#migrant workers that could do blue collar or service work jobs | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

implicatures · 5 years

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Why would i vote for Joe Biden when he’s just Trump with a D by his name???

(Lol, it took me so long to write this response that @ofgeography ’s original post has been deleted, but I learned a lot and so could you!)

Here’s what Joe “Basically just Trump” Biden wants to do if he’s elected. It’s on his website, you can read about it!

• END THE MUSLIM TRAVEL BAN

• Stop stealing money from federal programs to fund a border wall

• END FAMILY SEPARATION of migrants at the border

• Create a path to citizenship for more undocumented immigrants

• Increase the number of visas available for survivors of domestic violence

• Expand labor protections for undocumented immigrants

• Spend $50 billion in the first year of his presidency to rebuild and repair crumbling infrastructure like bridges and highways

• Earmark funds to improve infrastructure specifically in marginalized communities

• Invest in research and technology to make electric vehicles more efficient and affordable

• Invest hundreds of billions of dollars in biofuels and other clean energy technology in order to reach net-zero emissions by 2050

• Invest in high-speed rail to reduce pollution and commute times

• Encourage energy efficiency and solar infrastructure among businesses and in residences using tax credits and targeted deductions

• Double federal investments in clean drinking water and infrastructure in communities like Flint, MI that have unsafe tap water

• Monitor water systems for lead and other pollutants so we can hold polluters accountable and protect drinking water

• Bring broadband internet access to the more than 20 million Americans that don’t have it

• Invest $100 billion in school infrastructure and technology

• Fund “anchor institutions” like hospitals, universities, and government offices in distressed communities

• Develop low-carbon manufacturing programs across the country that will provide good blue-collar jobs while lowering emissions

• Impose stronger penalties on union interference by corporations and executives

• Prevent corporations from illegally misclassifying employees as independent contractors by significantly increasing the number of labor enforcement investigators

• Protect the collective bargaining rights of all public sector workers

• Ban “right to work” laws that weaken unions

• Support the passage of the Fairness for Farmworkers Act and the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights so that agricultural and domestic workers have more protections and the ability to organize

• Allow independent contractors to organize and bargain collectively

• INCREASE THE FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE TO $15, including farmworkers who don’t even make the current minimum

• Extend overtime pay to millions of workers

• Eliminate no-compete clauses so workers have the freedom to move to better jobs or negotiate better pay

• Reinstate OSHA requirements that companies report workplace injuries and increase the number of safety inspections at workplaces

• End mandatory arbitration clauses so that employees can sue their employer

• Introduce a constitutional amendment to get private money out of federal elections (that is, overturn Citizens United)

• Further restrict superPACs from coordinating with candidates and parties

• Prohibit dark money groups from anonymously spending millions of dollars on political issues

• Prohibit lobbyists from donating to the people and organizations they lobby

• Ban corporate PAC contributions to candidates

• Require that all candidates for federal office release 10 years of tax returns

• Require all elected officials to publicly disclose all meetings they take with lobbyists

• Prohibit all lobbying from foreign governments and their agents

• Guarantee 2 years of free community college for all students

• Invest $50 billion in workforce training, including apprenticeships

• Cut in half the payments on federal student loans, and forgive all loans after 20 years

• Simplify and expand loan forgiveness for public servants

• Crack down on predatory for-profit education programs

• Offer a PUBLIC OPTION for healthcare

• Make sure all Americans from pay no more than 8.5% of their income for health insurance

• Ban all surprise medical bills by preventing providers from charging out-of-market rates when the patient doesn’t have control over what doctors they see or when a doctor is out-of-network at an in-network hospital

• Allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices

• End the abusive over-pricing of prescription drugs

• End TAX BREAKS that pharma companies get on advertisements for their products (I had no idea this was a thing and it is disgusting)

• RESTORE FEDERAL FUNDING FOR PLANNED PARENTHOOD

• END THE ‘GLOBAL GAG RULE’ that bars the federal government from supporting any global health programs that contain information on abortion

• Implement nationwide the California policies that halved the maternal mortality rate there

• Double funding for community health centers

• RE-ENTER THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

• Push for a worldwide ban on fossil fuel subsidies

• Establish equal rights under the law for all LGBTQ+ people

• Protect LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination

• Reverse the military ban on trans people

• Protect the ability of LGBTQ+ people to adopt and foster children

• Prevent people from claiming religious freedom in order to discriminate against LGBT+ people

• Simplify the process for trans and nonbinary Americans to obtain IDs that match their gender identity

• Guarantee access to appropriate bathrooms, sports activities, and locker rooms for trans students

• Fund programs that reduce LGBTQ+ youth homeless and insecurity

• BAN CONVERSION THERAPY nationwide

• Invest $20 billion in programs to lower incarceration rates

• Eliminate mandatory minimums for non-violent crimes

• Eliminate all mandatory minimums at the federal level

• Make pre-K education available for all children

• Triple federal funding for low-income school districts

• Expand funding for mental health services

• Fund training in de-escalation tactics for police departments, and training for handling interactions with disabled and neurodiverse people

• DECRIMINALIZE THE USE OF CANNABIS and expunge the records of people with cannabis-use convictions

• End incarceration for drug use

• ELIMINATE THE DEATH PENALTY

• END THE CASH BAIL SYSTEM and stop jailing people for being too poor to pay court fees and fines

• End federal private prisons and the use of any privately-owned federal detention facility

• Work towards ensuring housing for all formerly incarcerated people when they rejoin society

• Fully fund educational opportunities and mental health programs in prisons

• Hold gun manufacturers civilly liable for gun violence

• Ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines

• Create a buy back program for assault weapons and mandate the registration of all remaining assault weapons in the country

• REQUIRE BACKGROUND CHECKS FOR ALL GUN SALES

• Prevent anyone convicted of a hate crime from buying a firearm

• Prevent anyone with an arrest warrant from buying a firearm

• Incentivize states to create gun licensing programs

• Make it a federal crime to buy a weapon for someone who couldn’t pass their own background check

• Invest more than $5 trillion across federal, state, local, and private-sector entities to fight climate change

• Reverse Trump’s regressive tax cuts

These are probably not your dream plans, but they are SO MUCH BETTER than what we have now.

If you can’t find anything on that list that you think is worth voting for, then I genuinely don’t believe you care more about people than you do about ideological purity, and that sucks.

#Joe Biden #Bernie Sanders #Whoever you wish you could vote for instead?#All of them are so much better than Trump it isn't comparable #Biden is running on what would be the most progressive platform of any general election nominee EVER #don't dismiss that just because he isn't Bernie

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shihtzuman · 6 years

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GM set to start 4,000 white collar layoffs - CNN

Layoffs for about 4,000 salaried staff at General Motors are due to start Monday -- a previously announced move that comes just as President Donald Trump prepares to trumpet American manufacturing at next week's State of the Union address.

The layoffs are part of a 15% reduction in white collar jobs in North America that the automaker first announced back in November. At the same time, it announced plans to close four US plants as well as a fifth in Canada.

The job cuts and plant closings are part of ongoing cost reductions to free up $6 billion annually to invest in a new generation of autos, such as electric and self-driving vehicles. It is also making a push to develop a ride hailing service that will allow GM to make more money by selling rides to customers rather than vehicles.

But the move enraged Trump, who repeatedly lambasted GM CEO Mary Barra over the decision. In his rebuke of GM, Trump focused on the closures in Ohio, a state he won in the 2016 election. The company also announced plans to shutter facilities in Maryland and Michigan.

He said the company would face punishment for the closures, which included a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that Trump personally promised to revive during the 2016 campaign.

The president said he was "very tough" on Barra in a phone call after the company announced the closures, and referred to the federal auto bailout money the company received in 2008.

"You know, the United States saved General Motors, and for her to take that company out of Ohio is not good," Trump said in November.

'We are the magic wand,' former GM worker of 40 years tells Trump

He commiserated about the closures in a series of phone calls with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau. And he claimed GM would soon announce steps that could counteract the effect of the plant closures, though what those actions are remain unclear.

Trump is due to tout his economic successes on Tuesday during the annual State of the Union address to Congress. A senior administration official said Friday the speech's theme would be "Choosing greatness."

Overall, Trump is presiding over a strong American economy. Friday's job report beat expectations, showing more than 300,000 jobs were created last month. But trade tensions and global economic anxiety have led some companies to rethink their business plans and sparked concerns about the risk of a slowdown.

The GM plants, which include about 6,000 hourly jobs, have yet to close, GM is moving ahead with the salaried staff reductions, a GM spokesman confirmed Friday. The timing of the layoffs was first reported by the Detroit News.

The company had about 2,300 salaried staff accept voluntary buyout packages that were offered to 18,000 employees. In addition, there were 1,500 contract employees who were not retained by the company.

GM workers will have job options — but they may not be as good

That leaves the remainder of the 8,000 planned job cuts to be accomplished with the involuntary layoffs.

GM (GM) is due to report financial results Wednesday and it is expected to report lower earnings.

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It's been nearly 200 years since white performers first painted their faces black in minstrel shows. It was racist and offensive then and still is today.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/business/gm-layoffs/index.html

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cartoonpi · 6 years

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Empathy is hard

For the majority of my life I have been baffled by a very deep, very stupid question. “How can someone who has taken a loan, enjoy anything?”

Now, I understand why that would sound stupid to you. It sounds stupid to me now. But as a twelve year old kid, all I could think when I saw my relatives who took a home loan, going to an expensive restaurant, was “How can you enjoy this moment? you have hundreds of thousands worth of loan! You should be saving every penny you can to pay back the loan! STOP ENJOYING!”

I believed this stupid thing till the day I got myself a student loan. I still vaguely remember the day I actually got the loan. After, I finished signing all the documents at the bank, came back to my hostel room exhausted and instinctively went to the cafeteria to have a hot cup of coffee. I don’t remember precisely but, probably that was the time I realized what every debtor ever in the whole word know: “I will not be changing my daily behavior or stop “enjoying” just because I got a loan.”

Let me tell another instance of similar behavior. I couldn’t believe people liked drinking coffee without sugar. I thought they have something wrong with their taste buds or they intentionally want to drink bad coffee or they just don’t want to be happy. And of course I started drinking coffee without sugar recently. Now, why I started it is a story for another time. But the important thing is that I now prefer my coffee without sugar and yes my taste buds are fine.

Similar story repeats when it comes to me starting to use public transport, switching to Ubuntu OS and using fountain pens.

Now, apart from highlighting the stupidity of my younger self, the point I want to make here is that Empathy is hard. It was hard for me to get into thought process of a debtor until I became one. Same goes for those drinking espresso or writing with fountain pen.

Ah…Empathy, the hottest new buzz word in technology and corporate scene. Everyone from designers, to product managers to the CEOs are supposed to have empathy now. That’s the rule according to the popular twitter wisdom at least. The likes of Satya Nadella have attributed it to the success of their companies. Countless others have written blogs and books about it.

What is Empathy?

