interesting transcript snippet from West Wing Episode Jan 2000 about 'soft influence'

[bart95]

'soft influence' is the term for this

where they throw groups of American workers to the wolves in favor of foreign interests in exchange for influence other countries

'West Wing' even had a TV episode about it, India and Pakistan were threatening each other (as they were in real life around that time), an president martin sheen at the end of the episode quietly gave India the computer industry for influence

in the episode, American tech workers solely accountable for peace in that region

i was shocked when i saw this, as i was learning about H-1b expansion in real life

i was wondering 'gee, where'd they get the idea for THIS episode?!?', sure, it was just a TV show episode, but they pulled plenty of their ideas from real life, that's what made the show so popular, a show for the 'smart set'


dont beleive me? here's the transcript (Bartlet is the president)

BARTLET
John, please.

MARBURY
You've been paying the world off since the industrial age. Foreign aid,
during the Cold
War was you paying dictators to be on your side. To this very day, you pay
Korea not to
develop nuclear weapons.

BARTLET
What does India want?

MARBURY
A computer industry, and for that, they require an infrastructure, and that
is what you
can give them.

LEO
Why?

MARBURY
It's the price you pay.

LEO
For avoiding a war halfway around the world?

MARBURY
For being rich, free and alive all at the same time, and for the criminally
negligent
behavior of your Congress in not checking the proliferation of nuclear
devices.

BARTLET
Your friend, the prime minister?

MARBURY
Rikki.

BARTLET
He's gonna go for this?

MARBURY
If it's handled properly.

BARTLET
All right, you tell the ambassador we'll discuss this in three months. In
three months,
John. I don't want this to be like quid pro quo.

MARBURY
Yes, sir.

BARTLET
That's the carrot. Leo, what's the stick?

LEO
In the next 24 hours, we want to see recon photos of Indian divisions
retreating. If we
don't, we're gonna seize Indian assets and so will our NATO allies, and
G-7's gonna call
in its loans.

http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTranscript&id=12




Episode 1.12 -- 'He Shall, From Time To Time...'
Original Airdate: January 12, 2000, 9:00 PM EST


(it certainly suggest we ar 'having to compete' with something we gave them in the first place)

[FSogol]

1. It is pretty childish to expect real life politics to operate like fictional politics.

[bart95]

2. it was eerily similar to something that seemed to be happening in real ife

and seems to be continuing today. and i really didnt claim anything more than it was a very interesting choice for their fiction at the time. any time the government wishes to explan why they really did hand over the software industry to India around that time, I'm all ears. but until the, i'm free to speculate, and i do not owe them my silence

'President Obama is not the only member of the administration who appears to lack an understanding of how the H-1B visa works. Several months after the president's awkward and widely reported conversation on the subject with Jennifer Wedel, the wife of an engineer who has been out of work for 3 years, a reporter recently asked Vice President Biden whether he thought the U.S. grants too many high-skill visas.

Biden's answer, writes Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld, reveals that the vice president "doesn't know a thing about the H-1B visa." Biden, for example, did not know that "there's almost nothing to stop an employer from replacing a U.S. worker with an H-1B visa holder," Thibodeau notes. "Those who have had to train their visa-holding replacement" could have set him straight.

But "even odder" than Biden's apparent failure to brush up on the issue after the "embarrassing" Wedel incident is that the vice president appears so uninformed even though "his own former Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser, Jared Bernstein, has spoken negatively about the H-1B on various occasions," writes University of California-Davis computer professor Norman Matloff in an e-mail newsletter. Rather than suffering a true shortage of qualified technical personnel -- Matloff quotes Bernstein as saying -- what employers claiming they need to hire employees using the H-1B "really mean is that they can't find enough people at the rate they want to pay."

rest of story

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2012/04/president-obama-2.html



(a quote from the woman who was First Lady when that episode was aired. if the People of New York, elected you, why would you mention Punjab first wehen introducing yourself? isnt that kind of a slap in the face to the average persn of New Yrk?)

Washington May 18th - “I am delighted to be the Senator from Punjab as well as from New York” said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the former first lady of the United States of America. She received a standing ovation and thunderous applause from the Sikh Americans who had gathered in the Senate side of the Capitol Hill on May 17th for the Sikh American Heritage Dinner Event in Washington, DC. The Sikh Council on Religion and Education (SCORE), based in the nation’s capital organized this event


from

http://www.sikhcouncilusa.org/article.aspx?article=evtdinner

there's some pretty weird stuff here - anyone who has a logical explanation, feel free to offer it. but if all someone has to say is 'shhhh, you're not supposed to talk about that!', then, no thanks)

[zipplewrath]

3. Clinton Admin

That show was littered with former Clinton staffers as "technical advisors". The politics was right, even if they got to "win" when the writers needed them to win.

[bart95]

4. yup, that show was a new phenomenon

there'd never really been anything like it

[bart95]

5. ok, let's hear YOUR explanation for this

US senator working on bill to allow more visas to Indians

New York, Mar 25, 2012,(PTI)

Amid Indian IT firms' concerns over restrictive US visa policies for their employees, a top American senator has assured that he is working on a bipartisan bill that will reform immigration laws and allow more Indians to come to America.

Influential US Senator from New York Chuck Schumer and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid met noted Indian-American hotelier and Chairman of Indian-American Democrats Sant Singh Chatwal at his Manhattan hotel here on Friday.

During the nearly hour long meeting, the three discussed India-US bilateral relations, with Chatwal raising concerns of Indian IT corporations regarding problems faced by them in obtaining work visas like H1B and L1 for their employees.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/237070/us-senator-working-bill-allow.html