Saturday, March 25th, 2017
Eleanor J. Bader, - truthout
Stephan: One of the bigger lies of the Republican anti-immigration movement is that immigrants are taking jobs for honest White working Americans. It is root and branch nothing but BS. From farming, which is in desperate trouble because immigrants aren't showing up to work, and those honest White working class Americans won't do the backbreaking farm work, to virtual reality research immigrants are one of the largest creators of jobs for Americans. Let's deal with some
facts:
"Accessing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s public online database, the study reviewed 1,466 patents from the top ten patent-producing universities in 2011: the University of California system, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas system, California Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois system, University of Michigan, Cornell University and Georgia Institute of Technology. The review of patents from these leading research universities found the following:
- 76 percent of the patents had a foreign-born inventor.
- 54 percent of the patents were awarded to the group of foreign inventors most likely to face visa hurdles: students, postdoctoral fellows, or staff researchers.
- Foreign-born inventors played significant roles in the fields of semiconductor device manufacturing (87 percent), information technology (84 percent), pulse or digital communications (83 percent), pharmaceutical drugs or drug compounds (79 percent) and optics (77 percent)."
And it all starts with immigrants coming to the U.S. to attend college. But... oh dear... Trumpian nastiness is causing the number of bright young people coming to U.S. colleges to drop like a rock. Where are they going? Well a lot are going to Canada, so look for Canada to begin to surge ahead in technology research. Here's the story.
Credit: Unsplash
Two-and-a-half years ago, when Margarita left her home in Venezuela to study in the US, she had high hopes. No one in her family had ever attended university, let alone studied abroad, and she relished the opportunity to perfect her English and complete a Bachelor’s degree.
Trump’s election changed that and Margarita says that she now worries about whether it is in her best interest to remain in the country. Despite having a student visa, she says that she’s always on edge. Nonetheless, she has decided to stay and finish her degree. “I want to make my dreams come true,” she told Truthout. “I do not want to leave something half-way, that is incomplete.” She expects to receive her undergraduate diploma in the spring of 2019.
Like most international students, Margarita is not eligible for financial aid and her family pays her tuition and living expenses out of pocket, in this case at $320 a credit. It’s a huge investment, and as bias incidents and hateful rhetoric about immigrants ramp up, many would-be international students […]
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Saturday, March 25th, 2017
Erin Corbett, - The Raw Story
Stephan: In my view the processes of American democracy themselves, the foundation of the nation's political integrity, are under fascist attack. It's a story that is getting very little coverage in that context, but one I want my readers to know about.
The data firm Cambridge Analytica, which is funded by the Mercer family, claims to have collected the “psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters,” Democracy Now! reported based on New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer’s latest work.
The Mercer family also has stakes in Breitbart, and placed former Breitbart executive and current White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon on the firm’s board. Cambridge Analytics was hired by President Donald Trump’s campaign last year in an effort to reach specific targeted audiences for votes — what some described as an online “voter suppression operation.”
Mayer joined Democracy Now! to discuss the significance of the firm, and specifically what it means for Cambridge Analytica to be working with Bannon.
The Mercer family “basically invested heavily in building an — it’s an offshoot of an existing English company called Strategic Communication Laboratories,” said Mayer.
She explained, “The British company [Strategic Communication] had been involved in psychological warfare operations for militaries and international elections and kind of some pretty interesting and sneaky-seeming things, which raised a lot of eyebrows when its offshoot was […]
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Saturday, March 25th, 2017
Meghan McCarthy, Cofounder & Chief Content Officer - Morning Consult
Stephan: In the midst of everything going on in the American government I think it is very important to stay in touch with what is going on with the people in Trump world who voted this abomination into office. Surprise, surprise... they love him all the more. Can that possibly be true? Well, here's where things stood as of 23 March, the day before the failure of Trumpcare. This is the word from their parallel universe, and I think this is very dangerous. A democracy cannot survive when the citizens live in a fantasy world free of facts or even their own self-interest.
Credit: Morning Consult
President Donald Trump’s ability to withstand scandals that would seemingly bring down other politicians is well-established, and his first two months in office have shown the outrage-a-week rhythm of the campaign will continue.
The scandals, real or imagined, produce hours of coverage and plenty of Twitter traffic. But do they register with the American public? Or is “Teflon Don” truly impervious to the rules the punditry said applied to politicians?
To test this, we asked voters whether scandalous events from Trump’s first two months in office gave them a more or less favorable view of the president. We found that after each of the seven events we tested, from the size of the inaugural crowds to Russia, a plurality of voters had a more negative view of the president.
But the opposite is true when you look just at people who voted for Trump. In five out of seven cases, a plurality of Trump voters say these ‘scandals’ gave them a more favorable view of the president. […]
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Pamela Brown, Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz, Reporters - CNN
Stephan: In my view this election was a farce. Between Comey's letter and the obvious Russian involvement, which just gets more and more blatant, the election should be declared corrupted and reheld. Hard to imagine the impact that would have, but I do not see how we can go on for four years like this. And it is not enough to eliminate Trump he would be replaced by Pence, if Pence was included as he should be, it would leave us with Paul Ryan, who is being revealed as an incompetent and ideologue.
The question everyone is asking whether they publicly admit it or not: In 240 years we have never had a situation like this, and no one knows what to do. What can we do? That is Trump's insurance policy.
This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, according to one source.
The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may have taken place, though officials cautioned that the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing.
In his statement on Monday Comey said the FBI began looking into possible coordination between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives because the bureau had gathered “a credible allegation of wrongdoing or reasonable basis […]
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Ana Kasparian, - The Raw Story
Stephan: There is so much bad stuff going on with the Republican congress and the Trump circus that it is hard to keep it all straight. But here is something that should not get lost. If you are a student, or the parent of a student... surprise.... surprise.
One of the biggest obstacles to a healthy U.S. economy continues to be student loan debt, which an increasing number of people are defaulting on. Millions of people had not made a payment on $137 billion in federal student loans for at least nine months in 2016. That’s a 14 percent increase in defaults from the previous year.
So what was Trump’s response to the the already grotesque $1.2 trillion problem? He threw out what little protection borrowers had against shady debt collectors.
Around 8 million people are currently defaulting on their student loan debt. Just under half of those people took out loans through the discontinued Federal Family Education Loan Program. The program insured and subsidized loans from private lenders.
When students defaulted on FFEL loans, collectors on insanely high fees that made it even more difficult to pay them off. The Obama Administration intervened on the matter when the circuit court of appeals asked for guidance on a lawsuit against debt collection agency USA Funds.
Bryana Bible sued USA Funds after being charged $4,500 in collection costs on a loan she defaulted […]
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