Let me do the cliche thing first. {In generic old English man’s voice} : Websters English Dictionary define empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner”

If you skipped the last paragraph, you are not alone. No, seriously. I copied the definition from the Webster’s website but haven’t read it. Let me give you a simpler, more metaphorical definition. “To empathize with someone is to put yourself in someone’s shoes.” That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. More methodically it is creating emotional and behavior model of someone for yourself. It is not holding hands with someone, but looking through their lens.

It definitely not the touchy-feely thing you only feel for the less fortunate.(Hint: That’s sympathy)

With this definition in mind, it becomes obvious why many businesses want their employees to empathize with their customers. And it seems very easy to do, especially if you are the target customer. But if you are not, it can be very difficult as I have demonstrated earlier. It is hard for a charter jet interior designer to empathize with their billionaire customers. And it is hard for a millionaire CEO to empathize with poor malaria victim customers of her medicine.

I am in a minor Empathy deficiency of my own right now. I am developing an internet product for migrant blue-collar workers. I find it extremely difficult to judge what product feature someone will use, what will they like and what they wont.

I have found two ways which seem to be working for me to empathize with my target audience. I think they are general enough to be applicable for most readers.

1. Talk with them when they are emotional.

Talk to your customers or whoever you want to empathize with. But talking to them when everything is good and happy is not that helpful. Talk to them when they are angry, when they are frustrated and sad. What frustrate someone? What makes them angry and sad? Answers to these questions will tell you what they care about, what is important to them. This will help you create a better mental model of their emotions and behaviors.

If they are angry and frustrated at your particular service or product, That is the golden opportunity. Don’t avoid such customer calls. Those calls would probably save you hundreds of A/B tests later on.

2. Read or Watch fiction.

Fiction, where the characters belong to your target audience can be a very useful tool for developing empathy. If the creators and writers have done a good job, not only you will be able to empathize better, but you would find it difficult not to empathize with the characters.

You are essentially outsourcing empathy creation to the writers and storytellers. This can be a powerful and entertaining tool of forming empathy.

#startup #empathy

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inadarkdarkroom · 7 years

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Venka

This isn’t my story, personally, but it’s one that has kicked around my family for so long that it definitely feels like it’s mine. It’s been told and re-told, but I do think that the central details are very solid.

My aunt Sarah is my mom’s youngest sister. She graduated from high school in the early seventies. She’d been dating my uncle Jack for years, and they went away to the same college. He was on a football scholarship and taking the ag track (farms, ugh). My aunt was in college for education, to be an elementary teacher.

Anyway, it was the seventies, but they were from a very small town with ‘Christian’ values, so despite the fact that they’d been dating for years (and would eventually get married), and they were both seniors in college, there was no way they could live together. So my aunt lived in the dorms on campus and my uncle and a bunch of his football buddies got a place off campus. I can only imagine what a hole it was. Six guys in their late teens and early twenties, all football players, none of them has any idea how to even do a load of laundry. I digress. My point here is that it was a piece of crap house because what landlord in their right mind would rent to those guys? So crappy house in a very crappy part of town.

It was a college town, so there were some nice parts. But it was still a not very big town in a very agriculture heavy state. And it was the seventies, so there were still heavy manufacturing jobs. There were also several really big feedlots and beef packing plants (slaughterhouses) that ran twenty-four hours a day. So while there were the educated muckey mucks and the college students, there were also a whole lot of blue collar workers. And a lot of them were migrant workers who went were the jobs were. A lot of them were paid under the table and lived pretty much off the grid. Cash only. Never used their full names, etc.

Because my aunt was going into education, she knew what kind of challenges the school districts had with trying to deal with the kids from some of these families. A lot of the mothers - if there was a mother - didn’t speak english and couldn’t read or write, as far as the district was concerned. So the fathers/husbands/boyfriends worked these incredibly long hours, the women were home alone with these kids, unable to communicate with school administrators, cops or truant officers. Part of my aunt’s coursework for her degree was going into the local district and trying to help these families get services and resources for the kids, stuff like free lunches and pre-natal care if the moms were pregnant, etc. She said every now and thens he’d have a good day and know she really helped a family, but mostly it was just depressing as fuck. The families wanted the resources, but they didn’t want to bring any attention to themselves. The kids would do all the talking and translating for the parents - if the parents showed up at all. It was just a disaster.

So, anyway, back to my uncle, busy being on football scholarship and living the Animal House life. As previously mentioned, they were in a not very nice part of town - a part of town where the neighbors didn’t call the cops to complain about your kegger going strong at four in the morning, because they didn’t call the cops. Ever.

My aunt was over there a lot, and since she wasn’t a big drinker or partier, she probably paid more attention than the others. But she noticed this kid. And it was weird, even by the Animal House standards. Because it was just one kid, this little girl.

My aunt said the kid was probably five or six, so not old, but old enough to be in school. Except that she wasn’t in school because every time my aunt went over there, the kid was sitting on the balcony of this crappy apartment building across the street. The building had a dozen units, all of them accessible from doors that faced my uncle’s house. It was two stories, so from my uncle’s house, you looked across and it was six front doors and plate glass windows, and then the second story was the same thing, a balcony that ran the length of the entire building with six more doors and plate glass windows.

There were a lot of people who lived in those units, so on the weekends, there would be tons of kids of all ages running around, tearing crap up, generally being little jerks, like kids do. They moved into the house in August, so it was blazing hot and the sun didn’t set until almost ten at night, so the kids were always out running around.

But the little girl was never out there on the weekends. So my aunt didn’t know if her family kept her inside when the other kids were around, or maybe she stayed with another relative on the weekends, or what. But any given weekday, that kid would be sitting there all by herself, just staring over at them, even into the evening. My aunt said at first she just thought it was sad that the kid didn’t have anybody really looking after her.

But then it started turning to fall and the day were getting shorter and colder. One night my uncle was walking my aunt out to her car and they’re out there, like making out or something super gross that I don’t want to think about. But my aunt finally remarked on the fact that the little girl wasn’t out there, and that she was glad - because it was chilly. But then a car turned down the street with its brights on and when the headlights hit the balcony of that apartment building, the kid was still there. My aunt said the kid must have been wearing dark clothes because when the headlights passed over her, all they could really see was this very pale little face. And the headlights were so bright that it pretty much washed away all of her features. So she’d been there the entire time my aunt and uncle had been outside. They just hadn’t seen her because it was so dark.

Anyway, I guess that was sort of a turning point for my aunt. By now, she was into her internship with the district and she was doing a lot of outreach. So there was one weekend afternoon when it was still pretty nice weather and there were a bunch of kids across the street, but also some adults as well. So my aunt went over there to talk to them. My uncle went with her, as a precaution. She asked about the little girl, but no one would talk to her. She said even the kids pretended not to be able to understand her. She figured it was probably because my uncle was with her, but they all clammed up and wouldn’t say anything.

Then it was mid-terms and football playoffs and every got super busy. But my aunt said she still saw the little girl. And by now it’s cold. I mean, it wasn’t Minnesota or anything so there weren’t walls of snowdrifts or anything, but it was damn cold. Too cold for some five year old to be hanging around outside for twelve hours a day. And my aunt said it didn’t even really look like she had a coat.

So my aunt decided to stage an intervention - to get the kid a coat at the very least, if not getting her enrolled in school. So she sees the kid, it’s, I don’t know, like a Tuesday morning or something. Sun shining, mailman driving down the street, you know, nothing weird. So she sees the kid, no coat. She heads across the street and the kid is still just sitting there on the balcony waiting. But my aunt has to walk under the balcony to get to the stairs that lead to the second level. And by the time she walks up the stairs, the kid is gone. My aunt didn’t hear any footsteps. She didn’t hear any doors closing. Nothing. The kid is just gone.

My aunt figures it’s the same thing from before, they’re just scared of an outsider. But now she’s more determined than ever because this kid clearly needs some resources. That week it snows, so when the weekend comes, a bunch of the little jackals that live across the street are out there stockpiling snowballs to throw at each other and writing their name in the fresh snow with pee and other gross crap. But my aunt has learned from the last time, so this time she doesn’t take my uncle, but she does take candy. And a bunch of silver dollars.

The older kids avoid her like the plague, but a couple of the little ones come over. So my aunt starts asking about the little girl. The kids are way more interested in the candy and silver dollars than the questions. Most of them won’t say anything. But finally one of them says “Venka”. My aunt thinks maybe it’s the kid’s name. She’s never heard of a name like that, but maybe it’s a nickname or something. So she gives the little kids some candy and money. And when the older kids see what the little ones have, they finally come over. And now my aunt is a little wary because, yeah, they’re just kids. But they’re like fifteen and sixteen year old kids. But they take some candy and a couple silver dollars and they talk to her. Until she asks about “Venka”. Then the older kids completely clam up and they gather up all the little ones and in like thirty seconds, everyone is gone. And my aunt still has no idea who this kid is.

So now she’s given up completely on trying to get anything out of the neighbors directly. She starts asking around at work. But all of the other interns are in exactly the same situation as my aunt. They’re all really young and doing their damndest to keep their heads above water and help with this situation that so much bigger than them, and they barely have any resources to be able to do anything. None of the other interns have ever heard of this kid - my aunt was thinking maybe if she went somewhere on the weekends, then she’d maybe ended up on someone else’s roster or canvassing map or something. But no luck. No one has seen or heard of a kid by that description, and the name Venka doesn’t mean anything to anyone. My aunt even asks the social worker at the school and one of the cops who does outreach and none of them have heard anything either.

So it’s close to finals and my aunt is heading over to my uncle’s place to “study”. Ugh. Anyway, it’s not late, but it’s winter, so it’s hella dark, even at seven in the evening. But she sees the kid. And now it’s absolutely freezing out, and they had an ice storm just the night before and that kid is out there. So my aunt flips out and heads over there, fully intending to get the kid and call the cops, because this isn’t just neglect at this point, it’s abuse. But it’s crazy icy, so when she starts up the stairs to the second floor, she has to be really careful because everything is coated in like an inch of ice.

Anyway, she gets up there and the kid is gone again. And FINALLY my aunt gets freaked out. Because there is NO WAY a kid could have moved that fast on icy concrete. And she knows that none of the doors to any of the apartments were opened. There’s no snow, so it’s not like the kid could have bailed off the balcony and into a snow drift. But my aunt pulls it together and decides to walk the length of the balcony just to make sure the kid isn’t there - even though she can see all of it.

So she gets to the midway point on the balcony, where this kid is always sitting and in the ice there are these - she didn’t know what to call them. They’re not footprints, because they aren’t shaped like feet, not even like little feet. They’re mostly round, but like there’s a wedge out of the front of both of them. And they’re not just on top of the ice, they’re all the way through it, down to bare concrete. Like the kid had been standing there during the ice storm the previous night, and the ice had built up around her feet.

So my aunt freaks out and tears ass off the balcony and down the stairs - and manages to trip and take a spectacular chunk out of her shin, she still has the scar today. Anyway, she makes it across the street and is freaking the hell out. So my uncle and two of his roommates head over to check it out while my aunt stays back at their house, along with the roommates’ girlfriends who are busy patching up my aunt’s leg.

