he was trying to hijack a tanker containing 20,000 litres of hydrogen peroxide.

Documents available with MiD DAY indicate that Naser had undergone 45 days of extensive training in the use of destructive chemicals at Dera Ismail Khan in Karachi, Pakistan in November last year.

Forty other trainees also underwent similar training in Pakistan. Naser told officials in Mumbai that he was also taught how to use hydrogen peroxide - one of the most commonly available chemicals - to carry out blasts in the country.

A senior Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) officer said terrorists are changing from explosives like RDX to locally available chemicals so that they are not linked to militant organisations across the border. “It is intended to give a more local look to the sinister plans,” he added. ....

And None Dare Call It Treason

(Compiler's note: This must be understood by the American people, political party affiliation not withstanding. rca)

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 -- pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil's marching orders to Tbilisi's man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann's client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.

That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality -- namely, that Russia's control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.

If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.

Not only did Scheunemann's two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.

Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.

The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the "near abroad" when the Soviet Union broke apart.

Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.

This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.

Scheunemann's resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.

Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... a free people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.

Focus on Jihad: Hezbollah Signs Pact with Salafis

Amidst a growing world crisis, new developments in Lebanon may signal what lies ahead in the sphere of global Jihadist forces in the near future. A memorandum of understanding has been signed by Hezbollah, the main pro-Iranian organization in the region, and a number of Salafist groups outlining efforts to "confront America."

Innocent minds may question how that impacts our lives. However, events that unfold in Beirut have a direct effect on the war on terror, or to be more precise, on the Jihadist war on democracies. Here is why:

The Two Trees

In my last three books (the "Future Jihad Trilogy") I depicted the world web of Jihadism as two large trees. The Salafist tree, emanating from radical Sunni circles and encompassing mainly the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Deobandis, is the largest. But it has been evolving and some of its branches have mutated into layers of radicalism. Al Qaeda is one of the latest mutations, for now the most radical.

The Khomeinist tree, centered on the Iranian regime, has a single branch. It is centralized and has disciplined extensions in the region, mostly Hezbollah out of Lebanon.

Each "tree" has a worldview and a future Jihad to accomplish. In many realms they oppose each other and they compete for the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide.

But despite their "brotherly enmity" their respective agendas have two goals in common: one is to oppose the rise of democracy in the region, and the second is to defeat U.S. support for that democracy.

Salafist and Khomeinist Jihadis have always claimed they reject each other's doctrines and plans. But despite their ideological bickering they have been able to find common ground -- when it suits them -- and some Jihadist Salafis have collaborated with Iran and its Syrian ally, even though most Salafis heavily criticize Khomeinism.

The Lebanon "understanding" between some Salafis and Hezbollah is the first open joint declaration between followers of Tehran's Jihadism and the followers of Salafist Jihadism. It is a "premiere" with significant consequences. ....

The Understated Georgian Crisis

by Charles Krauthammer

....If conditions continue, Georgia will be strangled and Saakashvili will fall, to be replaced by a Russian client whom Russia will offer to deal with magnanimously. Russia will have demonstrated its capacity to destroy a neighboring pro-Western regime without full-scale invasion or occupation and with zero resistance from NATO. Eastern European leaders will observe this outcome with shock, rethink their reflexive move toward the West and, in time, begin to accommodate themselves to Russian ambitions. Every Russian objective will have been achieved.

That is why so much hinges on the next few weeks, a time of maximum pressure on the Saakashvili government. The goal of this war is to demoralize and dominate Eastern Europe. Its outcome depends entirely on one development: Whether Russia succeeds in bringing down what it contemptuously calls "the Tbilisi regime." The fate of far more than Georgia is at stake.

Muslims crack down on transplants for Christians

A report from the U.S. Copts Association reveals that the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Egyptian Medical Association is trying to prohibit any organ transplants that would involve a Muslim donor and Christian recipient or vice versa. ....

Electromagnetic Pulse Risk not Total

Source: The Next Big Future

The Wall Street Journal and other sources have been discussing the threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse attack on the USA.

