Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

SERCO, Unknown but Really Known….

Posted on by

Serco U.S. political donations found here. This is the exact type of company where spies…spy.

Further reading, Serco’s 2014 financial results and strategy review.

By Zerohedge: Serco. Chances are you’ve never heard of the company. If you have heard of the company, chances are you misunderstand the shear enormity of the global company and their contracts.

From transport to air traffic control, getting your license in Canada, to running all 7 immigration detention centers in Australia, private prisons in the UK, military base presence, running nuclear arsenals, and running all state schools in Bradford, Serco, somewhere, has played a part in moving, educating, or detaining people.

serco

New contracts awarded to Serco include a Saudi Railway Company, further air traffic control in the US and also IT support services for various European agencies. You can read more on their future projects below.

 

Serco HY15 Results SEA 11 August 2015

 

A Very Brief History

Serco’s history began in 1929 as a UK subsidiary, RCA Services Limited to support the cinema industry.

In the 1960s the company made a leap into military contracts to maintain the UK Air Force base Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. From there, the company continues to grow.

Now trading as Serco Group, 2015 trading as of August 11 2015, maintained a revenue of £3.5 billion, and an underlying trading profit of £90 million. The data was presented at JPMorgan in London.

In 2013 Serco was considered a potential risk, and became a representation of the dangers of outsourcing. The U.K. government developed contingency plans in case Serco went bankrupt. When the concerns came to light, Serco faced bans (along with G4S, another outsourcing contractor) from further bidding on new U.K. government work for six months. It wasn’t until Rupert Soames OBE – Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson – took on the job as Serco’s Chief Executive in 2014, that Serco turned a new corner of profit growth.

Serco Today

Serco today is one of the biggest global companies to exist. They have contracts with:

Alliant – the vehicle for IT services across the Federal IT market;

 

National Security Personnel System (NSPS) – For “(NSPS) training and facilitating services throughout the Department of Defense (DoD) and agencies that needs NSPS training and implementation services;”

 

Seaport – The NAVSEA SEAPORT Multiple Award contract focuses on “engineering, technical, and programmatic support services for the Warfare Centers.” This is inclusive of Homeland Security and Force Protection, Strategic Weapons Systems, and multiple warfare systems.

 

CIP-SP3 Services and Solutions (Cost $20 Billion, expiration date 2022) – biomedical-related IT services with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with the main objective focused on Biomedical Research and Health Sciences extending to information systems throughout the federal government. Also implementation in several key areas of Biomedical Sciences including legislation and critical infrastructure protection.

The few contracts listed above are among the vast array of transport, detention center and private prison contracts.

Serco, the biggest company you’ve never heard of…..

 

Who’s Calling the Shots in State Politics?

Posted on by

Exactly what else do voters need to be aware of? Who is winning the liberal-progressive agendas at the state level? Do you pay attention to the language on ballot initiatives? Do you know the background and the money and players behind them?

Read on….

National liberal groups to push ‘record’ number of 2016 ballot measures

Efforts to circumvent legislative logjam counter grassroots origins

PublicIntegrity: Paul Spencer, a teacher and part-time pecan farmer in Arkansas, drafted a ballot measure for 2016 to reform the state’s campaign finance laws so his fellow voters could know who paid for election ads on TV.

But he and fellow activists there knew they couldn’t do it alone. They sought the help of national election-reform groups because in Arkansas, as in many other states, initiatives can cost millions of dollars to pass.

Liberal groups working at the national level are using state ballot initiatives as their weapon of choice for 2016, but given the costs, they’re carefully planning exactly where to push these measures. And Spencer’s Arkansas proposal didn’t make the cut for 2016.

That top-down approach seems ironic. The initiative process was put in place at the beginning of the 20th century as a way for local citizens such as Spencer to band together to pass laws. And voters on the ground may not be aware that national groups are helping fuel the ballot fights in their backyards.

Still, national liberal leaders see state ballot measures as their best option for winning on some issues. Dismayed at their prospects in Congress and in Republican-dominated state legislatures, national liberal groups plan to use ballot initiatives to push raising the minimum wage in Maine, legalizing marijuana in Massachusetts, closing gun sale loopholes in Nevada, guarding endangered species in Oregon — and other campaigns in at least eight additional states.

National conservative groups, meanwhile, seem poised to play defense, setting up a battle of outsiders on state playing fields. In March, Republican-linked politicos launched the Center for Conservative Initiatives in Washington, D.C., to counter the liberal ballot measures they anticipate will arrive in record numbers nationwide in 2016.

