The H-1B Visa Problem

I despise almost all of what Trump has initiated in his nine months in office, but the H-1B Visa fees are not something I worry about.  In fact, wouldn’t the world be better off if we couldn’t rob other countries of their top talent?

There are three arguments against pillaging the best and brightest from other countries.  The first is that we should be focused on improving our own educational system.  We have three hundred and some million people in this country.  There is no conceivable reason why we should have to go far afield to find talent.  If the reason is better preparation in specific areas, then the tech companies should work with universities and secondary schools to improve the pedagogy in those areas. 

 

Within our population there is enough brain power to do anything.  There is no legitimate argument that we must tap other nations for the most intelligent or capable workers.  It is a simply a matter of developing the wonderful intellects that are already here.

 

The second argument is that H-1B visas are in essence a continuation of the western exploitation of the resources of other lands.  How can we expect these countries to become more stable politically with better developed economies and opportunities if we are taking the raw human resources that they so desperately need to make progress in a competitive world that is already stacked against them?  

 

The same is true for our visa system for studying in the USA.  It is a wonderful thing for our universities to train citizens from across the world if there are limited educational opportunities in their own country.  But we should not allow them to stay, for if they do not return, we are essentially stealing them from those other countries.

 

The world is a competitive place and I fully understand that there is a strong motive for recruiting talent, whether through university education or H-1B visas.  But the world is also a profoundly troubled place with grotesque inequalities among nations.  And those troubles and inequalities are no longer remote and meaningless to us.  They are increasingly causing strife within our land through immigration issues, climate change, wars, drugs and criminality.  There is no question that the loss of valuable intellectual talent contributes heavily to these woes.

Brain drain is a catch-22 for developing nations.  The more troubled or unstable a nation is, the more the best and brightest flee for better opportunities, which in turn creates more instability.  Developed nations are exacerbating the problem by aggressively recruiting people from struggling lands.

 

The third argument is that the H-1Bs are predominantly used to fuel the AI furnace, and the last thing this world needs is a furious, no holds barred arms race in AI.  We would all be better off if AI development were less frenetic and more measured, with essential ethical and safety analyses guiding the technology.  It would also be good for many countries to share in the development of this technology to motivate them to use it for the common good.

 

The AI arms race is similar to the nuclear arms race in the cold war.  But the mutual assured destruction scenario at least kept those arms in a dormant state.  I highly doubt there will be any such hesitancy or precautions in the application of AI technology.

 

Of course, all of my arguments are idealistic in the extreme and unlikely to ever be considered in public policy.  No doubt my concern for other countries and use of the term ‘exploitation’ would be ridiculed as hopelessly bleeding heart by more conservative readers.  But it is in my nature to ponder problems and look at an idealized scenario.  It is a naivete of sorts, but it is satisfying to me to imagine a more perfect world.  

 

Is Charlie Kirk the Horst Wessel for MAGA?

First, let me say clearly that I think the murder of Charlie Kirk is abominable and tragic.  There is no justification for this type of political assassination.  But the reaction of Trump, Vance and the rest of the MAGA world is frightening and incredibly cynical and manipulative.

 

Horst Wessel was a middle-class university student who reveled in the masculine subculture of the Sturmabteilung (SA) of the late 1920’s. He became a leader of a street cell that courted violent encounters with communists in Berlin.  He was shot by a communist thug over a lodging dispute and died later in the hospital from sepsis.

 

Josef Goebbels, at that time the Gauleiter of Berlin, had been looking for a martyr to use for propaganda purposes.  Horst Wessel was perfect for the role.  As the Nazi party became ever more powerful and the storm troopers grew in numbers and violence, Horst Wessel became an icon.  A song that Wessel had composed became the SA anthem and ultimately the Nazi party anthem and was known as the Horst Wessel Lied (Song).  To this day it is illegal to perform this song in Germany and both the lyrics and tune are banned.

 

There are strong parallels between the history of the Horst Wessel martyrdom and the current MAGA efforts to make Charlie Kirk into a noble hero cut down by evil leftists.  In both cases, rather than lamenting the violence that pervades society and calling for calm, the events were used for political vengeance and initiating draconian witch hunts for so-called co-conspirators. 

