Influence of the donor class on the candidates

How much influence are donors having on the presidential candidates? What do they want? One thing they want is easier access to H1B visas that will allow them to hire foreign workers who do the same work as American workers for less pay. On June 1, 2015 Alex Swoyer wrote at Breitbart that

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, is the first 2016 GOP presidential candidate to come out against tech companies’ abuse of the H1B guest worker program to replace American workers with cheap foreign labor.

...Huckabee then hammered away at the recent examples from Disney and Southern California Edison, among others, where American workers were forced to train their replacements—replacements who were brought into America on H1B visas and paid significantly less than the Americans they were replacing to do the exact same jobs.

...But when companies are undercutting an American worker just so they can increase their profits without regard to the people who made them profitable in the first place, that’s not a money issue. That’s a moral issue.

Swoyer quotes Senator Jeff Sessions, who said,

Most of the H-1B program is now being used to import cheaper foreign guestworkers, replacing American workers, and undercutting their wages.’ The U.S. is graduating twice as many STEM students each year as find jobs in those fields, yet the H-1B program continues to provide IT companies with a large annual supply of lower-wage guest workers to hire in place of more qualified Americans. There is no ‘shortage’ of talented Americans, only a shortage of officials willing to protect them.

In written congressional testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jay Palmer—who served as a whistleblower in the Infosys visa fraud case that resulted in the largest settlement in history at $34 million—wrote that he is now an “out of work American” because his whistleblowing caused him to be “blackballed in the industry.”

“Over the past month I have spoken to many Edison workers,” Palmer wrote in his testimony after thanking Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Iowa’s Senior GOP senator, for investigating this matter. “Their stories are atrocious. They have been threatened, muzzled and asked to train less qualified individuals as their replacements. These people are the back bone of our economy. We are their voice. We are the only one they have left because they were FORCED to sign non-disparaging remark clauses in order to get their benefits. They have been muzzled.”

...Palmer’s full congressional testimony—at least the written out pre-hearing statement—totals 17 pages in which he calls out the immigration system as nothing more than a tool used by these donor class-political class figures to replace Americans with cheaper foreigners, laying out the full facts of what’s really going on. Palmer detailed too how several other companies engaged in the same practice as Southern California Edison, including his own Infosys—which he said still does it—and it’s since been exposed that Disney did it too.

...“The leadership in both parties has essentially sold out to the donor class, and that’s what we have to just be honest about,” Huckabee said. “The donor class drives the political class and the people in the Washington to Wall Street axis of power have been very, very effective at creating at a collusion of power that really doesn’t change when the Democrats or Republicans are in power.”

Huckabee said that explains why people like Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell
and House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) are trying to push Obamatrade—the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) that would fast track the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal—through Congress to help President Obama.

“How else can you explain the Republican leadership fighting to give Barack Obama increased power over a secretive agreement?” Huckabee said.

Read more here.

What has happened since June 1? Trump has captured the votes of those who want a candidate independent from the donors. Huckabee has gone nowhere. Santorum, who agrees with Huckabee on this issue, has gone nowhere. Neither is getting big bucks from the donor class.

Marco Rubio seems to be the one who speaks out most favorably for the H1B visas, and he seems to be beating out the other main candidate of the donor class, Jeb Bush. Both Bush and Rubio have received big bucks from the donor class.

Yesterday I posted excerpts from an Andrew McCarthy piece about the astonishing profits of the Boeing Company, who stands to gain billions of dollars from the Iran deal:

For the 2014 campaign cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, the company gave about 60 percent of its whopping $3,250,000 in donations to the GOP. Major recipients included such establishment pillars as the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee ($38,000 each), and the National Republican Senatorial Committee ($33,000). Significant contributions were also made to McConnell ($13,000), Boehner ($25,000), Senator Lindsey Graham ($39,000), and many others. And that’s apart from the nearly $17 million the company spent in 2014 on lobbyists, 80 percent of whom have transitioned to the other end of the trough after careers in government.

It just so happens that Boeing stands to reap huge money from Obama’s lifting of the sanctions.