Displaying items by tag: Donald Trump

Alex Jones continues to receive about as much press as his friend Donald Trump, with Stephen Colbert impersonating the talk show host on The Late Show, and Trevor Noah attacking him on The Daily Show. Follow the links to view the videos.

Alex Jones makes for good television. That enraged character is so entertaining that Comedy Central has requested the right to use this clip of Jones to open their new show, The President Show, featuring a Donald Trump impersonator as host talking about the day’s news. It’s an attempt at impersonating the InfoWars model and mocking the Alex Jones character to attract a larger, more moderate audience. (The show had Keith Olbermann from GQ’s The Resistance as its first guest.)

The writers and producers of just about every comedy show have been pretty lazy lately, with the lone exception being the writers and producers of Last Week Tonight. With very little effort and originality, the writers and producers of The Late Show, The Daily Show and even Newsweek are taking shots at an easy target from point blank range and making easy money doing so. Not only that, they’re only giving Jones free publicity that enhances his “celebrity,” because as the cliché goes, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Clichés exist because there is truth to them.

While our advertising sales representatives at GCN confirm they have not raised the advertising rates for The Alex Jones Show, they certainly aren’t having trouble selling those spots, even while Jones is taking time to attend a custody hearing. He’s not off to a hot start in proving his attorney’s argument that Jones is playing a character on his show, telling the jury on 4/20 that George Soros is to blame for the ever-increasing potency of marijuana.

All that said, Jones’s audience is set. The people who tune into The Alex Jones Show will likely always tune into The Alex Jones Show, whether it’s on the radio or YouTube. The people who watch Bill O’Reilly will continue consuming whatever it is he does after Fox News, much like Rush Limbaugh. You don’t need to understand these people; you only need to understand these people exist and there’s no changing them.

Apparently, the only thing that could affect the advertising revenue of The Alex Jones Show is a criminal charge or sexual harassment allegation brought against Alex Jones. That’s been the case in sports and entertainment for quite some time. A custody battle isn’t going to turn advertisers away in droves like they ran away from The O’Reilly Factor.

There’s nothing anyone can do about people who want to be heard and have the resources to accomplish that goal because there’s nothing anyone can do about the audience that consumes that garbage. Americans consume everything including garbage; some garbage just smells better.

--

If you like this, you might like these GCN Live talk radio shows: The Alex Jones Show

Donald Trump is in the battleground state of Wisconsin to sign an executive order that will reportedly make it harder for technology companies to hire cheaper, high-skilled workers from overseas and prioritize the hiring of American workers and strengthen rules to make sure government contracts are awarded to American contractors.

Trump and White House officials have targeted the H-1B visa for high-skilled, foreign workers, which will even affect Trump himself. His own company takes advantage of the H-1B visa at his hotels, golf courses and vineyard. According to a CNN Money investigation conducted in July 2016, Trump utilized the visa to import 1,256 workers over 15 years. One of Trump’s campaign promises was to end the H-1B visa as a cheap labor program, but according to a study by Brookings Institute researchers, H-1B job vacancies are harder to fill and H-1B workers are paid more than non-H-1B workers, with wage growth much higher than the national average. Here are some answers to criticisms brought against the study and here’s a comparable study that comes to the same conclusion.

According to WorkPermit.com, the U.S. H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows American companies to employ graduate level workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise in specialized fields such as in IT, finance, accounting, architecture, engineering, mathematics, science, medicine, etc. Any professional level job that usually requires a Bachelor’s degree or higher can come under the H-1B visa for specialty occupations, but if a foreign worker does not have a Bachelor’s degree, they may still be able to show degree equivalence through work experience or other qualifications.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it received 199,000 petitions for 85,000 slots during this year’s H-1B visa lottery. Last year, the agency received 236,000 applications. Indian outsourcing firms such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro receive most of the visas because they submit the most applications to increase their chances.

Technology companies have long complained of a lack of a highly educated and skilled American workers as a reason for taking advantage of the H-1B program, but there are also companies taking advantage of it. Regardless, American technology companies could get around all of this by hiring foreign workers to work remotely from their home countries.

Supporters of the H-1B visa program say Trump’s executive order will make it harder and more expensive for businesses to find adequate workers, while the opposition says Trump’s order doesn’t go far enough. If more is to be done, however, Congress will have to get involved. Several bills have been introduced to overhaul the visa program. One presented by Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley would require companies seeking H-1B visas to make a “good-faith effort” to hire Americans prior to exploring foreign workers. What constitutes a “good-faith effort” will be determined by the Labor Department. The bill would also give foreign students studying in the U.S. the upper hand when applying for H-1B visas.

H-1B visas shouldn’t be confused with the H-2B visa program, which does allow companies like beach and ski resorts to import cheaper, low-skilled labor to serve seasonal positions. Hotels, resorts, restaurants, construction companies and seafood processors got a big boost when a spending bill was approved last year that allows for anyone who obtained an H-2B visa in the last three years to retain it and not count towards the 66,000 visa cap. These jobs will still go to immigrants who will do the work for less. That’s why every time you ski Montana or Colorado or California or Utah there’s rarely a local to be found in uniform. Yet the price of admission never seems to reflect the lower cost of the labor.

--

If you like this, you might like these Genesis Communications Network talk shows: The Costa Report, Drop Your Energy Bill, Free Talk Live, Flow of Wisdom, America’s First News, America Tonight, Bill Martinez Live, Korelin Economics Report, The KrisAnne Hall Show, Radio Night Live, The Real Side, World Crisis Radio, The Tech Night Owl Live