It’s like ten minutes before the guys come back and they say, yeah, they saw the footprints. And none of them can come up with any kind of explanation, but they’re trying to play it off. They work out all these different scenarios that seem plausible, like maybe there had been some empty cups or something sitting there and the kid kicked them off the ledge, and that made the weird footprints. They convinced her that if they went over and looked in the morning they’d probably find some cups on the ground. And then they said that maybe my aunt hadn’t seen the kid at all. At this point they’d ALL seen the kid at least once. She was always over there. But they pointed out that they all got so used to seeing her, that they probably just saw a shadow and took for granted that it was the kid. (Which didn’t make any sense if they really thought the kid had kicked over some cups, but whatever.)

Anyway, they all play it off. My uncle ends up driving my aunt in her car back to the dorm, and has one of his roommates pick him up later. And then finals and they’re all too busy to worry about the kid at all.

But then finals are over, so, of course, my uncle and his roommates throw a giant kegger before everyone heads home for Christmas. It’s the first time my aunt has been back to the house since all of the stuff on the balcony happened. But everything seems fine. It’s a weekend so some of the older kids from the apartment building across the street are loitering around, which means the little girl is nowhere to be seen, which, at this point, is just fine with my aunt

So the party is okay, a little mellower than usual maybe because a lot of people have already left for the holidays. So rather than the full on bacchanalia that usually happens, it’s like twenty people hanging out, drinking. All of my uncle’s roommates are still there, and their girlfriends and a couple of other guys from the football team. And one of the non-roommate players has brought his older sister, who graduates several years earlier. Her name is Marisol and it turns out that she graduated with a degree in my aunt’s major. And it turned out that she had been in the pilot program the year they started the internship program with the school district.

So the night wears on and there’s been another ice storm and the lights flicker out, which apparently isn’t a big deal. I’m not sure if it was the 1970s power grid that was the issue, or just the piece of crap house they were renting. Either way, the power goes out and so these idiots start a fire in the fireplace, which I don’t think they’d ever lit before. I’m not even clear on it being a completely functional fireplace. I’m still surprised no one died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

But yeah, so they’re all fairly trashed at this point, sitting around a roaring fire. And one of the roommates brings up the weird footprints - which no one has talked about in the last week, at least not in front of my aunt. And my uncle swears by it that they didn’t discuss it. But it’s been a week and the guys who went over and looked - my uncle and two of his roommates - finally admit that it was creepy as fuck.

And one of the guys says something like “I know it’s not possible, but it looked like - “ and he just stops.

And the other roommate says, “Yeah, like a ... goat hoof, or a pig hoof.”

And then my uncle finally says, “Yeah, like something was standing there with cloven feet.”

And then I guess one of the logs in the fire popped and everyone jumped and there were a few screams and then they all laughed it off and poured another round. But according to my aunt, the entire energy in the room was still uneasy.

And then the roommate who said it looked like a goat hoof turned to my aunt and said, “What did you say her name was? Velma?”

And my aunt says, “Venka.”

My aunt says you could have heard a pin drop at this point. But again, there’s some nervous laughter, and this time someone finally changes the subject for good. And my aunt decides to get good and drunk. And for another hour or so, there’s nothing more about the weird kid across the street.

At some point, my aunt gets up and goes into the kitchen and she says that Marisol, the teammate’s sister follows her. They’re alone in the kitchen and my aunt’s only just met Marisol, but she says the look on her face is really weird.

So Marisol says, “Did you say her name was Venka?”

And my aunt nods and says, “Something like that. The kids - the regular kids - across the street told me.”

Marisol nods and doesn’t say anything. So my aunt does the dishes or gets out a Jell-o mold or whatever the hell she was doing in the kitchen. But when she turns to leave, Marisol puts a hand on her arm and says, “It wasn’t Venka. It was ‘venga’. It’s slang. It means ‘come here’ in Spanish.”

And that’s when Marisol tells my aunt the story. It was the first year the district and the college tried this internship program and Marisol is stuck literally going door to door, trying to find these families with kids that need to be enrolled. Marisol gets a hell of a lot farther than my aunt ever got because she spoke fluent Spanish. The families still didn’t like her nosing around, but they would at least speak to her.

Marisol says she went to this crappy apartment building, it wasn’t the one across the street from my uncle’s rental, but it wasn’t far. And she sees all of these kids, including this little girl dressed in dark clothes, who appears to be by herself.

So Marisol talked to the more friendly kids and their families and she convinced them that they can qualify for services and going to school is really a good thing to be doing. And as she got up to go, she asked about the little girl she saw outside. And she said there was this old woman, probably a grandmother or great grandmother As soon as Marisol mentioned the girl, the woman crossed herself and shook her head. She tells Marisol in spanish that it isn’t a little girl. It’s a bad spirit and Marisol should forget she ever saw her.

Marisol isn’t easy to spook, and at this point, she’s heard unbelievable amounts of bullshit from families who are trying to stay off the radar with the schools and the cops. She figures maybe the kid is illegal, or maybe she was stolen and sold or given to another family - sadly, it happens. There was nothing particularly strange looking about the girl.

But Marisol said that when she tried to really think back to the girl’s features, nothing came to mind. It was sort of blank. Just a general impression of a girl in dark clothes. Anyway, Marisol wants to help, but she’s not about to set off some feisty grandmother armed with a rosary so she nods and leaves.

But she says starts to listen over the weeks and months. And she hears more and more about this venga girl. Apparently she’s called that because she whispers ‘venga’ and tries to lead people off into the woods. Marisol wasn’t clear on what supposedly happened to anyone who dared to follow her. According to the conversations she overheard, all of the kids knew better than to follow the girl or else they’d be beaten within an inch of their lives by a granny armed with a wooden spoon.

But Marisol said it was weird. And she swore she would catch glimpses of this kid in different places around town. And apparently there was a disturbing amount of animal mutilations, which always seemed weird to me. Given the amount of packing plants around, surely if that was your thing, you could find someone to pay you a reasonable salary to do it. But what do I know?

Anyway, by this time my aunt is super dunk and totally freaked out. So she gets away from Marisol as quickly as she can and informs my uncle that he’s taking her back to the dorm. So they head out to my aunt’s car. And okay, so supposedly there had been another ice storm, but I’m not sure I believe that. I think my uncle may have just been tanked. But a couple of blocks from the apartment, by this wooded area, he manages to slam the wheel into the curb hard enough that it blows out the tire. So it’s the middle of the night and it’s freezing and my uncle is out there with a flare, because apparently he doesn’t have a flashlight, changing a tire.

My aunt is in the car and is totally freaked out. And the flare is red, of course, and there’s all this ice, so there is red light flashing everywhere. But she say she looks over into the woods and that girl is there, like twenty feet from the car. And the flare is bright enough that my aunt can get a really good look at her face, except ... there isn’t one. She said her face was perfectly pale and featureless. My aunt swears it was face shaped, but there were no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Not like a skull. It was just completely smooth.

My aunt is in the car with the heater on and the radio going and she says she can hear this girl whispering ‘venga’ to her. How do you whisper without a mouth? I don’t fucking know and I don’t fucking want to know. The girl is crooking a finger at my aunt. This is the first time my aunt has ever seen the girl’s hands and she say she has these really long fingernails, but they’re cracked and some of them are bleeding, like she’s been trying to claw her way out of something. And her feet aren’t feet, they’re like hooves.

At at this point, my uncle climbs back into the car and my aunt turns to look at him. When she turns back to point out the girl, she’s gone.

They finally get back to the dorm and my aunt sleeps on the couch in the lobby next to my uncle. As soon as the sun is up, they pack up and drive all the way home for the holidays. And when they come back up in the middle of January for their last semester, my aunt categorically refuses to go back over to my uncle’s apartment. She finished her internship and she switched over to student teaching, so no more having to do community outreach. She got to be a teacher’s aid in the local high school.

My uncle swears he never saw the girl again after that. And then when they finished school in May, they moved back to our hometown. To this day, my aunt hates ice storms and she always makes sure the car is packed with flashlights.

More Scary Stories Here Submit Your Scary Story Here

#ghost #supernatural #demon #paranormal #spirit #haunted #hell #halloween #horror #ghost story #scary story #evil #dead #dead girl #venga #ghosts #spirits #demons #october #winter #snow #party

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toshootforthestars · 4 years

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From the report by Murtaza Hussain, posted 24 Apr 2020:

Although there could be price fluctuations of certain products, the U.S. still produces more than enough food to provide for its needs. The pandemic is not going to change that.

Covid-19, however, is a threat to those people whose invisible labor we rely on: the underpaid, overexploited workers who harvest, transport, and stock the food that keeps society functioning.

“The worry in the food supply chain was always about activities that were labor intensive,” said Ananth Iyer, a professor of operations management at Purdue University, “and where there weren’t proper procedures to protect the people doing the work: produce workers, warehouse employees, transport workers, and store employees.”

While most of the U.S. shelters at home, these essential workers have not been doing well. In the past several weeks, grocery store workers and farm laborers have started contracting and dying from Covid-19 in increasing numbers. In some places, the disease is already pushing people to a breaking point. This week, a massive meat-processing plant in Minnesota became the latest to shut down after a Covid-19 outbreak among workers. Many employers have continued pressing employees to work in unsafe and exploitative conditions, raising the possibility of more illnesses and shutdowns to come.

The economic impact of the pandemic is likely to land hard on these workers when the pandemic ends. Shifting consumption patterns means that industries maniacally focused on efficiency will likely slash employment levels. Among the victims could also be food service workers — presently frozen out of jobs amid the shutdown — who could return to an economy where far fewer people are willing to venture outside to eat.

“It’s estimated that in the United States, 50 to 55 percent of food consumption normally takes place outside the home, at restaurants, fast food outlets, and entertainment venues,” added Iyer. “All of a sudden, that came to a complete halt and now the question is whether we will even go back to that. If we don’t, there will be serious adjustments in the restaurant industry affecting the millions of people who work there.”

As is so often the case, a socioeconomic crisis is offering the chance for people with political power to push through policies that they’d quietly dreamed of implementing.

The present turmoil in the food supply chain is no different: In the wake of the pandemic, the agricultural industry looks ready to place the burden onto its most exploited workers by cutting the wages of migrant farm laborers. In this, they have a willing ally in the White House. In the name of supporting farmers, the Trump administration is proposing a new “wage relief” program to allow agricultural firms to cut migrant workers’ salaries to save money during the pandemic.

The proposal has gone largely under the radar while the country reels from news of Covid-19 deaths and job losses. But it may have serious consequences for what American society looks like when people eventually emerge from quarantine.

“At the moment the agriculture industry recognizes that the social turmoil caused by the pandemic has created something like a fog of war, in which they can press for lots of things that society normally would have no tolerance for,” said Ricardo Salvador, director of the food and environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s a basic principle of economics that if you successfully cut wages at the lowest rung of the economy, it is going to have a ripple effect up through the blue-collar range.