“Liberal groups have been forced to spend heavily on ballot initiatives in an effort to circumvent elected representatives because in states around the country the public has overwhelmingly rejected their out-of-touch candidates and messages,” said the Center’s leader, Matt Walter, in an email.

The push from outsiders to pass pet policies via the ballot has occurred before, on everything from land conservation in North Dakota to how to cage chickens in California, sometimes leading to big-money fights between corporations, advocacy groups and others.

“There’s this perception out there that the initiative process is all about the little guy,” said Jennie Bowser, a consultant who for many years studied ballot measures for the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. “But the truth of the matter is that it’s a big business. It’s really well organized, and it’s really well funded. And it is very, very rarely a group of local citizens who get together and try to make a difference.”

Passing popular ideas

In 2014, when a Republican wave gave conservatives more U.S. Senate seats and governors’ mansions, left-leaning activists still managed to notch victories for the minimum wage, gun control and marijuana legalization through ballot measures in Nebraska, South Dakota, Illinois, Arkansas, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia.

In 2015, they followed with wins for campaign-finance reform in Seattle and Maine.

Those successes, as well as the chance to draw more left-leaning voters to the polls, are encouraging liberal activists to push hard on the 2016 ballot.

 

Qaddafi did NOT have to Go, But….

Posted on by

He did and there was a larger agenda underway between the UK and the USA. He was behaving, he was trying to keep al Qaida out and what is more he was fighting hard against the Muslim Brotherhood knowing it was festering and growing in power to over-take his own rule.

But but but…..Obama and Hillary are loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood. Well yes they are and Tony Blair was too until late last year and he finally got the memo and then issued a report on the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile several countries in the Middle East have formally declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terror organization, when during the early 2000’s in the United States with the Holyland Foundation trial, the Muslim Brotherhood was proven to be a terror organization.

Meanwhile, Qaddafi was aiding the U.S. intelligence community and was indeed behaving. Obama, Hillary and Blair all had different missions for Libya post Qaddafi. That did not work out well, and all the predictions of Qaddafi have in fact come to pass.

Fail….

Gaddafi warned Blair his ousting would ‘open door’ to jihadis

Transcripts of 2011 calls reveal Libyan dictator predicted extremists would use his departure to start war in Mediterranean

Guardian: Muammar Gaddafi warned Tony Blair in two fraught phone conversations in 2011 that his removal from the Libyan leadership would open a space for al-Qaida to seize control of the country and even launch an invasion of Europe.

The transcripts of the conversations have been published with Blair’s agreement by the UK foreign affairs select committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the western air campaign that led to the ousting and killing of Gaddafi in October 2011.

In the two calls the former British prime minister pleaded with Gaddafi to stand aside or end the violence. The transcripts reveal the gulf in understanding between Gaddafi and the west over what was occurring in his country and the nature of the threat he was facing.

In the first call, at 11.15am on 25 February 2011, Gaddafi gave a warning in part borne out by future events: “They [jihadis] want to control the Mediterranean and then they will attack Europe.”

In the second call, at 3.25pm the same day, the Libyan leader said: “We are not fighting them, they are attacking us. I want to tell you the truth. It is not a difficult situation at all. The story is simply this: an organisation has laid down sleeping cells in north Africa. Called the al-Qaida organisation in north Africa … The sleeping cells in Libya are similar to dormant cells in America before 9/11.”

Gaddafi added: “I will have to arm the people and get ready for a fight. Libyan people will die, damage will be on the Med, Europe and the whole world. These armed groups are using the situation [in Libya] as a justification – and we shall fight them.”

Three weeks after the calls, a Nato-led coalition that included Britain began bombing raids that led to the overthrow of Gaddafi. He was finally deposed in August and murdered by opponents of his regime in October.

At one point in the conversations Gaddafi urged Blair to go to Libya to see the lack of violence in Tripoli, and held the telephone to a TV screen so Blair could hear people voicing their support for Gaddafi in the streets.

Blair said he had decided to act as an intermediary due to the contact he had with Gaddafi when he was prime minister. Both Washington and London knew of his phone calls to Gaddafi, he said.

During the calls Blair suggested he could engineer a peaceful exit for Gaddafi if he agreed to leave. Referring to him as the leader, Blair also insisted there was no attempt to colonise Libya. Gaddafi said he had to defy colonisation, insisting: “There is nothing here. No fight, no bloodshed. Come see yourself.”

