Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 22:27:31 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: Obama admin. appointments--update To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Recently I posted some disturbing news on major candidates for the Obama administration. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ObamaCabinetPicks.txt There is more news of this sort to report now. Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal reports that "Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has emerged as President Barack Obama's top choice for commerce secretary, with an announcement coming as soon as Monday, an Obama administration official and lawmakers said Sunday." Given this phrasing and the source, it would appear that this is more than rumor, though of course no one knows until the event occurs. Nevertheless, if it's true, then DOC would be headed by a hard-core supporter of the H-1B program, as made quite clear in Gregg's video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvoHBqtMR4k Next we have that "McKinsey Global Institute Director Diana Farrell has joined the Obama Administration as deputy director of the National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the President for economic policy," according to a letter distributed by McKinsey. As many of you know, McKinsey is in the vanguard of promoting offshoring. Her views on H-1B are naturally in line with the word "global" in the McKinsey Institute's title. Note for instance, this from 2006, at www.workpermit.com/news/2006_01_23/australia/searching_for_skilled_migrants.htm But Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, said that in fields such as engineering, the U.S. and other developed countries needed to import talent or send work overseas because universities weren't producing enough graduates to replace retiring baby boomers and fill new positions. This of course is pure industry lobbyist phrasing. And here's a howler: Ms. Farrell penned an article in the Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2008, titled, "New Thinking for a New Financial Order." The summary says, "World financial assets are growing faster than the world economy. Confronting that and other modern realities of global finance requires more than regulatory reform: It calls for deeper thinking..." On the plus side, I forgot to mention last time that VP Biden appointed Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute as chief economic adviser. EPI, closely tied to labor, has generally been critical of H-1B and offshoring. Norm