To put it another way, if you depress the wages for the poorest people, you depress wages for everyone.”

#news #us news #the intercept #murtaza hussain #us agriculture #us farms #food supply chain #2020 pandemic #coronavirus #us politics #2020 us presidential election

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Campaign to Drive Out Migrants Slams Beijing’s Best and Brightest

By Chris Buckley, Sui-Lee Wee and Adam Wu, NY Times, Dec. 11, 2017

BEIJING--With coding skills, a foreign degree, fluent English and an apartment barely big enough for his espresso maker and two cats, Si Ruomu thought he was the kind of go-getting young tech worker that Beijing needs to thrive in the 21st century.

That was before the police arrived at his apartment building and ordered him and hundreds of others to vacate within 48 hours. Like most of his fellow tenants, Mr. Si had come from elsewhere in China to find work in the capital, which often treats migrants virtually as second-class citizens.

“One minute you’re drinking espressos, the next you’re being evicted,” said Mr. Si, 28, a bespectacled programmer who grew up in northern China and studied computer science in New Zealand. “I’m starting to think whether people like me have a future in Beijing.”

As Beijing has launched its most aggressive drive in decades to rid itself of unwanted migrants, the brunt of the crackdown has fallen on laborers from the countryside. But it has also hurt a different kind of migrant: educated and ambitious white-collar workers drawn to the city’s new economy of tech, finance and hospitality industries.

Beijing is a cultural, technological and commercial capital as well as a political one, and the tenements on its outskirts are home to tens of thousands of hopeful young college graduates who have moved here seeking better jobs and better lives.

These job seekers are treated as migrants in their own capital, because China’s biggest cities are fortresses of official privilege, especially Beijing. The government gives residents with permanent residence permits, called hukou, more generous access to housing, schools and health care. But migrants must pay more for many services, and many live on the edges of Beijing, where rents are lower.

Now whole swathes of these neighborhoods have been emptied out and in many cases reduced to rubble as the authorities condemn buildings as unsafe or illegal and order migrants to leave.

That has ignited debate about how Beijing can function without the blue-collar migrants who serve as its cooks, cleaners and vendors, but there are also worries the campaign might harm the city’s fast-growing tech sector, which employs armies of migrants who work for relatively low pay.

“You can find this new displaced class in nearly every sector and business in the city, including manufacturing and I.T.,” said Wu Qiang, a researcher in Beijing who has written about the expulsions. “The growth of a marginalized, unprotected work force is a global phenomenon, but in China it’s especially found in so-called ‘villages in the city’ where migrants live.”

When the authorities arrive with eviction orders, many migrants search for newer, safer homes even further from the city center. Others say they may abandon Beijing to find work elsewhere.

“This will certainly change my impression of this city. I don’t really want to stay in Beijing,” said Zhang Mi, 25, a web application developer from Hebei, the province surrounding the capital, as he crammed his bags into a van after being evicted.

Most migrants in Beijing are manual laborers but a growing number are college graduates--nearly 30 percent, according to a 2015 study. Another study found that the city’s software and information technology sectors employed about 346,000 migrants.

“To young tech workers like me, there’s really no option--only the big cities like Beijing have more opportunities,” said Hu Xianyu, 22, an intern at Baidu, the internet search giant, who moved to Beijing from the northern province of Shanxi and was forced out of his apartment last month.

“Tech workers for the bigger companies can get help from them,” he said. “But for those working for small companies or start-ups, the evictions can be disastrous.”

Migrant workers have often reacted to the eviction orders with angry resignation. But small confrontations have flared up, and the largest and most organized protest broke out on Sunday, when hundreds of people in a neighborhood in northeast Beijing scheduled for clearance gathered and chanted “violent evictions violate human rights.”

The effects of the crackdown are already evident in Beijing’s booming e-commerce sector, which relies on legions of couriers--nearly all of them migrants--to deliver packages and meals on electric bikes.

Last month, five delivery companies warned of delivery delays following the expulsions.

Gan Wei, secretary-general of the China Electronic Commerce Logistics Industry Alliance, said the companies represented by her group would have to raise delivery prices in Beijing by about 20 percent.

“Why is takeout food so cheap in Beijing? Because of all the cheap labor from the countryside,” said Jia Dayong, 43, a stringy courier from the northwestern province of Shaanxi who was being expelled from Banjieta Village, a migrant neighborhood in northern Beijing.

“Nobody cares whether we have a place to live,” he said.

Beijing launched the eviction drive in late November, citing worries about cramped, substandard housing after an apartment fire killed 19 people, all but two of them migrants.

The government says a population of 21.7 million residents, 8.1 million of them classed as migrants, has put too much strain on city. Urged on by China’s president, Xi Jinping, Beijing wants to cap its population at 23 million by 2020, and clear out gritty neighborhoods that do not fit its aspirations to become a spick-and-span capital of monuments, malls and broad motorways.

“If they keep clearing out like this, Beijing will suffer a drought of employees next year,” said Wang Le, 29, a hotel manager from the eastern province of Jiangsu.

She was one of about 100 tenants--most of whom worked in finance, technology and hospitality--living in steel shipping containers that had been converted into small, brightly painted apartments. They were being torn down on government orders.

In an attempt to slow the influx of job seekers, Beijing has cut the numbers of university graduates from other parts of China receiving the hukou permits that confer privileged status and benefits. But they have kept coming.

Without permanent residency, they are forced to live precariously. Trying to save money, many find cheap apartments in the same run-down neighborhoods as migrants working menial jobs.

“Even if the industry I’m in is very high-level, as far as the government is concerned, I’m also a peasant worker, a migrant worker,” said Zhang Xingwang, 24, who studied automation in college and came to Beijing from Hebei Province seeking work as a software programmer.

He had to find new housing after his old apartment near where the deadly fire broke out last month was demolished. “I thought Beijing would be relatively fair and tolerant, and the government would behave better,” he said. “But after this happened …”

China’s big tech firms have refrained from criticizing the migrant crackdown, perhaps out of fear of angering the government. Alibaba, the online commerce giant, said the overall impact on its business “hasn’t been significant.”

But some experts have warned that by choking off the flow of migrants, Beijing risks losing entrepreneurial energy.

Even before the recent expulsions, Yin Deting, a demographer who advises the Beijing city government, warned that heavy-handed clearances of migrants would accelerate the aging of the city’s work force.

“If we place our hopes for reducing the population just in demolishing illegal buildings and low-grade markets, the actual outcomes may well be contrary to what is hoped for,” Mr. Yin wrote earlier this year.

Mr. Si, the programmer who studied in New Zealand, eventually found a place to stay on the eastern edge of Beijing where he could keep his cats. He said he was weighing whether to move to a more tolerant Chinese city, or leave the country again to resume his studies.

“I don’t think this will ever work,” Mr. Si said of the crackdown. “There are job opportunities in Beijing, and government policies can’t stop people moving to get jobs. If you do, the city pays a heavy price.”

#China #Beijing #migrants in Beijing

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go-redgirl · 5 years

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Court Upholds H-1B Visa Scrutiny: clearing away legal obstructions to end rubber-stamping H-1B [tr] Center for Immigration Studies ^ | July 19, 2019 | John Miano

One of the major changes at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that the Trump administration implemented under Francis Cissna was to apply some scrutiny to the approval process for H-1B visas. 👍

Previously, the H-1B program had been a rubber-stamp operation with a huge fraud rate in approved visas.

The situation was so bad that one could even import sex slaves into the United States using H-1B. 😡

Now USCIS is taking the long overdue step of ensuring that H-1B workers actually have jobs or that the position is actually a specialty occupation that requires a college degree.

The change from no scrutiny to some scrutiny has caused shock waves among those involved with making H-1B petitions. Their strategy appears to be to flood the courts with lawsuits challenging H-1B denials.

However, that approach may not work.

This week the District of Columbia District issued an opinion in Sagarwala v. Cissna. Plaintiff Usha Sagarwala was in the United States on an H-1B visa. She sought to change jobs so that she would work as a "QA analyst" (Quality Assurance) where HSK Technologies in Piscataway, New Jersey would be her paper employer while she actually would work for Anthem in Wallingford, Connecticut. Anthem is one of many employer using the H-1B program this way to replace American workers with cheap, foreign workers.

Changing jobs requires getting a new H-1B via approval. In response to the petition, USCIS issued a Request for Evidence, asking the "employer" to show that Sagarwala was actually going to be an employee of HSK and that the position was a specialty occupation.

USCIS ultimately rejected the petition, concluding "there was insufficient evidence to conclude that the required degree was 'common to the industry in parallel positions among similar organizations' or that the position was 'so complex or unique that it could be performed only by an individual with a degree.'"

The District Court held "USCIS did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in concluding that HSK Technologies' petition did not describe a specialty occupation" and that "there is no basis under the APA for setting aside the agency's decision."

For those of us who have worked in the industry, the only thing surprising about this determination is that USCIS might have approved such a visa petition in the past. QA is not a position that requires a college degree. While some QA job postings list a degree as a requirement or nice to have, many do not.

The decision by the district court starts clearing away the legal obstructions to USCIS's end of rubber-stamping H-1B petitions.

TOPICS: Business/Economy; Government; News/Current Events KEYWORDS: corporate welfare; h1b; hire american; immigration

________________________________________________________

INDIVIDUALS/COMMENTS/POSTS:

To: NobleFree

H1Bs should be abolished, period.

3 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:09:57 PM by Shadow44 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Shadow44 H1Bs should be abolished, period. ******************************* Agreed. America can do far better by developing the talents and skills of native Americans.

4 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:13:29 PM by House Atreides (Boycott the NFL 100% A— PERMANENTLY) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Shadow44

Wrong. H1-b is right program.

5 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:24:16 PM by impimp -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: House Atreides

America should skim the elite from around the world and assimilate them into our economy.

6 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:24:59 PM by impimp ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp America should skim the elite from around the world and assimilate them into our economy. ***************************************** Hey... let’s take the top 5% of the world’s Muslim population and bring them here. What could possibly go wrong.

7 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:29:49 PM by House Atreides (Boycott the NFL 100% A— PERMANENTLY) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp Sure, if you like hollowing out the middle class and replacing our STEM sector with incompetent Indian and Chinese workers.

8 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:36:51 PM by Shadow44 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: NobleFree

In a previous life, I was a hiring manager for H-1B at a major tech firm. It was and still is a major scam. We (the firm) used it to keep wages suppressed.

And while we kept our labor rate low, we eviscerated the Graduate schools of US students and ate our own seed corn.

9 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:37:30 PM by Drango (A liberal's compassion is limited only by the size of someone else's wallet.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp

I detected a whiff of elitist snobbery about you so I did a quick search to see “where you’re coming from”. And quickly saw the below post. Despise Americans much? .............. “I couldn’t agree more with an article. I am sick of subsidizing America’s blue collar manufacturing employees. If they can’t compete then too bad...adapt or else.”