Blair urged Gaddafi to give him a phone number so he could contact him urgently, and beseeched him to “do something that allows the process to start, end the bloodshed, start a new constitution”.

He told Gaddafi that if he made the right statements, ended violence, and lowered the political temperature, it might be possible to get the US and the EU to hold back from interfering.

“If you have a safe place to go, you should go there because this will not end peacefully and there has to be a process of change; that process of change can be managed and we have to find a way of managing it,” Blair said. “The US and the EU are in a tough position right now and I need to take something back to them which ensures this ends peacefully. If people saw the leader stand aside people would be content with that. If this goes on for another day or two days, we will go past that point. I am saying this because I believe it deeply. If we cannot find a way out very quickly, we will be past the point of no return. If this does not happen very fast the people of Libya will make this very destructive.”

Blair ended the call by saying: “ I would like to offer a way out that is peaceful … keep the lines open.”

Commenting on the exchanges on Thursday, the foreign select committee chair, Crispin Blunt, said: “The transcripts supplied by Mr Blair provide a new insight into the private views of Colonel Gaddafi as his dictatorship began to crumble around him. The failure to follow Mr Blair’s calls to ‘keep the lines open’ and for these early conversations to initiate any peaceful compromise continue to reverberate.

“The committee will want to consider whether Gaddafi’s prophetic warning of the rise of extremist militant groups following the collapse of the regime was wrongly ignored because of Gaddafi’s otherwise delusional take on international affairs. The evidence that the committee has taken so far in this inquiry suggests that western policymakers were rather less perceptive than Gaddafi about the risks of intervention for both the Libyan people and the western interests.”

In one of the deadliest attacks since the fall of Gaddafi, dozens of people were killed on Thursday in an apparent suicide bombing at a police training centre in the Libyan town of Zliten.

Saudis and the DC Powerbrokers, Millions $$

Posted on by

Ah, you have a call holding on line 5, insider information incoming for the next committee meeting or the next paragraph of legislation to be tucked into that bill.

Oh interesting mail here, so buy this stock at this strike price, hold it for 9 days and bail.

Hey Nancy, are you going to the Piper party in Georgetown, great see you there lots to discuss over martinis.

Harry, new nugget coming from K Street, make sure you say this on the Senate floor.

Podesta Group = John and Tony Podesta (John Podesta is Hillary’s campaign architect)

DLA Piper = Law Firm found in 30 countries and was a large contributor the re-election of Barack Obama and is the 5th largest donor to Hillary’s current presidential campaign

Targeted Victory = A digital strategy firm whose founder Zac Moffatt was the director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign

Qorvis/MSL Group = A DC based Public Relations/Crisis Management organization that was hired by the FDA, Palestinian American Chamber of Commerce and even Yemen

Pillsbury Winthrop = Law firm that concentrates on mergers and acquisition for corporations and Middle East interests including Abu Dhabi and did sizeable work for arguing habeas corpus rights for Gitmo detainees

Hogan Lovells = Law firm with global offices with concentration in media, litigation and First Amendment law. Oldest law firm in DC, origins in the UK with early cases on treasury issues

Now you may begin to understand connections, donors, cocktail parties and who else is taking up the time daily of those in Congress. Now comes Saudi Arabia:

Washington’s Multi-Million-Dollar Saudi PR Machine

Public image isn’t something one can always control, but Saudi Arabia is spending millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists and PR firms to improve the Kingdom’s reputation in the West. The execution of Shiite leader Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by an attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran and the Kingdom’s severing of diplomatic relations with Iran, would seem to offer few upsides for the Saudi government. Riyadh’s behavior comes across as a desperate Hail-Mary pass to isolate Iran at the expense of regional efforts to negotiate a de-escalation of the Syrian civil war and defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Jim Lobe pointed out that Washington’s neoconservatives have jumped to Riyadh’s defense, apparently subscribing to the philosophy that “the enemy of my Iranian enemy is my friend.” But, as The New York Times editorial board wrote on Monday, “The execution of the popular Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and 46 other prisoners on Saturday was about the worst way Saudi Arabia could have started what promises to be a grim and tumultuous year in the kingdom and across the Middle East.”

The Times may be stating the obvious, but Saudi Arabia pays millions of dollars per year to American public relations firms to paint the Kingdom in the most positive light. These firms have their work cut out for them. Indeed, that PR machine is doing all it can to spin the Saudis’ execution of a political dissident and blatant effort to fan sectarian tensions as somehow the fault of anyone but Saudi Arabia.

