LeMieux Betrays American Workers

Senator George LeMieux actively secured Mexican workers for mass construction projects, neglecting the many capable unemployed Americans, a slowed economy and H2-B guidelines.

Gunster Yoakley, a firm in which LeMieux is chairman, procured foreign workers to build the elaborate St. Regis hotel and condominiums in the Bal Harbour village, via the H2-B program. In accordance to H2-B, it is illegal to hire foreign workers when there are already Americans who are available in the field.

For Gunster Yoakely to take part in the program, they were required to apply to the State Department and the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation (AWI.) This is an Agency that directly reports to the Cabinet under governor Crist.

The AWI, before moving forward, must open a 10 day span to test the job market for potential American employees. This span was initiated on October 1st of 2008. The AWI didn't advertise for these new jobs until the 6th day, in the Miami Herald. On the tenth day at 9:16 am the 10-day bracket was closed, which permitted only a three day window for people to inquire.

The AWI also must contact any relevant local unions. And they did... on day 7. Still after 9:16 am on the 10th day, no more applications were accepted, leaving the union with a mere 2 days to send in applications. Under certified letter, applications from the union arrived to the AWI on the 10th day. On the 10th of October they were received after 9:16 am and therefore they were rejected as "too late."

The State Department approved the AWI's declaration that there weren't American workers for the job. In most cases The State Department puts forth minimal effort when addressing state agencies. The AWI was headed at the time by Monesia Brown who resigned during a scandal where 250,000 social security numbers were posted on the AWI website. Publicly, Moni Brown announced her resignation to focus on family.

Some of the visas that were approved by the State Department were meant for people either working in some type of management or who have special skills that were not found elsewhere. Reportedly, the workers that were brought to the site did not have any unique skills and their tools and techniques were described as outdated.

In January of 2009, foreign workers were hired from CYVSA International, a Mexican sheet metal firm. I would like to think that we didn't have about 2,000 unemployed sheet metal workers in Florida as it is. On the "upside" you could take advantage of these workers in ways Americans wouldn't put up with; it was also reported by CBS4 News they were underpaid and worked overtime without compensation.

Officials of Gunster Yoakely, George LeMieux and a spokeswoman for Governor Crist refused to comment or did not respond when questioned about their involvement in pressing for the approval of these visas. Gunster Yoakely's officials did not respond to questions highlighting other clients it might have represented on visa issues, nor the amount of visas they gained for foreign workers to be employed in the U.S.

LeMieux chaired a firm that may have illegally secured foreign sheet metal workers during an economic crisis, where unemployment in Florida is the highest it has been since the seventies. The situation should be investigated, that way we can prevent this type of corruption from harming people who could have been rescued from unemployment.

Video:

Part1
(video removed...but the second part is still here!) --->

Part2

Tom Delay: He Danced Down K Street, Now He's Dancing For You

Did I just see a Republican dance with a wise Latina woman?
(The K Street Project)

FOX: Obama Called It Right

When President Obama appeared on five sunday talk shows, without an appearance with the Fox News Channel, a few critics decided that it was a display of weakness or that Obama was avoiding Americans. One was Fox Sunday host Chris Wallace, who stated on his show:

"Every president is thin-skinned but I wonder whether this administration, this White House has a particular problem with criticism. … Not talking about just us but just the attitude of this White House. Whatever happened to reaching out to all Americans?"

ThinkProgress reminds us that his own network made the decision not to broadcast Obama's Speech to Congress on Health Care last week. In light of that many are led to think it is the Fox Network that doesn't hold the interest of reaching out to all Americans.

Within the video Obama is criticized for his many appearances, citing how many interviews he has been doing and that they exceeded interviews compared to Clinton and Bush. Yet, in the same video he is condemned for not making an appearance on the Sunday show. Maybe Obama would have considered an interview with Chris Wallace if his show didn't have dead last ratings of all other Sunday News Shows.

These are the released comments from the white house in regards to the decision:

We figured Fox would rather show "So You Think You Can Dance"
than broadcast an honest discussion about health insurance reform.

Fox is an ideological outlet where the president has been interviewed before and will likely be interviewed again;
not that their whining particularly strengthens their case for participation any time soon.