10 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:38:40 PM by House Atreides [ Post Reply |

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: NobleFree

There are a gazillion non-immigrant and immigrant visa classifications:

(Push the ‘+’ next to the category to see that list)

And yes, once H1-B visas are clamped down, they will use other visa entries to do exactly the same thing.

11 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:38:55 PM by yefragetuwrabrumuy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Drango

The amount of fraud with H1Bs is staggering as well, the credentials they use are bogus and a lot of their degrees are from diploma mills. It’s a gigantic racket.

12 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:42:49 PM by Shadow44 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp "Wrong. H1-b is right program." So, who you pimpin' out instead native born Americans, pimp?

13 posted on 7/28/2019, 5:51:49 PM by Rashputin (Jesus Christ doesn't evacuate His troops, He leads them to victory !!) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: NobleFree

A massive India Indian influx has occurred under the H1B program. Indians have big families, The H1B recipient somehow has the right to bring in their entire family, to include parents, grandparents, etc, as well. There is an Indian invasion of America occurring.

Ever visit India? DO we want America to transform into an India like place? How about if migrant Indians exercise speaking proper English, talk to their children in English when in public, and lose the nutty head thing? And oh yea, start tipping for services provided to you. They seem like one of the cheapest ethnic minorities going.

14 posted on 7/28/2019, 6:03:07 PM by LeoWindhorse ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp H1-b is right program. Learn English.

15 posted on 7/28/2019, 6:15:56 PM by NobleFree ("law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual") ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp America should skim the elite from around the world H-1B is the opposite: low-paid low-skilled drones.

16 posted on 7/28/2019, 6:17:29 PM by NobleFree ("law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual") -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: NobleFree

H-1B is just another method of invading and looting of America.

17 posted on 7/28/2019, 7:45:10 PM by gawatchman ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp

You obviously have not worked in IT industry.

18 posted on 7/28/2019, 8:16:50 PM by Sapwolf (Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty. -Sowell) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: impimp

DUMB DUMB DUMB!

We don’t need MORE elites. We need a proper labor market without artificial flooding of people from all over.

Immigration has been the number one reason for low real wages since the 1970’s.

19 posted on 7/28/2019, 8:18:53 PM by Sapwolf (Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty. -Sowell) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: NobleFree

H1-B is not about elite, but replacing American middle-class workers with cheap foreigners mostly from India but also from other countries.

It is a racket just like coyotes bringing in illegals across the southern border.

20 posted on 7/28/2019, 8:20:11 PM by Sapwolf (Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty. -Sowell) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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mastcomm · 5 years

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Battered at the Polls, Pro-Europe Britons Gird for the Next Fight

LONDON — They marched by the hundreds of thousands to stop Brexit. They mourned when Prime Minister Boris Johnson walloped their side in the latest election.

And now, on the precipice of Brexit, ardent pro-European Britons, who by some measures outnumber those favoring Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, are looking for new outlets for their rage — something, anything, to keep from staring into the abyss of a generation-long exile from the bloc.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” said Tanya Luker, standing in the corner of the Coach & Horses pub in central London this week. “We’re just like a group of unhappy people that don’t know what to do.”

On Friday, Brexit will pass from the realm of left-wing nightmare to reality. And Britain’s Remainers, who fought for years to stay in the European Union, are reckoning with how to keep afloat a movement that may not get another chance to reverse Brexit for 30 or 40 years.

After going for broke last year with a strategy of trying to undo the withdrawal, they are rallying their weary, despairing supporters for hugely consequential battles ahead over the shape of Brexit, leaning on lawmakers to preserve smooth trading ties with Europe so British workers can keep their jobs.

They are agitating on behalf of Europeans living in Britain who have been refused long-term permission to stay.

And they are trying to deny Mr. Johnson his wish of stashing Brexit on the business pages of the newspapers, arguing instead that now is the very moment when the threat of brutal factory closures and migrant crackdowns needs to be forced on to the front pages.

“For three years, we’ve been in a phony war,” said Naomi Smith, the chief executive of Best for Britain, one of the biggest remaining anti-Brexit campaign groups. “Nobody really felt any of the actual effects of it, because we hadn’t yet had to look at border checks, we hadn’t had to consider what happens to our right to live, work, study and love in another country.”

In many Britons’ eyes, it was remarkable that pro-European Britons mounted a serious fight to overturn Brexit at all. In converting scores of British lawmakers, campaigners turned stopping Brexit from a fringe cause into the largest pro-Europe movement on the Continent.

Enough people changed sides that in many opinion polls before the general election in December, Remainers narrowly beat out the Leavers favoring withdrawal from the bloc. And in the general election, parties that favored rerunning the Brexit referendum won more than half the votes.

But the Remain vote splintered into competing parties, consigning the anti-Brexit side to a historically awful defeat to Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party.

What followed was a long Christmastime stupor.

“It’s the end of everything you fought for for years, and the end of your vision of Britain for many people as a country they thought of as open and international and rational,” said Ian Dunt, a pro-Remain writer whose book, “How to be a Liberal,” will be released this year. “You obviously get a sense of detachment from your country.”

But the approaching date of Britain’s departure, on Friday, seems to have shaken many people from their daze. In their rage at the government’s migration plans, and their desperation not to sink into years of despair, they said they were looking to the way left-wing voters in the United States reacted to President Trump’s win in 2016.

“In the U.S., we’ve seen mass mobilization in defense of migrants, Abolish ICE protests,” said Ana Oppenheim, an organizer for Another Europe is Possible, a leftist anti-Brexit group. “This is something we have to do here. We can’t let the energy dissipate in a situation where our rights and our freedoms are under threat.”

On university campuses, organizers are advising Europeans about how to apply for permission to stay in Britain, said Eve Alcock, president of the University of Bath students’ union. Pro-Remain groups are now asking Conservative members of Parliament to keep their party from pursuing a sharp split from the European Union, arguing that it would only hurt the blue-collar workers who helped put them in Parliament.

And political operatives are making plans to pounce when Mr. Johnson finally turns his party’s aspirations for Brexit into the hard reality of a plan.

If he tries to preserve close ties with Europe, Mr. Johnson could infuriate hard-line, pro-Brexit voters. But cutting the European Union adrift carries its own risks, especially in ex-Labour heartland seats that are home to automobile or aerospace industry workers who stand to suffer if the bloc responds with trade barriers, as its leaders have promised.

“More than three years on, they still have not defined Brexit,” said Tom Baldwin, who helped run the People’s Vote, the umbrella group that organized marches for a second Brexit referendum. “I’m not sure he knows which ones yet, but Boris Johnson will inevitably betray more people, more promises, and his opponents have a duty to expose that.”

Not that anyone thinks rejoining the European Union is in the cards, at least in the next decade.

Nor do pro-Europeans have access to the same well-funded, data-rich organizations that helped set up the largest rallies last year. People’s Vote split into warring camps in October, with one side trying to turn it into an avowedly pro-Remain organization and the other trying to keep recruiting a broader range of lawmakers.

Another challenge for pro-Europeans in Britain is that, unlike with anti-Trump voters in the United States, there is more than one party competing for their votes, said Denise Baron, a political researcher who has worked for campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic.

While Democrats alone benefited from the swell of anti-Trump sentiment in the 2018 midterm elections, many pro-European voters are waiting for the results of the Labour leadership race this year to decide whether to make that the vessel for their opposition to Mr. Johnson or turn to another party.

And in Britain’s political system, which gives a government with Mr. Johnson’s majority almost total control over what does or does not pass, opposition is a lonely place.

Of all the opposition’s battles ahead, perhaps none has attracted as much concern as the roughly 3.4 million European Union citizens in Britain, some of whom are struggling to secure long-term residency rights and are anxious about being denied housing or jobs.

Tanja Bueltmann, a professor of migration at Northumbria University, said that while the attention was welcome, pro-European campaigners were coming belatedly to the cause, given that the window for easing the process of applying for so-called “settled status” had closed.

Still, some groups that have long been agitating for European citizens, like the3million, have already launched legal action to fight for their voting and privacy rights.

At the Coach & Horses pub, where the3million was hosting a pub crawl, Ms. Luker and her husband, Trevor Luker, who met while working in Frankfurt, said they would wake up Saturday in a different country than the one they had chosen to make their home.

“Most of my life, I’ve been able to move freely throughout Europe,” Mr. Luker said. “All of a sudden, that’s no longer an option. That freedom to pick up sticks is gone.”

The European trading office of Mr. Luker’s financial services firm had already moved to Brussels. With changes like that starting to affect more people, Ms. Luker, a Finnish-American, said she hoped protests to limit the damage of Brexit might catch on.

As people filled the pub, among them a group of pro-Remain Britons who were nevertheless making fun of the Europeans there, Mr. Luker bemoaned the decades of upheaval ahead.

“We might have a hangover tomorrow,” he said, “but the country will have one for the next 20 years.”

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occupyscifi · 7 years

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The passion project

“You know, I still remember the moment the idea hit me” Will Wheatley stood on a podium, above a pool with the Silicon valley skyline behind him and all the people he respected and trusted in front of him. Will had e-vited everyone he knew, used the latest apps for spamming people who casually called themselves his friends and all the other people he had been boring the shit out of for the last six months as he had pursued his passion project “and you don’t need to laugh, because I’d been using the Ynspire app” there was a faux groan from a man in the audience and laughter around him. Everyone knew Bill Patton, CEO of Ynspire industries and creator of the app that made people want to make apps had been a big influence on Wheatley “and it just hit me, out of the blue” he grinned “because I know all of us have been in that bind. We wanna run our business. We need to get our passion project off the ground. But we need people. Only the people are asking too much. Funploy changes all that. Funploy finds you the cheapest people to do the quickest service. You want someone to iron your clothes? Usual guy cost too much? Funploy keeps you updated in real time so you get the most competetitive price possible” Will grinned as behind him stats of happy customers grinned back “this is the ultimate app for anyone who wants to make sure that their bottom line really is as close to the bottom as possible. For the little guy running a business trying to compete in a world of big beasts. For the mom and pop stores struggling to get by, to the young entrepreneurs out here in the valley today with barely enough cash to cover their rent – Funploy brings you the best workers for the best price – guaranteed!”

There was a polite smattering of applause and a few whoops from Will’s pals in the audience. Will looked around proudly. This evening was the culmination of two years of sleepless nights, of hard work, of burning through his savings and that of his parents with only this image lighting up his head. An app that would bring employer and employee together. Where when a worker woke up they could scroll through a list of employers as easy as a Tindr profile to find their day of work, no strings attached. Where employers left in the lurch could find anything from a PA to a bartender to a lawyer as easy as hailing an uber. Will knew it was an idea that would change the world. His only worry was that someone else would get there first, hence the sleepless nights spent coding, AB testing. Debugging. Dealing with the million and one problems that were part and parcel of every startup going back to the two Steves in a garage trying to change the world with a computer named after a fruit.

“now, ladies and gentlemen, before we get to the entertainment” Will gestured at the live band, a group who’d scored background music on a Pornhub-HBO miniseries and were on the verge of bigtime success. However before that they’d been just a lo fi post hip hop nobodies who’d lived for free in Will’s spare room. This was the favour being repaid “does anyone have any questions?”