 

Ignoring the complex nature of violence in the USA, which has touched all sides of the political spectrum and is often more a question of mental illness and alienation than of political motivation, is profoundly deceitful.  And publicly shaming, threatening, suspending or firing people who express opinions that are critical of Kirk or that minimize his assassination are clear violations of free speech.  It is a very slippery path to a police state mentality.

 

There may indeed be wrenching sorrow in the MAGA ranks over the death of Kirk, but using his death as a way to limit political discourse and target political foes is clearly an authoritarian move that endangers the most basic rights of our country.  The proper way to honor Kirk would be to make a strong appeal for reconciliation and harmony.  We may not be able to cease vilifying one another in the short term, but using Kirk’s death to ratchet up the tension in our fragile democracy is courting disaster.

It Really Is All About the Data

Figures never lie, but liars will figure.  This pithy quote is attributed to Mark Twain, but like so many quotes, may be falsely attributed.  However, the implication that data and statistics are important but can be manipulated by the unscrupulous is an important caveat to any discussion of the importance of facts and data.

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, who often engaged in heated debates with liberal college students as a way to spread his hard-right brand of Christian conservatism, caused me to review some of his debates and consider the larger question of how we study and interpret the issues that plague our current political landscape.

 

Charlie Kirk was no deep thinker.  He was a hard-right provocateur in the spirit of Rush Limbaugh and other shock jocks.  He is being eulogized for his willingness to engage in debate and dialogue, but these debates and interactions were always superficial.  No serious analysis of issues took place.  The goal was to ‘own the libs’, and Kirk was somewhat skilled at making clever jibes that seemed to make sense to an audience desperate for validation of their own prejudices.  His so-called debates were pure entertainment, not a real channel for engagement. Charlie Kirk was a skilled political operator, nothing more.

 

The only way to truly work through political, social and economic issues is to analyze the data and think deeply about how that data can be interpreted.  It isn’t easy, and it isn’t foolproof. There is always potential for people to manipulate or misconstrue facts to confirm their biases.  But careful study and good faith interaction will generally lead to at least a moderation of extreme views and a potential for compromise.

 

Sadly, the American people have little patience for data or details.  Ross Perot’s candidacy for president in 1992 was doomed after he famously brought out a flip chart and tried to educate the audience by using graphs and data.  Americans are bred on political sound bites and the verbal pugilism of talk radio, TV news and Internet memes.

 

Our rabidly partisan political situation has triggered a near total abandonment of deep, factual analysis.  The primary channels of social media have no capability to foster gracious, sincere exchange of carefully thought-out views.  There are Internet spaces where deep thinking is recorded (substack, patreon and others), but only a tiny minority of Americans engage.

 

When careful, deep analysis is abandoned, the political landscape becomes dominated by boisterous, brutal and violent people.  The loudest, most extreme and most simplistic opinions are embraced with fervor by a public that only has appetite for the clever quip or the putdown.

 

When data and facts are no longer the basis of political dialogue, democracy goes into a death spiral.  Who will pull us out?

France’s ‘Block Everything’ Protests – The Start of a Unifying Theme for Troubled Democracies?

On Wednesday, a day after France’s assembly gave a no-confidence vote to its Prime Minister that resulted in his resignation, over 200 thousand people went into the streets to protest inequality and potential budget cuts proposed by the Macron administration.

 

The great majority of the participants polled were adherents to left or far-left politics. The right was an early advocate of the idea to demonstrate, but the increasing role of the left, still a sworn enemy, discouraged many from the right. The far-right party, the National Rally (RN), has focused its key ideological tenets around immigration, nationalism and euro-skepticism.  The RN is also anti-woke, which tends to alienate it from the left.  But its strong populist nature is fed significantly by economic insecurity, which suggests a possibility for a future alliance.

 

The French republic, like the USA, has a debt larger than its GDP (123%).  It also has seen dramatic increases in income and wealth disparity over the last 40 years similar to the those in the USA.  The challenge of coming up with a budget that begins to reduce that debt has overwhelmed Macron and his party, somewhat ironically named Renaissance.

