A fable for our time, by Tommy Douglas

Avedon links us to a most brilliant piece:

 

The Infosys H1B Scandal

Yet more proof that the “oh we can’t find these tech workers at home so we must import them” line is nonsense:

A giant Indian outsourcing company with thousands of employees in the
United States is facing an expanding federal investigation prompted by
claims from an American whistle-blower that it misused short-term
visitors’ visas to bring in low-cost workers from India.

Accusations that the company, Infosys Technologies, repeatedly violated the terms of business visitor visas were first raised in a lawsuit filed in February in Alabama by Jack Palmer, an Infosys project manager. Aside from Mr. Palmer, at least two other Infosys managers in the United States have submitted internal whistle-blower reports pointing to Indians on business visitor visas who were performing longer-term work not authorized under those visas, according to internal
documents and current Infosys managers.

In May, Infosys acknowledged that it had received a subpoena from a
federal grand jury in Texas seeking information about the company’s use
of the visitor documents, known as B-1 visas, which are easier to
obtain. This month, N. R. Narayana Murthy, an Infosys founder, expressed
his concern about that investigation at a board meeting in Bangalore,
India, in his final address before he retired as company chairman.

“As I leave the board, I feel sad” about the subpoena, he said. “The
issue will be decided on its merits in due course,” said Mr. Murthy, who
is something of a legend in global business for building the company
over three decades from a $250 investment into an outsourcing powerhouse
with $6 billion in revenues.

The legal jeopardy isn’t the only one the divide-and-conquer-the-worker CEOs in both India are facing. Zoe Lofgren’s introduced a bill that would require US companies to increase the wages employers would have to pay H-1B workers, in an effort to ensure they do not undercut American tech industry workers as well as to eliminate the exploitation of overseas tech workers in the US; the measure targets Indian outsourcing companies. In addition, Congress last year added an extra $2,000 to the fee for H-1B visas, in another move aimed at the Indian outsourcing companies.

Hillary’s Mouseketeers

The State Department is trying to outdo itself for silliness.

(image adapted from DisneyNuts)

Following is a joint statement of Canada, Colombia, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, European Union, South Korea, Spain, Mexico, Norway, and the United States.

Begin Text:

We, the Group of Friends of the International Conference in Support of the Central American Security Strategy, meeting tomorrow, June 22, 2011, in Guatemala City, express our strong support and recognition to the Member States of the Central American Integration System (SICA) in their fight against organized crime and drug trafficking in the region.

The members of the Group of Friends recognize that confronting the threat of organized crime is a shared responsibility, and commend the leadership and responsibility shown by the Central American governments in formulating and implementing policies to promote security, and urge them to continue their efforts to implement the new Central American Security Strategy, mainly through the regional integration mechanisms, by ensuring adequate financing based on timely fiscal and budgetary policy decisions.

Moreover, the members of the Group of Friends stand willing to fully maximize the effectiveness and sustainability of our contributions, reducing duplication of efforts, generating a more effective impact in support of the Strategy and national efforts by the countries of Central America, and taking steps domestically which help enhance security in Central America.

The members of the Group of Friends will pay special attention to, and collaborate on, programs aimed at increasing Central American countries’ capacity in the fight against transnational organized crime; strengthening rule of law institutions, including prosecutors, the judiciary, police, penitentiary, and border security institutions; combating corruption; as well as building SICA’s capacity as a key institution for achieving regional security objectives.

Moreover, we recognize the need to act on the underlying causes of crime and insecurity, including poverty and the lack of access to jobs and education by the most vulnerable segments of society.[emphasis added]

Group of Friends? I don’t think a sillier name could have been chosen. What do Finland, South Korea, and Israel have to do with Central American drug trafficking? And what leadership has been shown by Central America? Half the Honduran government must be members of the cartels, and the rest of the nations of the region aren’t much better.

Go ahead. Listen to the theme song of the Group of Friends and see if it doesn’t sound familiar.