A sea of hands, some from known investors. Others from his friendship group, planted to ask friendly questions. However Will was feeling bold, and instead went for an actual journalist – the last of a dying breed and the human equivalent of using a polaroid camera or a VHS recorder.

“Shelly Ming, LA times” said the journalist, her e-glasses large and serious and channelling Margot Kidder era Lois Lane “this is a very slick startup you have here, and its already proved its success in California”

“sure has” said Will “next stop, the world”

“but how do you counter the criticism that you are creating nothing more than an app for undermining unions, destroying long term contracts and turning even white collar work into zero hour no guarantee work for hire? You offer no employee protection, no rights, nothing” she paused “how do you counter the charge that you’re nothing more than a modern day robber baron?”

“Hey” said Will, his arms outspread “we’re a startup. My entire team is a couple of guys in a coffee shop. I’m no sweatshop owner or GM farmer” he looked incredulous “come on, this project is my passion. It isn’t about the money, it’s about changing the world”

That was the tagline that they’d be writing up the next day, the journalist realised looking up at Will’s earnest and plump face. That this was a project born of a passion to change the world for the better, a classic Silicon Valley dream made reality. Not to become rich, nor powerful. But just to see a human need and fill it. that was what Ynspire was all about, and that was what Funploy was about. It didn’t matter that Funploy gave its user (never employees, employees had legal rights. Users did not) lower wages by far than the national average, or offered no long term guarantee of work. It didn’t matter that it was driving employment agencies out of business. What mattered was that it made the world just that little bit more efficient, and therefore just a little bit better.

What was worse, as Shelly watched Will leave the stage, was that Will believed it all.

“you know, I’m not like that” Will had cornered the journalist by the edge of the pool where she had been trying to get a shot on her ancient Nikon of the reflection of the water and the circulating investors and brogrammers that were partying. Shelly looked up to see Will’s earnest face, slightly sweaty in the warmth.

“like what?” she said, straightening up.

“like them” he said, twisting a beer bottle in his hands. It was a GM craft beer, made from an entirely unnatural substance but by a pair of Oregon based farmers. Shelly had tasted it earlier, it had been as if someone made liquid donuts with a dash of milkshake. Not really her thing, she drank Bud because that was what hardcore journos should drink. Will gestured at the investors, at Patton who was laughing away with one of the Uber brothers over some complicated glow in the dark cocktails.

“well, pretty soon you’ll be rich like them” said Shelly “you should enjoy it. you worked hard, after all” there was an edge of sarcasm in her voice that Will ignored.

“I didn’t do it for the money. I’m serious. I didn’t” Will look intently at the pool “I don’t know if you know what it’s like. Having a passion” he looked at her Nikon, at the complicated pockets on her jacket with extra lenses, extra film. All the unnecessary accoutrements when you could wear a pair of glasses that could get better pictures that could be immediately tweaked, edited, improved and uploaded by software “okay, maybe you do. So you should understand” he looked her in the eye, his wide face serious “you gotta remember, I didn’t have any guarantees when I began this. I didn’t have no big investors. No mom and pop trust fund. I worked during the day doing any work that would pay me a dollar – hell, half the stuff I put into Funploy was based on my experience working like a dog. Not knowing if I was gonna have a job in the morning”

“well now we all get to experience that uncertainty” said Shelly, raising her bottle of Bud in salute while she stowed her camera away in its padded bag “thanks man”

“come on, its not like that” Will looked over at the investors who’d helped make his dream a reality. He lighted on Patton “all I had was a dream, and you know nine out of tern startups fail. That’s why it was so important to have Ynspire, else I would have given up long ago” he looked back at Shelly “even so my odds of success were hella low. If I’d just wanted to get rich I’d have gone into something safe. I didn’t need to take a massive risk on a new app. I did it because I thought I could make things better. You know I used to hang around with brocialists? That was a big influence, I didn’t wanna be some libertarian asshole. I didn’t wanna be some Peter Thiel or Lucky Palmer type fucking people over for money…”

“and yet here you are” said Shelly, her eyebrow raised. She nodded at Patton “you know, you aren’t the first guy to use Ynspire to make an app that makes people’s lives worse”

“what do you mean?” asked Will “Ynspire doesn’t tell you what to do. It’s like Eno’s oblique strategies. It’s a method to help inspire creativity and to take you from idea to reality and beyond…”

“yeah, I’ve heard the tagline” said Shelly. She was starting to feel a bit light headed. She didn’t like these places, but if you were going to be a serious journo you had to follow power around. Like Hunter S Thompson and the presidential elections. Being in the belly of the beast made better journalism, and it also attracted better sponsorship – especially is she got kicked out for being drunk and rowdy “just, like I say. You aren’t the first. Lotta people using Ynspire end up coming up with the kind of apps that are one step away from illegal. Like that guy who created the militia app, or the one for spotting illegal migrants….”

“lots of different folks use Ynspire” said Will defensively, thinking of the other apps he knew people were making “besides there’s a friend of mine making an app so’s people on the poverty line can find the cheapest deals without having to trek to the nearest megamart. That can save people dollars who haven’t got two to rub together”

“and yet that app isn’t here, is it?” said Shelly, looking around “and do you think it would get this kind of investment if it was?” Will opened his mouth to argue back but realised she was right. He’d seen the app his friend had been working on, and both of them had worked just as hard. Only Will had got lucky when his friend had not. At the time he’d thought it was just the luck of the draw, and that in the end you never knew how the wheel would turn. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“look, just do me a favour?” said Shelly, itching to go off and shoot some of the techbro’s now they were a bit drunk and more likely to say something horribly misogynistic “when you get super rich, just use some of that money to help people, okay? Maybe your friend’s app, yeah?”

With that she was gone, and Will was left even more uncertain.

“umm, hey Mr Patton?” Will asked the investor timidly “could we…could we have a word?”

“sure dude” said the investor of Ynspire grandly, his face flushed from cocktails and the adulation of the brogrammers present. Will lead them both over to a deserted end of the pool. The band were just finishing up and there would be some pitches by lesser developers, hoping to score drunken investment from one of the wealthy people present.

“so, what’s on your mind, bro?” said Patton. He was in his middle fifties but his trim shape and surfer like affability made him look two decades younger. That and the fact he could afford to blow a few hundred grand on cosmetic enhancement.

“its just….my app” said Will, he picked at the label of his beer which featured a picture of what the brewers imagined the taste would look like if you visualised it - a hellish Wonka like confection with overtones of kids cereals from the days before the sugar ban “I just get the feeling. I dunno. That maybe its not what I want”

“how’d you work that out man?” said Patton, looking confused “you got a solid gold app. Its gonna be a smash. You worked damn hard to make it, you went the distance. You lived that app. How could it not be what you wanted?”

“its just….just when I used Ynspire, it just seemed a great idea. Now I’m not so sure. I mean, did I do the right thing?”

“look dude” said Patton, his eyes looking heavy and his voice slightly slurred “you wanna know the truth?”

“what truth?” asked Will, confused

“it’s a lie, okay?” Patton looked sly, watching for Will’s reaction “the passion project shit. Ynspire isn’t what you think it is. It’s not some life guide to help you fashion your dreams into reality. It works the other way around”

“umm, what?” asked will, unsure if this was a joke. Patton had a reputation in the valley for his odd sense of humour.

“well, it isn’t about turning your idea into a passion project. What it really is about is seeding a bunch of ideas we dreamed up but don’t have the time or resources to bother creating and getting you guys to slave away making them a reality”

“I don’t…” began Will, his lip trembling “I don’t know what you mean. I really believed in Funploy….”

“you didn’t. You don’t” said Patton “you were tricked into creating apps that fucked over other people. I mean come on, an app that allows employers to aggressively employ only the lowest paid workers? That makes ordinary folks fight to the death just to get paid a basic living wage? That isn’t anyone’s passion. Not unless you’re a sociopath”

“but…but its about getting the best results for employers” protested Will “and giving working people the freedom to…”

“no, no its not” said Patton “its about getting you to work like a fucking dog, thinking that you’ve had this great idea that’s going to change the world. Instead it’s an idea dreamed up by some executive on Wall Street that if they tried to pull would get them on the front page of the NY times and probably lynched on social media if they launched it themselves. But because you’re a young guy running a startup everyone gives you a free pass. Because you have passion” Patton gave a twisted grin.

“but…but it was my idea” Will stood on the edge of tears, his beer bottle forgotten in his hand. For all his protests some part of him knew that Patton was right. It had been spooky how easily the idea had come into his mind, of course putting into practice had been all his own hard work. All those sleepless nights. The relationships it had ruined, the friendships it had cost to get the app first into alpha and then beta. The schmoozing it had taken to get it a favourable rating in the apple store “okay. Maybe not. But it was my hard work”

“sure” said Patton, patting Will on the arm “just keep telling yourself that, buddy. Your hard work, and you’ll get the reward. Well a decent cut of the reward anyway”

“what do you mean?” said Will, his confusion now turning to cold anger

“who do you think we bothered to invest in your app?” Patton said, knocking back another tequila and laughing “who took it from just some guy’s idea to a realistically funded prototype?” Patton tapped his chest “we did. Because it was our idea in the first place. You just worked on it, just like every other poor sap in this world. No one gets to own anything. Well, no one but us”

Will bunched his fists, imagining sinking one of them into Patton’s smug face. But then he struggled to control his temper, not least because it wouldn’t look good to punch a major investor at his own launch party. He was also curious.

“how’d you do it?” said Will, letting a fake smile move across his face. He’d hustled enough times to know how to fake it “cause I’m guessing a good chunk of the apps you’ve invested in have been your own ideas, right?”

“oh, its simple” said Patton, his face a picture of drunken malevolence “everyone who wants to be a bigshot developer downloads my app. Because they want access to quick cash and the buzz from other startups, right?”

“yeah, sure” said Will

“well, because no one ever reads the terms and conditions they don’t notice the small print. That the app doesn’t turn off, even if you delete it. we loaded it with subliminals and peripheral software so that whenever you look at your phone its sending input to your eyeballs. You can’t help but absorb the information. Advertisers use it all the time, only cause all of them do it doesn’t work right. If both Coke and Pepsi are equally hitting you with subliminals they cancel each other out. But for people already looking for that big idea that’ll make ‘em richer than a Zuckerburg? Its dynamite”

“wow, that is cool” said Will, already looking in his e glasses for the source code of Patton’s app. Naturally it wasn’t exactly legal to come by, but as a partner of Patton’s he had more leeway “imagine having that much power”

“it’s like having a permanent hardon bud” said Patton, staggering slightly as he tried to dance near the pool “and talking of hardons” he looked at one of the geek girls whose presence was meant to convince everyone that the famous Silicon Valley sexism was a thing of the past. Patton was about to prove this very wrong “I’m gonna sexually harass some of these chicks. Don’t get too cut up, not everyone can have great ideas, right?”

