Cry Havoc and Let Loose Elon and Vivek
America just didn't realize until now that it's all our fault. Elon and Vivek will explain it to you.
“Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
If you've wondered why top Democrats have not weighed in on the latest internecine fight among the MAGA folks, you have only to consider the above quote from Napoleon.
Perhaps Woodrow Wilson said it more bluntly.
"Never … murder a man who is committing suicide."
I mentioned last week that the basic contrariness of many on the right will ultimately prove to be a godsend for Democrats who are currently trying to reattach their asses that were handed to them in November.
There is a scuffle on the right over immigrants taking American jobs, but not the ones we usually talk about. The standard argument is over illegal migrants taking jobs from Americans at the lower end of the skills ladder. If you are wondering why, you have only to look at the salaries paid to a migrant farm worker in my state of Texas. It is on average, $17 an hour.
Ironically, that is also the average hourly wage for folks who bag your groceries at Walmart. So, long, hot hours of stoop labor or working a boring job in an air-conditioned store. What would you choose? And would any young person in America opt for the tougher job, given the same wage? Only a dumb one. You'd have to pay an American teenager more than that to endure those conditions.
That is why the orchards in the Rio Grande Valley are not full of kids named Chad and Amber.
But one tech billionaire says it's Chad and Amber's fault they aren't sacking groceries but working in high tech.
Vivek Ramaswamy is one of the two, monied fat-cats who have now been practically beatified on the right and are "tasked" with finding out how to cut spending in the country to tame the budget deficit. More on that in a minute.
Ramaswamy is indeed a go-getter and has made a fortune in the biotech industry. But he isn't a scientist, despite his claims to have developed medicines that save lives. He has a BS in biology and a law degree. He made much of his fortune running a company he called Roivant. The "Roi" stands for "Return On Investment." It was incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda with some hedge fund money.
“This will be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry,” he boasted in a cover story in Forbes.
His company, through a subsidiary called Axovant, bought the rights to a supposed Alzheimer's drug from GlaxoSmithKline. They gave it away for $5 million since it had already failed 4 clinical trials. He then hyped the drug to investors before the promised successful next clinical trial and took the company public for $3 billion in increased value. As the New York Times reported...
In late 2015, Mr. Ramaswamy sold off a portion of his Roivant shares to an institutional investor, Viking Global Investors, that wanted in. The sale was a major payday: On his 2015 tax return, Mr. Ramaswamy claimed more than $37 million in capital gains.
In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said he cashed out only to make room for Viking, not to hedge his bets ahead of the Alzheimers drug's clinical trial.
Of course, it failed yet again but Ramaswamy came away much richer. The stock price plunged, losing 75 percent of its value in a single day. The stock slid further in the months that followed and never recovered before the company was dissolved this year.
He also was an admirer of the so-called "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli, most famous for purchasing the rights to an anti-malarial and aids drug called Daraprim. The price of a dose of the drug in the U.S. market increased by a factor of 56 (from US$13.50 to US$750 per pill) overnight. He was later sent to prison for securities fraud.
Vivek's take? According to Politico...
Ramaswamy wrote in “Woke Inc.” that when he first met Shkreli, he found him “brilliant” and that he was “a little envious.” Ramaswamy also criticized prosecutors who went after him, saying that the case was “murky.”
“What was Martin Shkreli really guilty of?” Ramaswamy wrote. “Why did the DOJ go after him so hard, when it lets others quietly get away with much worse? … [W]hom did Shkreli hurt? The people he was convicted for defrauding all ended up richer. The people who used Daraprim didn’t pay more for it; the cost was split up across the whole health insurance system.”
So what does this have to do with now and Vivek's strange partnership with the erratically peculiar Elon Musk?
He looks like his little league team just won and now they get snow cones.
Firstly, they are both credited as geniuses, but in actuality, neither has invented anything. They are talented businessmen who know a good deal then they see it. That is a talent, no doubt, but not what anyone would label "genius." Unlike their new mentor, they know when to buy and when to sell, although none of them can dance.
Not so much a dance as a printing press imitation.
And now, they are selling American mediocrity, and some corners of the MAGAverse aren't having any. Let me explain.
The H-1B visa is part of the American immigration system that is reserved for highly skilled individuals. The tech industry makes extravagant use of them to import engineers and researchers from other countries to fill their ranks. And when some question why these jobs are not legitimately filled by young American grads, they make the argument that American kids just don't have what it takes. Vivek was very specific about why American culture is to blame. From Axios...
In an X post, he argues that there isn’t “an innate American IQ deficit,” but referencing the mass pop culture of his 1990s youth, argued that “A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World’... or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters’ ... will not produce the best engineers.”
He added that he knew “*multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity … and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates.”
Yeah, 90's sitcoms are apparently to blame.
And Elmo decided to weigh in...
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk said in a Christmas Day post on X.
He even went further, in his usual elegant mien...
"The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.
"Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend."
Musk endorsed a post from one of his own employees, calling American workers too “retarded” to perform high-skilled tech jobs for which foreign workers were being hired.
Yes, he said retarded.
Well, OK then. Some, like the (apparently) shower-phobic Steve Bannon weighed in on the other side.
“This thing’s a scam by the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens, give them to what become indentured servants from foreign countries, and then pay ‘em less. Simple. To let them in through the golden door.”
He even got personal (surprise, surprise) when Musk banned critics on his X platform...
“The nerds don’t take criticism. They’re kind of, you know, they’re a little bit all on the spectrum, right? They don’t know– they’re not deep in social skills. Someone please notify 'Child Protective Services'— need to do a 'wellness check' on this toddler."
Musk has Aspergers, in case you were wondering. But despite his usual nonsense, I am loathe to admit that Bannon has an interesting point. Just like the farmer who pays Walmart bagger wages to get cheap immigrant labor, the average H-1B visa holder in big tech makes less than would otherwise be paid.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. While H-1B program rules allow this, the DOL has the authority to change it—but hasn’t.
So, the whole "America First" stuff applies to thee but not me. As for Vivek saying we just don't produce enough young college grads, Investopedia reports that fewer employers are planning to hire recent graduates, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
"Recent college grads are having a hard time finding a job than a couple of years ago," Nick Bunker of Indeed wrote. "That cool-off is due primarily to a large pullback in hiring for many sectors that traditionally hire recent grads. Tech, consulting, and marketing job postings are all down dramatically from two years ago."
The President-elect has weighed in, predictably, on the side of his big donors in tech. Despite railing against the H-1B visas in his first term, Trump now says...
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
Since Trump is primarily in the hospitality business, his employees no doubt have mostly EB-3 visas. The EB-3 visa is an employment-based visa that allows U.S. employers to sponsor non-U.S. citizens for unskilled jobs.
So, these are the guys who are ostensibly going to decide what our national budget looks like.
It's going to be a bumpy 4 years.