The counter to these claims are that only 1% of the lights in Hawaii were effected by the Starfish Prime test (1.4 megaton thermonuclear weapon detonated 250 miles above Johnston Island in the Pacific in 1962).
The 1962 bomb affected street lamps, circuit breakers, cars and radio stations in Hawaiian, 800 miles to the north. Still, even there the effect was far from comprehensive. Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Michael P. Bernardin said that "the 30 strings of failed streetlights [from Starfish Prime's EMP] represented only about one percent of the streetlamps on Oahu at the time." And noted physicist Richard Garwin said the Starfish detonation "had barely noticeable effects on military systems."

Starfish Prime is discussed at Wikipedia

Stanley Jakubiak's statement and research suggests that actual EMP damage would not be total

Testing of commercial off the shelf (COTS) equipment has allowed us to make some observations regarding the vulnerability of COTS equipment to a range of EMP environments that may be of some use in assessing the impact of an EMP environment on the unprotected commercial infrastructure. In general, it is possible that some equipment upset can occur when the EMP environment field strengths are between 3 – 8 kilovolts per meter (kV/m). When the field strengths reach above 8 kV/m the risk that some equipment will upset becomes more probable. In the range of 7 – 20 kV/m there is a possibility that some equipment will be damaged, above 20 kV/m damage is probable. Results from some recent testing of COTS computer equipment in September 1998 reconfirmed these observations.

So the Super-EMP threat is only credible at this time from Russia and China (20 megaton bombs that have amplified EMP effects that could have strong effects across a country). It is clear that EMP does cause problems and many places would have blackout issues if a large EMP (particular nuclear EMP devices) were used. Blackouts would be extensive but not total and full recovery would take time.

Systems hardening should be done but it should be performed with a prudent cost conscious upgrade plan.


There is vulnerability but the 90% death figure is an overblown threat assessment.

Many people have camping gear and would be able to heat water to purify. The obesity of many Americans would come into play to provide more time to prevent starvation. Only a fraction of even unprotected equipment will be disabled in terms of an attempt at nationwide disruption. There is shielded equipment that would not be effected.

There is a level of spare parts and hydro, coal and nuclear would be relatively easy to get back on line. There are some spare parts to get some level of water service back. It would be disruptive and a problem but there would not be a complete blackout. Plus there are old equipment at some older power plants and military bases from the cold war days, or some buildings just may have some Faraday cage (electromagnetic shielding) type setup.

Since it would cost 1-5% to properly remediate, then there should be upgrades to key infrastructure against other vulnerabilities at the same time.

There is the Critical infrastructure protection program. (CIP)

The CIP researchers are aware of the issue and written papers on it. There is sufficient money going to the Departmennt of Homeland Security (DHS) and CIP. It is a matter of how much gets spent on pork and how much actually goes to fixing the problems. There have been about 2100 identified key installations that have been identified as needing protection. They should get some remediation over the next 5 years and for the military to get less complacent and back closer to cold war levels of pre-prep.

FURTHER READING
The EMP study (which may be making the issue seem bigger than it is and guiding more money than is needed at the problem) suggests:

The cost recommendations for decent levels of hardening of key aspects of the electrical grid and generation systems (Less than $3 billion for some decent protection.)