Although Wallace describes Obama's decline to appear as petty and childish, he does not account the plethora of insignificant accusations made by the network's own hosts and anchors. The White house has ample reason behind their comment. Jon Scott, Anchor on Fox, spins into his interviews that Obama is to blame for the Bush-induced recession, explaining:

"I mean, you know, it’s been pretty obvious since about September that he was going to win this presidency. It’s not like he hasn’t had some amount of time to gear up and get ready for the job he’s got."

The President has also been labeled as a racist and compared to Hitler on the network from people like Hannity and Beck. With Beck's dipping loss of sponsors, that wasn't the only reaction to his consequential remarks and the significance of the channel's entirety.

Healthcare Run-Around

• Spouse Abuse and Caesarean Pregnancies are pre-existing conditions.
  



• Elliot Engel Wasn’t Always Muttering “Weasel Words” on the Public Plan



• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:House HCR Bill Will Include Public Option
  



• Obama's Healthcare Reform Rally



• O'Reilly Endorses Public Option (what he last month called "socialism.")...Really?
  

Recognizing Florida Netroots: An Interview with Kenneth Quinnell

I procured (with great difficulty, no doubt) Kenneth Quinnell to tell us what the Florida Democratic Party Netroots Awards was all about. Quinnell is the creator of the Netroots awards in the state of Florida and is also the recording secretary for the Florida Democratic Party Netroots Coalition.

LD: What is the Netroots Awards and who can be nominated?

Quinnell: The Netroots awards are our recognition of the best and the brightest in the online political world on the left in Florida. So it's for, you know, Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatever... But the idea is there are a lot of people out there doing a lot of hard work and doing a lot of important stuff and this is a way to recognize and reward people for that.

LD: How many nominations are there this year?

Quinnell: There are about 150 nominations, of about a 100 of those are unique different people or blogs. Some people are nominated for more than one.

LD: This is the 3rd annual Netroots awards for Florida. What are some changes you have noticed over the years?

Quinnell: Well... The first changes are the technical ones, each year we discover that there are new things that we should be awarding, like we created a new category for Twitter this year because so many people are using Twitter and it's actually been useful or a couple of news stories that were broken first on Twitter by Florida Bloggers. So we'd added a new category for that and for use of social media, etc.

Second is it keeps growing. Each year there's more and more participants. The biggest change though is that there is such an ebb-and-flow in the blogosphere. So there is a recent statistic I saw, something like ninety-five percent of blogs that exist haven't been updated in 2009, so there are always lots of people that start blogging and are really into it and then drop off by the way-side. We get people to come out that do some really great work and then move on to something else. And then there are the people that have been there forever who keep doing it. There's always new people involved and so... Finding them and bringing them in so that everybody gets to read them, that type of thing, is difficult but fun.

LD: How many participants were involved last year?

Quinnell: In the final voting about 230.

LD: How many votes have been submitted since the opening at midnight, last night?

Quinnell: It is 110.

LD: Do you think that sudden input predicts more feedback then last year?

Quinnell: Definitely. I think you are going to see a huge explosion over previous years and participation, particularly because we've got a better plan this year to market it and get the word out to more people, so... Obviously we're gonna pass the 230 people from last year, probably within the next couple of days. But we're also going to have many of the nominees send it out to their supporters so that more and more people will know about it. It's a way both to market the organization, the awards, and the different blogs and people that have been nominated. I think we're going to see much, much higher participation this year.

LD: Who can vote for the Netroots awards?

Quinnell: It's pretty much open to anyone. The idea is that it's Florida Democrats and progressives but we're not screening to keep out anyone else.

LD: To anyone who is interested in voting, how would they go about that?

Quinnell: They would just go to the website, which has a very complicated URL, so uhm.. I can go to the tinyurl and tell you that one: tinyurl.com/po7vck

LD: When is the voting deadline?

Quinnell: September 29th. There is a possibility of run-off if the races after the initial period are still really close together, we will do a re-vote, so that you know, because many of the categories have six, seven, eight, nine, ten people in it. If some of them are really close, within say five or six votes, then we'll narrow it down to the top three or four and then do a re-vote so that we're really picking out which one is the one that people like the most, and that would be the week after that. They will be announced October 7th or 8th, at the Democratic convention, I don't know the date exactly off the top of my head.

LD: What inspired you to start the Netroots Awards?