“yeah” said Will, who was already leafing through Patton’s code “I won’t get mad” will was trying to hide a smile. He’d had another idea, and this one he was pretty sure was his own. Because if Patton could subliminally lace his Ynspire app with ideas then Will could do the same. But Will had a more revolutionary intent, he hadn’t forgotten his time with the brocialists. Maybe this time he could change the world for the better.

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Republicans Are Running For Governor In Nevada

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-running-for-governor-in-nevada/

What Republicans Are Running For Governor In Nevada

Adam Laxalt Trump Ally Who Filed Suits To Overturn Nevada Election Running For Senate

Donald Trump

Adam Laxalt, an ally of former President Donald Trump who filed lawsuits to overturn 2020 election results in Nevada, is running for the U.S. , the Associated Press reported.

Laxalt, a 42-year-old Republican, seeks to replace Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. The attorney and Navy veteran made a run for governor in 2018 but lost by four percentage points to Steve Sisolak. Two years later, he worked as Trump’s campaign co-chair in the state and filed lawsuits, that failed, against Nevada’s mail-in voting. Laxalt also tried to stop the counting of votes in Clark County.

In 2014, Laxalt became America’s youngest state attorney general at 35.

Andy Orellana, a spokesperson for the Nevada Democratic Victory group that supports Cortez Masto’s reelection campaign, said Laxalt as an attorney general “used his office to benefit his special interest donors.”

“He became Donald Trump’s main lackey in Nevada by orchestrating bogus lawsuits to prop up the Big Lie and overturn the 2020 election,” Orellana added.

For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.

Laxalt filed late Sunday to run, setting the stage for what could be a decisive battle as both parties fight for control of .

He is part of a Nevada political dynasty. Cortez Masto succeeded U.S. Senator Harry Reid in 2016 and became the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate.

“While Senator Cortez Masto is putting Nevadans first, Laxalt is only ever looking out for himself,” he said.

Nevada Gubernatorial Election 2018

: No

: 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Filing deadline:Last day of candidate filing Primary: June 12, 2018

defeated and three other candidates in the 2018 general election for of .

Democrats won a in Nevada by capturing the governor’s office and maintaining control of the state legislature. Heading into the election, Nevada had been under since 2016 when Democrats won control of the and the .

The winner of this election stood to influence the state’s . Under Nevada state law, the is responsible for drawing new maps for and state legislative seats following the completion of the census. The has the power to veto these district map proposals. Click for more information on redistricting procedures.

Incumbent , who was term-limited, was first elected in by 11.8 percentage points and re-elected in by 46.7 percentage points. The last Democrat to win Nevada’s governorship was Bob Miller in 1990 and 1994. won in the by 3 percentage points, making it one of eight states holding gubernatorial elections in 2018 that Clinton won despite having a governor. As of October 24, tracked by Ballotpedia called the race a toss-up and one said it slightly favored Democrats.

The third party and independent candidates who ran were , , and .

For more information about the Democratic primary, .For more information about the Republican primary, .

Biden Administration Quietly Allowing Silent Amnesty Of Migrants

Eric Wright

The Biden administration is quietly allowing a silent amnesty by suspending or dismissing thousands of deportation cases pending in immigration courts, The Washington Times reported on Monday.

Terminating or dismissing a case removes it from the active docket, granting migrants de facto permission to stay in the country even though they do not hold legal status.

Deportation orders, as a percentage of decided cases, have decreased to 35% from January to June, which is about half the rate of the last two years of the Trump administration.

The number of case terminations has also gone up sharply even though immigration judges are deciding fewer cases.

Theyre dismissing these cases out of hand, and then ICE is releasing these people from custody, one Justice Department source told the Times.

Jeremy McKinney, the president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association said that implementation of the current adminstrations common-sense immigration enforcement priorities are shifting those cases away from prolonged litigation and towards resolution through established paths of legal immigration.

Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and currently a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, pointed to a May memo from John Trasvina, the principal legal adviser at ICE, who urged the agencys attorneys to use prosecutorial discretion to curtail deportations.

Eric WrightEric Wright

Republican Adam Laxalt Is Running For The United States Senate In Nevada

CARSON CITY, Nevada Republican Adam Laxalt ran Sunday night to run for the U.S. Senate in Nevada, setting the stage for what could be a decisive battle as both parties battle for control of Congress. .

Laxalt, who is part of a Nevada political dynasty and an ally of former President Donald Trump, aims to overthrow Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, who succeeded US Senator Harry Reid in 2016 and became the first Latina elected to the Senate. from United States.

Laxalt, a 42-year-old Reno-based attorney and Navy veteran, is the son of former US Senator Pete Domenici and the grandson of the former governor of Nevada. and US Senator Paul Laxalt. Adam Laxalt rose to fame in 2014 after becoming the nations youngest attorney general at age 35 and clashed with the Republican governor during his tenure. Brian Sandoval and his moderate allies in the state party.

He unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2018, losing to the current governor. Steve Sisolak by four percentage points.

Democrats have won the last two Senate elections in Nevada by less than five points, but they fear a low turnout similar to 2014, the last midterm race held with a Democrat in the White House. That year, Republicans won nine seats to regain control of the Senate, and Laxalt rode the Republican wave to victory in the state attorney general race. Historically, the opposition party has won seats in midterm elections during a presidents first term.

___

See also:

Of the seven state executive offices on the ballot in 2021, four of them are represented by incumbents who are subject to term limits. One of those incumbents is ineligible to run for re-election in 2021 due to term limits. This represents 14.2 percent of the total seats up for election in 2021.

Republican Venture Capitalist Announces 2022 Bid For Nevada Governor

Republican candidate for governor Guy Nohra.

LAS VEGAS Republican venture capitalist Guy Nohra announced Tuesday that he is running for Nevada governor next year.

Nohra joins a GOP primary race that includes Las Vegas-area sheriff Joe Lombardo, North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee and Reno attorney Joey Gilbert.

I Switched To The Republican Party Heres Why

Watch The Video

Like every Nevadan, I grew up in awe of the American experiment.Â As children, we looked up to the flag and were proud of what it symbolized and what it stood for – freedom, opportunity, and promise.Â Back then, we knew both parties – despite their political differences – shared the same values. Today that is no longer the case.âTodayâs Democratic Party has embraced a socialist, extremist agenda that hurts working class families, restricts freedom, and extinguishes opportunity for millions of Americans – particularly working class minorities who deserve the chance to give their families a better life. Thatâs why I voted for President Trump twice.Â Thatâs why I had an A+ rating from the NRA and their endorsement in my time in the state senate.Â I refused to compromise my pro-life, pro-2nd amendment values, even though it meant losing my state senate seat.Though Iâve been a registered Democrat on paper my entire life, I made the switch to the Republican Party â because on some things, thereâs simply no compromise.

Sheriff Joe Lombardo Kicks Off Campaign For Nevada Governor

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo speaks with journalists at a news conference announcing his candidacy for governor of Nevada, Monday, June 28, 2021, in Las Vegas.

John Locher

Former Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison with Joe Lombardo as seen in Las Vegas on June 28, 2021.

Joe Lombardo speaks with members of the media after announcing his campaign for Nevada Governor. Las Vegas, Nevada. June 28, 2021.

LAS VEGAS — Sheriff Joe Lombardo has officially announced his run for governor of Nevada as a Republican candidate.

Lombardo on Monday made the announcement at Rancho High School, where he was once a student.

Sheriff Joe Lombardo has officially announced his run for Nevada governor as a Republican candidate.

Hes running in a Republican primary thats attracted North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, who recently left the Democratic Party to become a Republican, and Joey Gilbert, a northern Nevada attorney who has questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election. Former U.S. Sen. Dean Heller also is considering a run and has been making recent appearances before rural GOP groups ahead of any official decision.

Lombardos announcement speech previewed his platform and the talking points that Republicans plan to use in the 2022 midterms. The two-term sheriff, who has never run in a partisan race, said he would block teaching critical race theory in schools, establish an election integrity commission and defend the Second Amendment.

North Las Vegas Mayor Announces Republican Run For Nevada Governor

LAS VEGAS — North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee on Monday will launch his gubernatorial campaign for 2022 as a Republican, challenging Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak.

Lee, 65, will be running as a Republican following a party switch in April. The campaign will officially be announced on Monday morning with a video.

FILE – This May 23, 2011 file photo shows, former Nevada Sen. John Lee, D-North Las Vegas, at work on the Senate floor at the Legislature in Carson City, Nev.

Im proud to kick off my campaign for Governor of Nevada, because Nevadans deserve a leader who will put Nevada values first, not the liberal, radical agenda we see today from Steve Sisolak, said Lee in a statement to media on Sunday night. I will stand up for the constitutional rights of Nevadans everywhere, and will focus on embracing small government, defending free speech, protecting unborn life, and supporting the right to bear arms.

Lee’s statement said he left the Democratic party because it “embraced socialism, adopted radical policies, and turned its back on Nevadas middle class and working families.” He said Nevada’s leadership is “nonexistent” and that Sisolak has “mismanaged” Nevada’s economy.

Gov. Sisolak’s re-election campaign didn’t directly address Lee’s candidacy in a statement.

Lee was first elected mayor of North Las Vegas in 2013 and was reelected in 2017. His term ends in 2022. Lee also previously served on the Nevada Legislature.

Gaming Commission Of Nevada

In 1998, Sandoval was appointed to serve as a member of the Gaming Commission of Nevada, which oversees the state’s gaming industry. The following year, at the age of 35, Sandoval became the youngest person ever to serve as chairman of the gaming commission. During his time on the commission, Sandoval fought national efforts to block gambling on college sports events, worked on regulations limiting neighborhood gaming and worked for regulations prohibiting slot machines with themes attractive to children.

Sizing Up The Gop Field For Nevada Governor

KSNV Las Vegas

Sheriff Joe Lombardo may be the latest Republican to jump in. He may not be the last.

Northern Nevada Congressman Mark Amodei is also mulling a run.

Amodei tells me he’s in no rush to make a decision. He says he’ll probably decide this fall, for a primary that’s still a year away. He says he’s doing his homework because he says beating Democrat Steve Sisolak, especially in his home base of Clark County, will not be easy. His message to his fellow Republicans:

Its like, what is your plan for not losing Clark County by 100,000 votes? And you know what – I know it’s early on but if you want to get people excited I’m sure waiting for some of those folks to start talking about that, the Congressman told me by phone Tuesday from Washington.

I got to tell you I feel no vulnerability in terms of sitting down and evaluating my stuff, Amodei told me, adding, at this point in time I feel no vulnerability because Im all around my district in person, in Vegas.

RELATED | Support group urges Nevadans to be mindful of those with PTSD on July 4th

To win, Republicans would need to win as much of Clark as possible, and run up the score in the rurals, and Washoe.

That said, the GOP field now stands at three: Lombardo; North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee and Reno attorney Joey Gilbert.

Because no party benefits from a large primary. It sucks up a lot of money that could be used in the fall campaign, Lokken says.