Defending the Kingdom

Fahad Nazer, a non-resident fellow at the Saudi- and UAE-funded Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, was quoted in Politico defending the executions, saying, “The primary message appears to be aimed at Saudi Arabia’s own militants, regardless of their sect.” And the Times published a quote from Saudi commentator Salman al-Ansari, who “accused Sheikh Nimr, who was in his mid-50s, of organizing a ‘terrorist network’ in Shiite areas in eastern Saudi Arabia and compared him to a Qaeda ideologue who sanctioned the killing of security forces.” The Podesta Group, a public relations firm hired by the Saudi government, provided Ansari.

So, how much money is in it for the PR professionals who are burning the midnight oil to put a positive spin on Saudi Arabia’s decision to start the year with a mass execution of 47 prisoners? Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings submitted by Saudi government contractors in Washington reveal an expensive PR operation.

Firms listed as “active foreign principals for Saudi Arabia” on the FARA website include: DLA Piper, Targeted Victory, Qorvis/MSLGroup, Pillsbury Winthrop, Hogan Lovells, and the Podesta Group. Qorvis/MSLGroup appears to the biggest recipient of Saudi money. Their FARA filings reveal what appears to be a $240,000 per month retainer with the Kingdom for services described as:

Drafted and/or distributed news releases, weekly newsletters, fact sheets and/or speeches to promote Saudi Arabia, its commitment towards counterterrorism, peace in the Middle East, and other issues pertinent to the Kingdom.

Qorvis/MSLGroup also reports it “created a Twitter account for a senior Saudi official,” and “managed a website on Operation Renewal of Hope,” Saudi Arabia’s 10-month-old military intervention in Yemen. Moreover, it farms out $55,000 per month of work from the Saudi account to Targeted Victory, LLC, a digital consulting firm.

The Podesta Group received $200,000 from the “The Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court” for approximately one month of “public relations services” from August to September. The Podesta Group, cited in the Times as working for the Saudi government, is listed as an “active” foreign agent for Saudi Arabia on the FARA website, suggesting that the contract is ongoing.

For services that include advising the Saudi government on “media reports and related public affairs developments” and undertaking “specific advocacy assignments with regard to litigation, legislative, regulatory, public policy or public affairs matters, and/or in other activities,” Hogan Lovells receives $60,000 per month in fees.

DLA Piper receives a fee of $50,000 per month for services including “[contacting] Members of Congress, congressional staff and Executive Branch officials in connection with strengthening the ability of the United States and Saudi Arabia to advance mutual national security interests.”

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP collects a fee of $15,000 per month for “legal and non-legal services to Saudi Arabia in conjunction with information gather on U.S. Middle East policy.”

Assuming that these contracts are ongoing, as the FARA site indicates, and the Targeted Victory LLC fees were already included in the Qorvis/MSLGroup fees, Saudi Arabia is spending $565,000 per month for its lobbying operations in Washington, not including expenses. That’s $6.78 million per year in fees for PR, lobbying, and legal representation in the U.S. capitol.

Who Else Benefits?

Saudi Arabia is certainly a prize catch for K Street firms looking for hefty monthly retainers from foreign clients. But the U.S. military-industrial complex rakes in the biggest profits from the country currently fanning the flames of sectarian conflict in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia is looking to complete a $1.29 billion purchase of U.S. weapons, in part to replenish bombs and missiles used in Yemen. Reuters reports that a $11.25 billion purchase of Lockheed Martin warships is also expected to move forward, according to “military and industry sources.” The Congressional Research Service reports that Saudi Arabia topped the list of arms transfer recipients among developing nations from 2007 to 2014 with $86 billion in agreements, giving US defense contractors ample incentive to lend their own lobbying and PR firepower to the Kingdom’s efforts to manage public opinion.

“The tangled and volatile realities of the Middle East do not give the United States or the European Union the luxury of choosing or rejecting allies on moral criteria,” the Times editorial concluded, but that “cannot mean condoning actions that blatantly fan sectarian hatreds, undermine efforts at stabilizing the region and crudely violate human rights.”

Saudi Arabia’s extensive contracts with Washington’s biggest PR firms—and the additional PR help it gets from U.S. defense contractors—are designed to make those actions somehow palatable inside the Beltway. But in the end they will only make the White House’s efforts to navigate the Sunni-Shia divide all the more difficult.