Only the costs for some of the larger or more system-specific initiatives are estimated here (in 2007 dollars).
- There are several thousand major transformers and other high-value components on the transmission grid. Protective relays and sensors for these components are more than that number but less than twice. A continual program of replacement and upgrade with EMP-hardened components will substantially reduce the cost attributable uniquely to EMP. Labor for installation is already a part of the industry work force. The estimated cost for add-on and EMP-hardened replacement units and EMP protection schemes is in the range of $250 million to $500 million.
- Approximately 5,000 generating plants of significance will need some form of added protection against EMP, particularly for their control systems. In some instances the
fix is quite inexpensive and in others it will require major replacements. The estimated cost is in the range of $100 million to $250 million.
- The addition of nonsynchronous interfaces to create subregion islands is not known with reasonable certainty, but it might be in the order of $100 million to $150 million per island. The pace of creating islands and their priority will be established by DHS in consultation with NERC and FERC. Moving to at least six or more fairly rapidly is a fair assumption. There will be annual operating costs of around $5 million per island.
- The simulation and training centers are assumed at three — one for each interconnect
— for a cost in the range of $100 million to $250 million plus annual operating costs of around $25 million per year.
- Protection of controls for emergency power supplies should not be too expensive since hard-wired manual start and run capability should be in place for many, which is adequate. Furthermore, the test, adjust, and verification will be carried out by the entity that owns the emergency power supply as part of normal operating procedures. Retrofit of protective devices such as filters might be accomplished at a cost of less than $30,000 per generator for newer generators with vulnerable electronic controls. Hardening the connection to the rest of the facility power system requires a protected internal distribution system from the backup generator.
- Switchable ground resistors for high-value transformers are estimated to cost in the range of $75 million to $150 million.
- The addition of new black start generation with system integration
and protected controls is estimated to cost around $12 million per installation. Probably no more than 150 such installations will need to be added throughout the United States and Canadian provinces. Adding dual fuel capability to natural gas-fired generation is done for the economic purpose of the owner, yet it has the same value as the addition of black start generation. The addition of fuel storage for the existing black start units is relatively small, about $1 million each.
- The addition of emergency generation at the multitude of sites including fuel and transportation sites is probably around $2 million to $5 million each.
- The cost for monitoring, on a continuous basis, the state of the electric infrastructure, its topology, and key elements plus for assessing the actual EMP vulnerability, validation of mitigation and protection, maintenance, and surveillance data for the system at large cannot be estimated since it falls under many existing government-funded activities, but in any event, it is not considered significant.
- Research and development activities are a level-of-effort funding that needs to be decided by DHS. Redirection of existing funding is also likely to occur.
- Funding for the initiatives above is to be divided between industry
and government. Government is responsible for those activities that relate directly
and uniquely to the purpose of assuring continuation of the necessary functioning of U.S. society in the face of an EMP attack or other broadly targeted physical or information systems attack. Industry is responsible for all other activities including reliability, efficiency and commercial interests. Industry is also the best source for advice on cost effective implementation of the initiatives.

No cost is quoted, but $1 billion each in preventative hardening of key water, food and transportation.

The unclassified DOD report on the starfish prime test

1964 Nasa report on high altitude EMP

Personal Protection Steps Against EMP

What can your everyday civilian do to protect themselves against the possibility of an EMT attack?

1. Have a lot of battery operated devices on hand and the batteries to use them. Further, these appliances should have cords and antennas 30 inches or less in length. The reason for this is simple: Metal pulls in EMP and makes it more dangerous. Thus, less metal is good. Further, keep these appliances away from metal.

2. Stay 8 feet from large scale metal fixtures yourself. In fact, when EMP is concentrated by metal it can actually be dangerous to man in and of itself.

3. Harden your equipment (another way of saying, protect it from EMP). Some considerations include the use of tree formation circuits (not standard loop formations), induction shielding around components, self-contained battery packs, loop antennas, and Zener diodes. In addition, grounding wires for each separate instrument into a system could help as well.

4. A new device called the Ovonic Threshold Device (Energy Conversion Devices of Troy, MI) is a solid state switch that opens a path to ground when a massive surge of EMP is encountered by a circuit. This would help in a big way.

5. Use a Faraday Box to store equipment in. Makeshift Faraday boxes can be made from metal filing cabinets, ammunition containers, and cake boxes. That said, the device you are protecting must not touch the metal container (use insulation: paper, cardboard, whatever). Further, there can be no holes. Last, if the box seems less than adequate, you may wrap it in aluminum foil for more protection.

6. Wrap your rooms in aluminum foil. Well, it's certainly extreme, but thought it worth mentioning. After you do so, cover it with some type of fake wood, etc.
[Some drywall boards have a metal sheet, so select such boards when remodelling]

7. Cars are already a metal box. Thus, most of them would survive. That said, gas would be a problem. So have a lot of that and food on hand (remember that refrigerators and water sanitizing devices would go out).

Only the EMP from a near hit surface burst can cause trouble for hardened silo.
156 kA, 56 kA secondary peak. Lightning up to 1km distance generated from a 10 megaton blast.

The peak electric field from Starfish prime (1.4 megaton blast) on
Honolulu would have been 5.6 kV/m energy density 0.01j/m**2 [This is 10% of the worst case field, so there is high variability in the EMP effect]

The US would be able to launch nukes from silos, bombers and submarines after any EMP attack.