 

All of the western democracies are facing similar challenges.  Both moderate left and right parties have failed to rein in budget deficits and growing populist movements are becoming significant threats.  In most cases, the efforts to create a balanced budget are focused on spending cuts rather than increases in taxes – a unilateral approach that is primarily  alienating the lower classes on the left presently, but has the potential to broaden its repugnance.

 

The economic situation in all of these countries is becoming more precarious with each passing year.  Interest payments on debt are rising, military outlays are increasing and populations are aging. The attempts to cut public services or delay retirements are extremely unpopular, but up to now have not created a united front across the political spectrum.

 

If the economic trends continue to be bleak and begin to seriously impact quality of life and employment opportunities, then I predict the populist movements will finally look past their cultural and immigration focus and find common cause with the left in assailing the absurdly unequal distribution of income and wealth across the developed world.

Movements like ‘block everything’ (bloquons tout!) will begin to attract people from across the political spectrum.  The ruling classes, who generally resist raising taxes out of a combination of self-interest and free market dogma, will finally be forced to address both sides of the budget equation.  If there must be pain (and there is no doubt that pain will be necessary) then the pain must be shared or there will be hell to pay. 

Where Is the Dreaded Antifa, MAGA people?

Not long ago, for MAGA diehards, Antifa was everywhere.  Every Black Lives Matter protest was rife with Antifa terrorists.  Every anti-Trump rally was a mob of violent Antifa communists, ready to bring mayhem and impose a new Marxist order on America, that shining city on the hill, that lonely bulwark against European socialism and Chinese takeover.

Well guess what, MAGA people, Trump ‘won’ the 2024 election by less popular votes and less electoral college votes than Biden did in 2020 and not a single Antifa stormed the capitol to try to take back the ‘stolen election’.  No democrats raged against voting machines or mail-in ballots. 

 

The ‘but what about ism’ that equated violent right-wing militias and MAGA extremists with the bogeyman Antifa was pure nonsense from the start, but has now come into clear focus.  The internal threat to America has never been the left-wing activists who believe that Trump and the MAGA movement are leading us ever closer to an authoritarian police state.  This, if nothing else, should be crystal clear now.

 

Recall that there was a huge effort to blame the January 6^th riots on Antifa false flag agitators immediately after the attacks.  When the extensive investigations by the FBI yielded not even the slightest evidence of Antifa involvement, the MAGA world began to minimize the January 6^th events, latching on to Trump’s description of the attempted coup as a ‘day of love’.

 

Right-wing extremists, whether the John Birchers of the 50’s, the Nixon moral majority of the 70’s, the Reaganites of the 80’s, the Gingrich cabal of the 90’s, the Tea Party of the late 2000’s or the current MAGA and Christian nationalists, always need an enemy to vilify and a threat to fearmonger.  Immigrants, trans and gay people and Antifa were tangible enemies, and communism and Marxism the abstract threat (never mind that not a single significant political party or presence in the USA espouses either communism or Marxism currently).

 

Antifa was never a highly organized group.  It was simply a ragtag assembly of people who felt that it was important to oppose emerging fascist trends in the country before they became entrenched.  They became active during the first Trump presidency and immediately became the poster child for MAGA propagandists, who portrayed them as a highly dangerous fifth column in America.

 

Well, it turns out that the real fifth column is now populating the seats of government and is rewriting history, blackmailing, arresting or firing all opposition, deporting hundreds of thousands of ‘tired, poor, huddled masses’, imposing martial law on cities, and forbidding all college protest.  

 

So much for the Antifa threat.  Now that we know what the real threat is, will there be enough time and willpower to act before irreparable harm is done?

Trump: The Abuser in Chief

Watching the heroic Zelensky have to profusely thank the tyrant Trump during his recent visit with European leaders was deeply disturbing.  Trump’s only real objective in negotiating over the Ukraine/Russia war is to win a Nobel Peace Prize.  He couldn’t care less about the tens of thousands of lost lives or the trauma visited upon Ukraine.  He hasn’t the slightest interest in creating a strong consensus with European leaders or with Zelensky.  If getting to a settlement requires forcing Ukraine to accept what are really unacceptable demands, then he will not hesitate to use threats and insults to achieve it.