 

 

 

 

Universities Hide 100,000 Foreign White-Collar H-1B Employees

Posted on by

So, exactly which agency has sent a memo to selected universities across the country to hide these numbers? Who issued this edict? Heh….only one guess.

In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job. Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates. Example: Employers are posting jobs that don’t really exist, seeking candidates they don’t want, and paying for bogus non-ads to show there’s an IT labor shortage in America. Except of course there isn’t an IT labor shortage.

Universities Hide Workforce of 100,000 Extra Foreign White-Collar H-1B Employees

Industry executives and university advocates have successfully duped nearly every reporter, editor and anchor nationwide about the scale and purpose of the H-1B professional outsourcing program.

Breitbart: The journalists–and Americans—have been kept in the dark while universities and many allied name-brand companies have quietly imported an extra workforce of at least 100,000 lower-wage foreign professionals in place of higher-wage American graduates, above the supposed annual cap of 85,000 new H-1Bs.

Less than one-sixth of these extra 100,000 outsourced hires are the so-called “high-tech” computer experts that dominate media coverage of the contentious H-1B private-sector outsourcing debate.

Instead, the universities’ off-the-books H-1B hires include 21,754 professors, lecturers and instructors, 20,566 doctors, clinicians and therapists, 25,175 researchers, post-docs and biologists, plus 30,000 financial planners, p.r. experts, writers, editors, sports coaches, designers, accountants, economists, statisticians, lawyers, architects, computer experts and much else. The universities have zero legal obligation to recruit Americans for these jobs.

These white-collar guest-workers are not immigrants — they are foreign professionals hired at low wages for six years to take outsourced, white-collar jobs in the United States. Many hope to stay in the United States, but most guest-workers return home after six years.

These white-collar guest-workers are the fastest-growing portion of the nation’s unrecognized workforce of roughly 1.25 million foreign college-grade temporary-workers, and they’s replacing experienced American professionals — plus their expensively educated children, and the upwardly striving children of blue-collar parents — in the declining number of jobs that can provide a rewarding and secure livelihood while the nation’s economy is rapidly outsourced, centralized and automated.

The American professionals who are displaced from these prestigious university jobs don’t just go into the woods and die. They flood down into other sectors, such as advocacy and journalism, or step down to lower-tier colleges and companies, where the additional labor-supply drives down white-collar wages paid by other employers.

So how does this off-the-books army of foreign professionals get to take jobs in the United States?

The Fake H-1B Cap

The media almost universally reports that the federal government has set a 65,000 or 85,000 annual cap on the annual number of incoming H-1B white-collar professionals.

Here’s the secret — the H-1B visas given to university hires don’t count against the 85,000 annual cap, according to a 2006 memo approved by George W. Bush’s administration.

Basically, universities are free to hire as many H-1Bs as they like, anytime in the year, for any job that requires a college degree.

The university exemption is so broad that for-profit companies can legally create affiliates with universities so they can exploit the universities’ exemption to hire cheap H-1B professionals. From 2011 to 2014, for example, Dow Chemical, Amgen, Samsung and Monsanto used the university exemption to hire 360 extra H-1B professionals outside the 85,000 annual cap.

That’s not an abuse of the law. It is the purpose of the 2006 memo, and it is entirely legal — providing the foreign professional allocates at least 55 percent of his or her time to work with a research center that is affiliated with a university. Even if an H-1B working at a university’s medical center is hired away by a company that works with the medical center, he’s still exempt from the annual cap.

Each foreign professional with a H-1B visa can stay for three years, and then get another three-year H-1B visa.

All told, the universities and their corporate allies brought in 18,109 “cap exempt” new H-1Bs from January to December 2015. They brought in 17,739 new H-1Bs in 2014, 16,750 in 2013, 14,216 in 2012, 14,484 in 2011, and 13,842 in 2010, according to a website that tracks the visas, MyVisaJobs.com. That’s an accumulated extra resident population of up to 95,140 foreign professionals working in universities in 2015.

Here’s a partial list of H-1B approvals, sorted by university for 2013 and 2014.

The MyVisaJobs.com website shows that the University of Michigan got 165 new H-1B hires in 2014. Harvard brought in 162, Yale hired 132, and so forth. Over the five years up to 2015, Johns Hopkins University accumulated a battalion of roughly 885 new H-1B professionals. That’s 885 prestigious and upwardly mobile jobs that didn’t go to debt-burdened American college-grads.