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warren gunnels
Progressives Say GOP's H-1B Visa Feud Distracts From Real Problem: 'Billionaire Robber Barons'
"Billionaires want you to wage a culture war while they win the class war," said one critic.
Dec 29, 2024
Progressive commentators on Saturday weighed in on a dayslong dispute between Republican President-elect Donald Trump's billionaire tech industry backers and far-right MAGA allies over the H-1B guest worker program—saying the program's right-wing supporters and detractors alike aim to distract from the real threat to workers: the billionaire CEOs who exploit both American employees and those who come from abroad.
"Billionaires want you to wage a culture war while they win the class war," said Warren Gunnels, a top adviser to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on Friday night.
Gunnels' comments came after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who spent $277 million to help Trump get elected this year, vowed to go to "war" to protect the H-1B program, which grants temporary visas to highly educated foreign professionals who work in specialized fields such as technology, medicine, and engineering.
Silicon Valley heavily relies on guest workers with H-1B visas, and Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle company, obtained 724 of the visas this year. Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in South Africa, has said he also personally benefited from the program.
Musk—who has spoken out against immigration overall—said he would defend the program after far-right activist Laura Loomer criticized Sriram Krishnan, who Trump named as senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence, over his previous support for making it easier for highly educated foreign workers to come to the U.S. Loomer said the policy was "in direct opposition" to the anti-immigration agenda embraced by Trump, who has vowed to oversee a mass deportation operation.
Trump on Saturday expressed support for Musk's position, saying he is "a believer in H-1B," which he moved to limit during his first term.
"The problem is the oligarchs who became billionaires by exploiting workers, suppressing wages, and shipping jobs abroad."
"I have many H-1B visas on my properties," Trump told The New York Post. "I have used it many times. It's a great program."
Labor rights advocates have raised concerns that workers who come to the U.S. with H-1B visas are vulnerable to exploitation by their employers.
Last year, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted in a report that H-1B visas were not being used to "fill genuine labor shortages in skilled occupations without negatively impacting U.S. workers' wages and working conditions." The program's biggest users were companies that laid off thousands of workers in 2022 and 2023.
"The rest of the companies that dominate the program have an outsourcing business model that exploits the program by underpaying skilled migrant workers and offshoring U.S. jobs," wrote Daniel Costa, EPI's director of immigration law and policy research, and Ron Hira, a research associate and job offshoring expert who is also a professor at Howard University.
On the social media platform X on Friday, Hira wrote that "employers favor guest workers because they have fewer rights and less bargaining power."
"[The U.S. Department of Labor] has set the H-1B minimum wages far below market wages," continued Hira. "Employers can and do pay H-1B workers much less than market rates. While H-1B workers can change jobs, they have far fewer employment options and job mobility than U.S. workers. Many call their employment situation 'indentured servitude' because they are effectively bound to their employer. Employers control the visa so they can exercise extraordinary bargaining power over their H-1B workers on wages and working conditions."
In 2023, Hira and Costa called on the Biden administration to close the "outsourcing loophole" in the H-1B program by requiring companies that hire visa holders to file labor condition applications and to ensure the H-1B workers are paid a fair wage—steps that would promote fairer treatment of all workers.
Gunnels pointed out that when Sanders was first elected to the Senate nearly two decades ago, he introduced an amendment that would have "increased the fees companies pay to hire H-1B guest workers to fund scholarships for Americans pursuing degrees in science, engineering, and math"—supporting U.S.-born and foreign workers. The amendment did not become law despite passing 59-35.
The bipartisan budget deal that Musk helped to kill earlier this month included a similar provision, Gunnels said.
Musk said last week that the H-1B visa program is needed because of a "permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent" in the U.S., while Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur who Trump has chosen to run his proposed Department of Government Efficiency along with Musk, said U.S. culture "has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long" and advised Americans to look to a future with "more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons."
Krystal Ball, co-host of the online news show "Breaking Points," said the feud between Trump's MAGA allies and his Big Tech supporters promoted two distinct lies.
"Trumpism pushes the lie that if you are struggling it's because of immigrants and trans people," said Ball. "Elon and Vivek are pushing the traditional GOP lie that if you are struggling it's your own fucking fault. The truth is if you are struggling it's likely because of billionaire robber barons like Trump, Elon, and Vivek, who rig the rules to screw regular people."
Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner added that American corporations, not workers, have a "culture problem."
"This is about corporations squeezing every last penny out of anyone and anything they can," said Turner. "This framing that American workers have a 'culture problem' and aren't 'motivated' is quite telling, given where it's coming from: billionaire CEOs. What does 'motivated' mean? To them, it seems that it means the threat of being sent back overseas."