Capitol Rioter Running For Governor In Nevada

10 weeksEd Scarce

“I’m not a politician, I don’t ever want to be a politician.” said Gilbert. Hmm…where have we heard that before? Apparently, Gilbert was on something called The Contender, a reality tv show centered around boxing, as he was a former professional boxer, the show also made by Mark Burnett of Survivor fame.

Gilbert was present at the riot. He hasn’t been charged with any crimes, nor is there any evidence that he was ever inside the Capitol. He does, however, have ties to several people now arrested.

A northern Nevada attorney who has questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election and was outside the U.S. Capitol the day it was violently stormed is running for governor.

A video posted on Facebook shows Republican Joey Gilbert told an applauding audience in Las Vegas over the weekend that he planned to challenge Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak in Nevadas 2022 gubernatorial race.

“I have a PhD in success,” Gilbert said in his announcement video. “I’m not a politician, I don’t ever want to be a politician. Let me tell you something that I am probably going to be doing here shortly. And that’s called running for governor.” Gilbert’s announcement was met with a standing ovation and loud cheers, the video shows.

According to the Associated Press. Gilbert is something of a fixture among loopy, rightwing causes in Nevada.

We’ve reached out to Gilbert for a comment but have not heard back yet.

North Las Vegas Mayor

On April 2, 2013, Lee was elected Mayor of North Las Vegas defeating incumbent Mayor Shari Buck. Lee assumed office on July 1, 2013. At the time of his election, North Las Vegas was facing large monetary challenges including a deficit of more than $150 million. Because of employee concessions and a strong management team, he was able to balance the budget without tax increases or layoffs in less than a year.

Lee has made the expansion and enhancement of North Las Vegas Libraries and parks two of his biggest priorities. In addition, his administration has streamlined business licensing procedures, attracting new businesses to the city. Lee also initiated an innovative plan to use state tax credits as an incentive to jumpstart development at the Apex Industrial Park, an effort that could eventually result in the creation of 116,000 jobs to the area.

Lee was re-elected in 2017.

On April 6, 2021, Lee announced he would switch political affiliation from the to the Republican Party, citing what he called the “socialist takeover of the Nevada Democratic Party”.

Former Sen Heller Preps Comeback Run For Nevada Governor

Heller has been meeting with GOP governors, donors and other party leaders during the Republican Governors Association conference.

Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller talks to supporters before a joint appearance with Ivanka Trump, at the GOP field office in Reno, Nev., Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018. Ivanka Trump praised Heller for his role in passing the tax bill and the doubling of the child tax credit that came with it. She says she’s confident he’ll win his battle for re-election against Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen. | Scott Sonner/AP Photo

05/26/2021 01:49 PM EDT

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Former Nevada Sen. Dean Heller is preparing to run for governor in 2022, giving Republicans a high-profile entrant into one of the key contests of the midterm elections.

Heller has meetings with GOP governors, party leaders and major donors at the Republican Governors Association conference this week in Nashville, Tenn., according to three people familiar with the conversations.

It would represent a dramatic comeback for Heller, who lost reelection in 2018 as part of a nationwide repudiation of former President Donald Trump. Heller, who spent more than two decades in state and federal office, has begun talking with potential consultants and has conducted an initial round of polling.

I think hes really committed to this campaign, said Barbour. He would be awfully hard to beat in a primary.

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Nevada Attorney Who Was At Us Capitol On Day Of Riot Now Running For Governor

They are vying to take on incumbent Democrat Steve Sisolak, who will be making his first reelection bid in 2022.

A U.S. News & World Report analysis identifies Sisolak among eight governors who are vulnerable this election cycle especially since he is the first Democrat to win the governors seat this century in Nevada. The states three previous governors were all Republicans.

Nohra is a 61-year-old who was born in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. when he was a teenager.

He cofounded Alta Partners, a venture capital firm, and moved to Nevada six years ago. He lives in Reno.

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kunmmemories-blog · 7 years

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Jesus Manuel Guzmán (1955-2001): MacBeth, Metal, Mariachis and Mole

Jesus Manuel Guzmán was born in Hidalgo de Parral, Chihuahua on May 27nd, 1955. He crossed at El Paso, Texas into the United States in 1976 and moved the same year to Albuquerque, where he made a living working blue collar jobs. Jesus volunteered at KUNM during the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s before joining a migrant stream through North Carolina and the upland South. Mr. Guzmán was an active member of the Raices Collective and a regular overnight freeformer on early Sunday mornings. He was one of the voices heard on the old Adelante news program, a weekly production of the Raices Collective and El Comite de Derechos Humanos launched in the early 1980s that reported extensively on the wars, economic crises, human rights atrocities and other burning issues of the day in Latin America and the U.S. Southwest. At one point, Jesus visited Nicaragua during the the Contra War.

In his varied day jobs in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Jesus engaged in the hard,physical labor that millions of immigrants that keep this country going. On one job he once talked about, Jesus worked at iconic Mexican singer Juan Gabriel’s Santa Fe area house.

KUNM volunteer and journalist Kent Paterson, who sometimes helped Jesus with the unforgettable Overnight Freeform shows, recalled the eclectic, electrifying and symphonic sounds the deejay from Chihuas would pump out into the New Mexico night. “Nobody could do a heavy metal- mariachi transition quite like Jesus” Paterson said.

“He was a real wild man but he was a real great deejay,” recalled Karl Stalnaker, co-host of KUNM’s long running Home of Happy Feet show. “It was pretty spontaneous and could get way out there.” In his Duke City days, Mr. Guzmán also spun tunes for the old Spanish language station KABQ. “He was very flamboyant and had a big heart, and contributed a lot to the Raices Collective” said fellow collective member Henry Gonzales. “He would always bring in some humor to the situation.” The son of a Mexican bracero farmworker, Jesus was the appropriate voice who narrated the Spanish version of Paterson “Gold: The Rio Grande Cotton Kingdom" radio documentary. In his cool, stray cat voice, Jesus told the story of King Cotton in New Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, a landmark rural economy made possible by labor of Mexican contract workers known as braceros. “he blood, sweat and tears of the cotton empire ran through Jesus’ veins,” Paterson said. Now a mechanized crop, cotton still glistens in the commercial farm belts of New Mexico where the feet of braceros once plodded the soil. Former Adelante co-producer and longtime Raices Collective member Louis Head also collaborated with Jesus.

“I don’t use this word very often. He struck me as one of the most brilliant people I ever met. He was amazing,” Head said in an interview. “From what I knew, he came across the border (knowing little English), and he knew Shakespeare. The guy was very much an organic intellectual. And just the way he used the English language, he was very funny.” Head reminisced about Mr. Guzman’s mastery of code-switching and his gift at dropping Spanish or English words in the right place at the right time to have an added effect. “One time he was playing Los Alegres de Teran and Flaco Jimenez and he went into this Spanish monologue. He was talking Spanish and then saying ‘gritando (shouting) mojado POWER.’” Overall, Jesus “had an amazing voice-English or Spanish,” Head summed up. “He was a fun guy to hang out with. He was a blast.” Jesus returned to El Paso to complete his education in 1996, graduating with a Bachelor’s of Arts in history in 2000 from the University of Texas at El Paso. While residing in the Paso del Norte borderland, he became a noted and published poet on the local scene. His poems appeared in Bridge, Voces Fronterizos and Rio Grande Review, while his translations were included in Leonardo and the Flow of the River. Jesus was a founding member in 1995 of Tumblewords, a literary project that began in the Las Cruces area with a mission of encouraging new writers before migrating down the road to El Paso. Twenty three years later, Tumblewords still features weekly gatherings of poets, writers, artists and performers, both veterans and beginners, in the heart of El Chuco. In an interview at an El Paso cafe late last year, Guzmán’s former partner and Tumblewords founder Donna Snyder shared samples of Jesus’ work and read her own poems that speak of sudden departures and emotional grief, inspired in part by Jesus’ passing.

“He was just beginning to let himself go,” Snyder said of Jesus’s poetry writing.

“These are examples of his early work. I can’t imagine what he’d be doing now.” In one poem published in Rio Grande Review, Jesus mocked life, death and himself: “Jesus Descansa Aqui” “Jesus descansa aqui” he used to smoke cigarettes too many, his friends said. Jesus used to eat fat foods and never exercised. He used to drink and never wanted to lose weigh. Never paid attention to his mother who would say, “Chuy you better exercise or stop stuffing your face.” He then responded by scarfing two more mole burritos and washed them down with a beer. Jesus died with a big fat pain in his chest and his epitaph read, “Here lies a gordito cabron who paid no attention to his mom.” Snyder, who sometimes assisted Jesus with his KUNM shows when the two were still around Albuquerque, said the talented man was “beloved” in the Paso del Norte borderland. “He had a residency at an elementary school, and he had little 7-year- old immigrant kids who wouldn’t speak get up and read the poems they had written,” she said. Once, a housing services organization asked Snyder’s beefy partner and fellow poet to play Santa Claus in New Mexico’s Hatch Valley.

“He was a little offended by it but decided to do it. But when he came back he was illuminated, effulgent. He was so full of the happiness that he had created in those kids. They had never seen a Mexican Santa,” Snyder fondly reminisced. When Jesus died after falling off an El Paso roof, the children he had been working with in his school residency were informed. Dutifully and lovingly, the students stuffed a manila envelope with little cards, photos and messages for Mr. Guzmán, Snyder recalled. “It was the most moving thing,” she added. “He was right away beloved by anyone who heard his work.” For Snyder, the poetry of Jesus Guzmán was composed and delivered in the language of the borderland and borderlanders, or fronterizos, who communicate in Spanish, English and “Spanglish.” And according to Snyder, Jesus had a simple philosophy of poetry: “All good poems are short. He used Spanglish.” More than twenty years after his death, Jesus’ name still rings a bell with a now seasoned “cadre” of once youthful, mainly Chicano poets who found their voice in the early days of Tumblewords. “He’s still remembered by poets (now) in their forties,” Snyder added. Jesus Manuel Guzmán passed away at the young age of 45 on April 16, 2001, the day after Easter Sunday, while working as a counselor and community aide on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso. He was survived by his son Amado Guzmán, partner Donna Snyder and family in Mexico. Less than a year before his death, Jesus prepared a poem for the 2000 Taos Poetry Circus about the multidimensional journeys of a father and a son. My Father After his Stroke By Jesus Guzmán

He would recite things from the past when oxygen did not reach his brain He would say

“When people from Torreon come around, my heart swells up.” Or he would talk to people from his childhood. there were the Zamarippa brothers who dried up their brains with marijuana (he said). Or Los Gonzales who owned the corner hardware store. He would also talk in English To his bosses in Colorado where he was a Bracero in 1959. But this was 1976. I tried to make sense of his stories to no avail. That was my father after his stroke. Then my father died and I inherited his dreams and experiences that made no sense until I left my country.

Information: Amado Guzmán (son of Jesus Guzmán), Kent Paterson, Henry Gonzales, Louis Head, Donna Snyder, Karl Stalnaker, Taos Poetry Circus, Rio Grande Review.