Quinnell: Oddly enough, this is something I have done in every organization I have been involved with over the years. I've always been a big person on giving people positive feedback. There's always people that don't like it but, more people than not, do. It's something that...you know, you sit there, and do all this research and spend all this time writing this really great blog post and you post it and then ...nothing. There's no comments and no feedback and nobody links to it.

Well, If you do enough of that type of good stuff over time, you can get nominated for one of the awards and get feedback saying that your overall body of work is good even if individual posts don't get as much recognition as they should. I think it's a very good way to motivate people to keep posting, to keep using Twitter, to keep using Facebook, and all this stuff because these things do have an impact on what happens. These people that are out there doing all this work are getting recognized and rewarded so they will keep doing that work and they will keep changing the world.

LD: And how will the winning nominees be recognized?

Quinnell: The most physical way is that there will be a certificate, we always do this little shmancy-fancy certificate suitable for framing. The awards will be announced at the Democratic convention in October and this year we're trying to get the winners announced during a big session. But the Netroots have their own events that go on for an entire day, training and stuff like that. During that process we will announce who the winners are, give them their certificates if they're present, announce it on the blogs.

The real reward of course is you've been recognized by your peers and people that read what you're doing, so its fans and peers and professionals in the field that generally are the ones that participate, so you're getting recognition from them. For many blogs, once you're just nominated, more people get to find out about it so it helps drive more readers and traffic to their blogs.

Comic 1: Clueless Crist

The Florida Progressive Coalition
Tally Democrat

Leaflet on Healthcare

A savvy friend of mine asked me these questions for a student article. Although it is very concentrated, I think it is fitting to share with you:

1 What are your opinions on the Obama administration wanting to create a system where every citizen of U.S. has guaranteed health care?

Reforming healthcare is long overdue but there shouldn’t be compromise for something mediocre to appease Republicans in the senate. Right now Obama has an ambiguous stance as to whether or not he will stand strong behind a public option and veto anything “lukewarm." To implement, say a CO-OP system, would be waste of a bill when Republicans are inevitably going to vote against it, regardless.

2 In your opinion, do you think the government is trying to control the health insurance of citizens?

The government will regulate insurance, not control it. The people who are spoon feeding that government has an ambition to limit care unnecessarily want to extract words from their meaning and attach negative connotations to them. Words like “socialism." Those who are truly against socialist ideology should be protesting their fire department, not the new bill.

3 Do you think this will have a positive or negative effect on citizens in the future?

Put it into perspective on how Medicare was attacked at first. The opposition swore up and down that these programs like Medicare or Social Security were going to fail. My Dad just had quadruple bypass heart surgery. After the surgery he had an in-house nurse come check on him twice a week. His Medicare covered the entirety of his costs.

4 What do you think that Obama's true motives are behind this is?

To ask how I feel about Obama’s “true” motives is to suggest that I suspect some sort of underlying conspiracy. That’s the kind of paranoia that’s fueling the secessionists, the tea parties and birthers in this country.

5 In your opinion, do you like the way health insurance is provided now?

Some representatives are trying to use loopholes to insist our system is fine. For instance, Florida Senator Mel Martinez says that the U.S. has the best access to care in his response letter on the issue. What he means is we have the best emergency care. Many others who are using this as a talking point oppose preventative healthcare. Prevention is the key to hindering complications that would lead to last minute procedures in the emergency room.

6 Has health insurance been an inconvenience to you, or your family before?

I recently went to a free clinic for an infection because, as a student and part time employee, I do not have coverage. I called them and the phone rang for twenty minutes. Their email, which I attempted after hanging up, does not really exist despite being posted on their site. I wrote the address down and drove to their building to find a sign that said they had been moved to another location. When I got there, one hour after they opened, in the waiting room were already over a dozen people. Not exactly a nominal experience. Imagine if I didn’t have a car or a phone.

7 The AARP campaign busted the "myths" of guaranteed health care, such as medicare being taken away, rationed care, government takeover, government making life or death decisions, having an economic crisis, etc... What are your views on these issues? Do you think these are just myths, or do you think it can and will be a problem?

Myths like the death panels, for example, can't be found in the written bill. Private insurance companies profit in bonuses from their investors by denying care. Those who recall Linda Peeno’s confession know that the real death panels exist within the private insurance companies.

Call It What You Please.