Contrary to the dueling GOP narratives on display in recent days, the problem facing American workers is "not the H-1B guest worker from India or the tomato picker from Guatemala," said Gunnels. "The problem is the oligarchs who became billionaires by exploiting workers, suppressing wages, and shipping jobs abroad."
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'Sick Joke': Progressives Roundly Reject Idea of Rahm Emanuel as DNC Chair
"No amount of rebranding can change the fact that Rahm Emanuel's political career has been an abject failure—neoliberal centrism is exactly the wrong direction for the Democratic Party," said one critic.
Nov 15, 2024
Progressives were left fuming and flummoxed over reporting Friday that Rahm Emanuel is considering running for chair of the Democratic National Committee, with many leftists wondering whether the party has learned anything from its loss of the White House, Senate, and, arguably, the country's working-class voters.
Axiosfirst reported that Emanuel—President Joe Biden's ambassador to Japan and a former congressman, Chicago mayor, and chief of staff to former President Barack Obama—is mulling whether to seek the top DNC post. Current DNC chair Jamie Harrison, who was elected to the post in 2021, is unlikely to seek a new term, which would begin in March.
Emanuel has some powerful backers among the war-and-Wall Street wing that has dominated the Democratic party for decades.
"If they said, 'Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?' I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, and I would bring him back from Japan, and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee," prominent political consultant David Axelrod, who ran both of Obama's successful presidential campaigns, said Wednesday on his podcast.
Axelrod followed up the next day with a post on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, in which he wrote of Emanuel, "Dude knows how to fight and win."
Reaction came fast and furious, with Jonathan Cohn, policy director at the group Progressive Massachusetts, asking on the social network Bluesky, "How is this not a sick joke?"
Center for International Policy executive vice president Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) writing on X that "if you assembled a team of top scientists and told them to come up with a plan to ensure that the Democratic Party continues to lose working-class voters, I doubt they could do better than 'Make Rahm Emanuel head of the DNC.'"
Comedian, author, and podcaster Kate Willett
said on X: "If I had to pick one individual who set the stage for what seems like it may be decades of Trumpism, it's Rahm Emanuel. Imagine if Obama had saved peoples' homes in 2008 and put the bankers in jail? Truly fixed healthcare? Rahm worked diligently to make sure that didn't happen."
Miles Kampf-Lassin, the senior editor at the progressive website
In These Times, wrote, "I've said it before and can't believe I have to say it again: No amount of rebranding can change the fact that Rahm Emanuel's political career has been an abject failure—neoliberal centrism is exactly the wrong direction for the Democratic Party."
Hafiz Rashid argued Friday in a
New Republicarticle that, if he wins the post, Emanuel could be "the worst possible DNC chair."
"The fact that Emanuel has been disconnected from local and state politics for years... seems unlikely to help," Rashid asserted. "Democrats are currently expected to tap someone with expertise at the grassroots level and an understanding of how Democrats are winning elections now—two things Emanuel sorely lacks."
Apparently questioning the strategic wisdom of Vice President Kamala Harris' failed Democratic presidential run, Warren Gunnels, a staff director for Sanders,
said on X, "Ruling Elite: Let's get Dick Cheney's endorsement and anoint Rahm Emanuel as DNC Chair."
"One word," he added. "No."
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Converging on White House, Progressives Tell Biden to Cancel Mountain Valley Pipeline
The president "can stop MVP just like he stopped Keystone XL" and "can reclaim his climate legacy by stopping all new fossil fuel projects."
Jun 08, 2023
Progressives descended upon the White House on Thursday to demand that U.S. President Joe Biden use his executive authority to cancel the Mountain Valley Pipeline and declare a climate emergency to expedite the end of the fossil fuel era.
Approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was fast-tracked last week via the debt ceiling agreement that Biden, eschewing his options for unilateral action, forged with House Republicans who took the global economy hostage. The fracked gas development in Appalachia—pushed hard by the GOP and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a coal profiteer and Congress' top recipient of Big Oil money—is one of several fossil fuel projects that Biden has the power to stop.
While Biden was inside the White House talking with right-wing United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, hundreds of people gathered outside to remind the president that "he can stop MVP just like he stopped Keystone XL." The rally was organized by People vs. Fossil Fuels, a coalition of more than 1,200 organizations. It marks the start of multiple days of action nationwide.