Our nation is by far the most powerful empire in the world, and when its leader is a tyrant and an abusive narcissist, the rest of the world treads very carefully in its interactions with us.  Proud men and women swallow their pride and kneel before this megalomaniac because to do otherwise could harm their countries, or will lead to other unhappy outcomes.

 

Many so-called successful people are horribly abusive in their relationships with other people.  Almost everyone has encountered this sad truth in their lives, whether in business, the military, education, sports or even love.  If the abuser is in a position of power or dominance, then this abuse can seem to be very effective, and it encourages ever more abuse. 

 

Occasionally the abuser will suspend the abuse and treat the abused with some degree of consideration, or show some level of kindness or approval. The person who is abused will practically crawl up into the abuser’s lap out of sheer relief when this happens, and it is a sickening dynamic to witness.

 

Abusers have deep psychological problems, but they rarely have to confront them because human beings generally try to avoid conflict.  The people that abusers denigrate, criticize, insult and threaten are either not in a position to be able to combat these injustices, or they have been beaten down so completely that they are no longer able to judge what is or is not abuse.

 

Outside observers, peers or even superiors recognize the abusers and internally criticize their character and tactics.  But the success of the abusers often causes others to ignore their distaste and overcome their scruples in dealing with them.  Calling down an abuser requires a high degree of ethical fortitude, and sadly, that is a rare commodity these days.

 

So a large part of the United States and the world will continue to stroke the ego of this buffoon, who by some horrible twist of fate is now the most powerful man in the world.  Some may even feel sickeningly grateful when he exhibits some tiny bit of good will or bestows some small benevolence.  And we will all wait in outraged impotence as his temper tantrums and idiotic machinations create havoc and harm around the world, praying that in 2028 the United States comes back to its senses.

Absurdly Extreme Policies with a Razor Thin Margin of Victory

The Trump administration and congress have pursued an agenda of extremely aggressive extremist measures in their first 6 months even though half the country is strongly opposed to most of their initiatives.

Party line politics has played an increasingly large role in the US legislature and executive branch.  The unique nature of our two-party system often allows one party to control the presidency and both houses of congress even when the margins of victory are tiny.  This has increasingly led to legislative and executive actions by one party that have no support at all by the other party, creating a thirst for retribution once the other party takes control and creating a whiplash effect in policy.

 

The last three presidential elections have been extremely close.  In 2016 Clinton won the popular vote (48.2% to 46.1%) but lost to Trump in the electoral college (304-227).  In 2020 Biden won the popular vote (51.3% to 46.9%) and the electoral college (306-232).  In 2024 Trump won the popular vote (49.8% to 48.3%) and the electoral college (312-226).  The previous elections saw more substantial victories, but the popular vote margins have rarely been more than a 10% difference (Reagan’s win over Mondale, Nixon’s win over McGovern, and Johnson’s win over Goldwater being the rare exceptions in the last 60 years).

 

The House of Representatives and Senate have traded hands over the last three elections with both houses being won by the president’s party in presidential election years and the House of Representatives changing hands in midterm elections.  The margins in all of these elections have been small.

 

Given the obvious 50/50 nature of recent political affiliation, it would seem logical for both parties to work together to craft legislation that is a compromise of the views on both sides of the aisle.  But instead, most legislation is passed with bitter party line votes and strong protests from the minority party.  

 

This has reached a crescendo in the current political environment.  Trump’s executive orders and autocratic rule have been rubber-stamped by a craven, fear-driven republican-controlled congress that has only a tiny majority but is able to operate as if it has a huge mandate. A supreme court stacked with three conservative justices that Trump was allowed to appoint under clearly fraudulent circumstances has yet to exert any braking effect and seems unwilling to challenge Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

 

An objective observer cannot help but judge the Trump regime’s first 6 months as the most extreme set of policies and executive actions that this nation has ever experienced.  And the fact that Trump and his congress squeaked out wins in the last election makes this especially unwarranted and dangerous.  We are careening toward a state of civic distrust and enmity that does not bode well for the future of our democracy or our sense of a common purpose.