Classy John Gilmore Update: Now with Video

Thanks to Jeremy Ryan of Defend Wisconsin, who gave permission to AmericaBlog to post this on their YouTube channel, we now have video of prominent Minnesota Republican activist and party functionary John Gilmore right as he’s about to get arrested for harassing a few women who made the mistake of being openly Muslim in his presence.

Oh, and guess what? It turns out FDL’s very own Gregg Levine was an inadvertent witness to the start of the harassment:

OMG, after looking at the videos, I realize I saw the start of this whole thing Thursday night on Nicolette Mall. I assumed Gilmore was some drunk local or tourist. He was screaming in a sort of drunk-sounding slur, THIS IS AMERICA, and holding his camera three feet in front of his face and flashing pictures while he yelled at the women.

The women in hijab had this so under control, I felt no need to intervene. Really, they were calm and smart and mostly just told him they were practicing their religion and to leave them alone–and I felt they didn’t need some pasty NYer escalating things. I didn’t realize it did escalate after I walked on.

Gilmore came off as a screaming freak. I’m glad the police intervened–he was harassing the women. And since it is now theoretically illegal to take pictures of bridges, it should at least be investigated when someone tries to intimidate by snapping picture after picture of you when you are minding your own business.

And, now that it is in context, think what lies beneath. Gilmore is taking pictures to show how insidious the left Netroots is because we include these “obviously subversive terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.” I’m sure he thought he had some sort of scoop, himself. What a pig.

This tallies well with what we see on the video as well as with the various other eyewitness descriptions, such as these at City Pages, the local arm of the Village Voice:

Elisabeth Geschiere, a pedi-cab driver, was working on Nicollet Mall when she recognized a friend, Jamila Boudlali, standing outside of the Dakota Jazz club. She came over and started talking with Boudlali, and her friend Anwar Hijaz, who were downtown for an afterparty for Netroots Nation, the progressive political blogging conference. Both Hijaz and Boudlali were wearing Muslim headscarves.

That apparently attracted the attention of a gray-haired man — 52-year-old Gilmore — who suddenly approached the trio and said the name, “Ayan Hersi Ali.” Ali is a vocal, female critic of Islam. The three women tried to brush him off, saying they did not want to debate with him.

And that, according to cops and witnesses, is when Gilmore became belligerent, taking photos of the women, and demanding to know why they were in the U.S. Geschiere says when she asked him to stop taking their photo, things only escalated.

“He started saying things like, ‘This is America, welcome to America, this is the western world,’” says Geschiere. “So I immediately retorted like, ‘Dude, we all grew up in America.’”

As bystanders started to intervene, the shouting ramped up, and Gilmore started pacing around the crowd and yelling “Andrew Breitbart — hello!” into his phone. That was the first time, says witness and visiting Netroots Nation-attendee Matt Glazer, that he realized the man was a conservative.

“He made it sounds like he was about to hurt people, so then that’s when I called the police,” says Glazer.

More on this as it develops.

Note, ladies and gentlemen, that this occurred the evening before Andrew Breitbart’s attempt to sneak into Netroots Nation without paying. Much of the early scuttlebutt about this conflated the two events, leading to confusion that still exists today in some quarters.

(Crossposted to MyFDL.)

Gadget of the month

A mosquito trap using natural attractants and no pesticides:

http://www.flowtron.com/movie/high.wmv

If they’d sell it with carbon dioxide generated from anything other than carbon-based fuels and got the price tag below $100, I’d buy one. Out of all of God’s creatures, mosquitoes (and especially the parasites they carry) are the ones that I least understand the reason for existence.

BTW, anyone know of a good, electric chipper/shredder for under $250?

He’s baaaaack!

Opening to Keith Olbermann’s Countdown on Current:

Michael Moore: The third wheel in this [governing] is Congress. Where are they? They don’t stand up to the Supreme Court on that issue [courts making law], they don’t stand up to the President on this issue [making war]. It’s not healthy for the country.
Keith: It appears that in Congress they’re spending too much time there for it to be just a hobby, but they’re not taking it seriously enough to be a full time job.