\u201cBREAKING: Frontline communities (@OurWVRivers, @POWHR_Coalition, and more) and allies are rallying for Biden to declare a climate emergency and stop dirty oil and gas projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline.\u201d— Elise Joshi (@Elise Joshi) 1686250842
Many people wore masks due to the hazardous air quality in Washington, D.C. The East Coast's smoke-filled skies are a direct result of climate change-intensified wildfires now spiraling out of control in Canada—a fact that observers were keen to point to as evidence for why Biden should revoke the permits needed to complete MVP and other planet-heating fossil fuel projects.
\u201cLawmakers in the Senate now can\u2019t see the Washington Monument because of wildfire smoke. Those same lawmakers just voted to expedite a fossil fuel pipeline.\u201d— David Sirota (@David Sirota) 1686228891
\u201cCan\u2019t stop thinking about how Congress just had to prevent a fake and manufactured \u201cdebt ceiling crisis\u201d by fast-tracking fossil fuel projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline which will only make the very real climate crisis even worse. This is the price of corruption. Look up.\u201d— Warren Gunnels (@Warren Gunnels) 1686191276
When asked by a reporter Wednesday if the coalition planned to cancel Thursday's protest as a public health precaution, Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "No, this is exactly why we have to take these sorts of actions." On Thursday, he added that "we're not going to sit idle as the world burns."
A separate rally scheduled for Thursday in New York City had to be canceled, however, because the record-setting air pollution blanketing the country's most populous metropolitan area in an apocalyptic orange haze poses too great a risk.
"We're fighting for a future," West Virginia resident Maury Johnson said during the demonstration in the nation's capital. "Not one that's filled with smoke."
Climate justice advocates were joined outside the White House by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Noting that MVP has nothing to do with raising the nation's debt limit—an arbitrary and arguably unconstitutional cap on federal borrowing the GOP has weaponized to impose its agenda on multiple occasions—the progressive lawmaker denounced the inclusion of the project's approval in the debt ceiling deal.
\u201c\ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udd25\u201cWe have the right to breathe clean air. Do you know what 1 asthma attack can do to a whole family? Mountain Valley Pipeline should never have been part of the debt ceiling deal. I call bullshit!\u201d @RepRashida \ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udd25 @POTUS #StopMVP #EndtheEra #ClimateEmergency @FightFossils\u201d— Ben Goloff (@Ben Goloff) 1686249477
As The Guardianreported Thursday, "The Mountain Valley Pipeline project has been enmeshed in legal challenges for years due to opposition from grassroots groups and landowners but the deal passed by Congress to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, signed by Biden over the weekend, singles out the pipeline as being 'required in the national interest' and therefore should be allowed to proceed, shielded from any future judicial review."
The approval of MVP comes just months after Biden greenlighted ConocoPhillips' massive Willow oil drilling project in the Alaskan Arctic. Additionally, despite possessing the executive authority to cancel nearly two dozen proposed fracked gas export projects that threaten to generate heat-trapping emissions equivalent to roughly 400 new coal-fired power plants, the Biden administration has moved to increase fracked gas export capacity, especially in the U.S. Gulf Coast, since Russia invaded Ukraine last February. The president has also rubber-stamped more permits for fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters than his White House predecessor.
The Biden administration has done all of those things despite mounting evidence of the climate emergency's worsening toll and ample warnings from scientists about the incompatibility of expanding fossil fuels and preserving a livable planet. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently told Biden and other wealthy country officials in no uncertain terms that their current climate policies amount to a civilizational "death sentence."
People vs. Fossil Fuels has argued that the president "can reclaim his climate legacy by stopping all new fossil fuel projects."
Thursday's rally outside the White House marks the beginning of what the coalition called "a stampede of distributed actions across the country" from June 8-11.
Participants have four main demands for Biden:
- End new fossil fuel projects, including Willow and the Alaska LNG project;
- Phase out ongoing oil and gas drilling on public lands;
- Declare a climate emergency; and
- Make renewable energy technology more available for homes and transportation.
As another alliance of progressive advocacy groups has explained: "The president has a long list of actions that he could take or instruct his agencies to take, ranging from stopping fossil fuel infrastructure approvals to instructing the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] to issue a stringent pollution prevention rule for the oil and gas sector. Declaring a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act would unlock additional statutory powers, including the ability to halt crude oil exports and directing funds to build resilient, distributed renewable energy."
In a statement this week, Zero Hour organizing director Magnolia Mead said that "young people are angry and fed up with watching President Biden cave to the fossil fuel industry time and time again."
"We need an immediate transition to renewable energy to slow the climate crisis, and that's impossible while our president is still approving massive fossil fuel expansion," said Mead. "If President Biden cares at all for future generations and frontline communities, he must choose to end the era of fossil fuels."
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