Rightwingers, Winning Hearts and Minds

In Dearborn, Michigan, “Christian” missionaries proclaimed the superiority of their faith by yelling anti-Muslim insults at an Arab Festival and making little girls cry. They were attacking Catholics, too.

In Australia, scientists researching climate change are receiving death threats.

Republican Party of Minnesota Insider: Staying Classy by Harassing Women

For the record: John Hugh Gilmore is not an employee of Andrew Breitbart. While he is a conservative blogger (of the Minnesota Conservatives blog), he does have some standards.

Gilmore lives in St. Paul, and is a pretty big wheel in Minnesota Republican politics, being in tight with the Marty Seifert and Ben Golnik/Gregg Peppin crowd as well as being a prominent Republican Party of Minnesota functionary in State Senate District 65 and a state central committee member. He backed Seifert in the 2010 Republican race for the gubernatorial nomination, but dutifully (albeit reluctantly) climbed onto the wildly careening Emmer bandwagon once Emmer’s nomination was a done deal.

He also happens to be the person who was arrested last Thursday night for getting drunk and harassing two Muslim women of Middle Eastern descent. This is the incident that triggered a flash mob protest on Saturday’s session of Right Online, and accounted for some of the passion with which Andrew Breitbart’s attempt to disrupt Netroots Nation 2011 was met. Here’s Sue Wilson’s account:

.The story started the night before when two women ventured into the streets of Minneapolis wearing the traditional Hijab (headscarf.) They were approached by John Hugh Gilmore, a 52 year attorney and self described Conservative who blogs for “Minnesota Conservatives.” According to police, he asked the women what they thought of Ayaan Hersi Ali, a Somali who is a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who decries Muslims. The women told him they weren’t exactly fans. The inebriated Gilmore then became upset and started harassing the pair, asking what right they had to be in this country, until 60 onlookers intervened. Police were called and arrested Gilmore, but not until Gilmore tried to reach Andrew Breitbart on his phone.

Mind you, this is one of the persons who makes up the ‘respectable’ wing of the local GOP, capable of doing semi-credible defenses of Democrats like Terri Bonoff on invocations — though he muffs it when he attacks her for backing nondenominational ones only: “Invoking Jesus or Yahweh does not violate the separation of church and state. This misses the point entirely but then again MC has not found democrats to be well versed in either religion or the constitution.” Sorry, that’s not what the Fourth Circuit found.

This guy is, underneath his Brooks Brothers suit, a raging Islamophobe of the Bradlee Dean variety, and he shows it in his writings and now in his actions.

UPDATE: Well, whaddaya know — the local rocking-chair media actually have deigned to notice this story. Good on you, MPR!

Japan’s other nuclear disaster(s)

Jo6Pac sometimes links to Washington’s blog. That blog covers nuclear issues. While I happen to disagree with the most recent post which proposes that there is common ground between climate change scientists and skeptics, the author clearly reads widely. He linked an article in the NYT on the ongoing crisis at Monju. This is close to population centers like Osaka and Kyoto (not that anything in Japan is very far from anything else). Hiroki Tabuchi:

TSURUGA, Japan — Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle.

The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton [fuel transfer] device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core.

Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.

But critics warn that the recovery process is fraught with dangers because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium, a highly flammable substance, to cool the nuclear fuel.
…
In Monju, Japan is pursuing a technology that most countries have long abandoned.

Washington’s blog notes that Shizuoka nuclear plant has also suffered serious damage. This plant is roughly as far southwest of Tokyo as Fukushima is northeast. A serious accident at either Shizuoka or Monju could contaminate Japanese food supplies (See here for three maps that show where agriculture is possible in Japan).

Behold, I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.

Scare yourself

Arne Gunderson, former nuclear industry executive now working for the forces of Good, has a blog.

Most recent topic: People in Tokyo are inhaling 10 radioactive particles capable of triggering cancer or COPD every day. People in Seattle are breathing 5. [Added: my first post on Fukushima was titled "We are all hibakusha ("explosion affected people" or atomic survivors) now." It seems prescient in retrospect.]

He’s also on YouTube, talking about the Ft. Calhoun NE situation: In three parts, here, here, and here.