Dear Commons Community,

Former President Donald Trump’s recent plea to Russian President Vladimir Putin for political help in the form of dirt on Hunter Biden is the “worst possible thing” and “completely unacceptable,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said yesterday in an interview on CNN (see video above).

Trump called on Putin during an interview Tuesday to release any damaging information he might have on President Joe Biden’s son related to possible business dealings in Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The plea evoked Trump’s call during his first presidential campaign for Russia to hack and expose Hillary Clinton’s emails. Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails were hacked a short time later by an operation linked to the Kremlin.

Hogan told CNN’s Dana Bash that he wasn’t “surprised” by “just more of the same” from Trump. He said, however, that it was particularly disturbing now, amid the Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

“It doesn’t surprise me that Trump would make that statement, but it’s about the worst possible thing you can do when all these atrocities are taking place in Ukraine and Putin’s aggression is what the focus is,” Hogan said.

“For a former president to try to drag politics into that is just completely unacceptable,” he added.

Hogan also discussed last year’s U.S. Capitol riot and said it remains to be seen what action may be taken against Trump for his role in the attack on a congressional session to certify the 2020 Electoral College vote. But Hogan added: “There’s no question … that he was involved in stirring up the insurrection on Jan. 6.”

Hogan also attacked another one of his least favorite Republicans — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He called the state’s new “Don’t Say Gay” law — banning any gender identity or sexual orientation discussion in kindergarten through third grade classrooms — “absurd” and not something that would pass in his state.

He also called DeSantis’ new war on Disney after the company spoke out against the controversial law a “crazy fight.”

“We have a thing called freedom of speech,” said Hogan. Disney can “come out and say what they think,” he added.

Good interview, Governor Hogan!

Tony

Amazon Workers Vote to Unionize!

Dear Commons Community,

In a historic win for the labor movement, warehouse workers on Staten Island, New York, have voted to form the first union inside an Amazon facility in the U.S.

Employees at the company’s fulfillment center known as JFK8 will be joining a new independent labor group, the Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, following an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. The union delivered a stunning upset in the vote count held Thursday and Friday, winning 2,654 to 2,131.

If the labor board certifies the results to make them official, then the world’s largest online retailer will be obligated to bargain with a union representing several thousand of its employees, something it has never had to do except overseas.  As reported by several news media including HuffPost.

Amazon suggested in a statement that it may challenge the results of the election, alleging “inappropriate and undue” influence by the labor board. The company said it was “evaluating our options.”

“We’re disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees,” a statement from the company read.

Following the conclusion of the vote count on Friday, union members and supporters gathered on the sidewalk outside the labor board office in Brooklyn. Wearing red shirts with the union’s logo, they hugged, celebrated and chanted “ALU! ALU! ALU!”

Meanwhile, the labor board conducted a separate vote count Thursday for a different Amazon facility considering unionization, in Bessemer, Alabama. Workers voted 875 to 993 against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, but more than 400 other ballots have been challenged and remain unopened, meaning the union could still win after the board determines those voters’ eligibility.

In the Staten Island case, Amazon can appeal the election results if it decides to allege misconduct. In response to the company’s claims, Kayla Blado, a board spokesperson, said that the NLRB is an independent agency tasked with enforcing the law, and that all its actions against Amazon “have been consistent with that Congressional mandate.”

Amazon has put up stiff resistance against union organizing efforts, inundating workers with anti-union messaging and holding frequent meetings with workers to discourage them from signing union cards or voting for union representation. Disclosure filings that Amazon submitted to the Labor Department on Thursday indicate the company spent $4.3 million last year on labor consultants who help employers defeat organizing drives.

Until this week, those strategies had worked.

The labor victory in Staten Island is all the more remarkable because of the union’s unlikely roots. Amazon Labor Union was formed just last year by a group of workers in New York. It is led by Chris Smalls, a former Amazon worker whom the company controversially fired early in the pandemic after he spoke out about safety concerns, and Derrick Palmer, who works at JFK8.

Most unions have a large staff, including professional organizers, who are paid through workers’ dues to carry out the union’s work. But ALU has not been around long enough to have the resources of an established union. Smalls, Palmer and their fellow pro-union workers organized relentlessly outside the Staten Island facility, holding cookouts, speaking with workers about the campaign and urging them to sign union cards.

The group battled the company on TikTok and Twitter and raised money through GoFundMe.

“Words can’t describe this feeling,” Smalls told reporters in Brooklyn on Friday.

He thanked Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for blasting off into space, “because when he was up there, we were signing people up.”

After Amazon fired Smalls in 2020, Vice reported on internal company notes that showed Amazon planned to smear him as he spoke out about his termination. The company’s general counsel, David Zapolsky, described Smalls as “not smart or articulate,” and said Amazon appears more credible than Smalls in a public fight.

As the vote tally continued on Friday, Smalls sent out a jubilant tweet to remind Bezos and Zapolsky of his treatment.

Last month, Smalls was arrested for allegedly trespassing at the Staten Island warehouse after showing up to drop off food for workers, drawing a round of bad publicity for Amazon. The retailer said it had called the police on Smalls, but not on the two other ALU members who were also arrested.

The election win for the union is one of a string of recent labor successes at public-facing companies, including Starbucks and outdoor retailer REI. Workers at eight Starbucks stores in three states have unionized so far, and roughly 150 other stores have petitioned for elections.

Union membership in the U.S. is hovering near a historic low, with just 6.1% of private-sector workers belonging to unions. Labor activists have debated for years about how to turn around the flagging numbers. Until this week, unions had a poor track record running elections at workplaces as large as an Amazon warehouse.

With more than 8,000 workers eligible to vote at JFK8, Friday’s outcome is the biggest election win for the labor movement in years.

The young union will now face an even greater challenge: negotiating a first collective bargaining agreement with one of the most powerful companies in the world. It can take years for a union to secure a first contract, and some never manage to. Amazon would have a strong incentive not to offer the union a decent deal, for fear it would only encourage more unionization elsewhere.

Last year, Smalls told HuffPost that one of the greatest challenges to organizing Amazon is dealing with the company’s high turnover. Many workers, he said, don’t stay around long enough to be turned into union supporters.

“That’s the name of Amazon’s game: Hire and fire,” he said at the time. “They know that people don’t want to be here long, that these jobs break you down physically and mentally.”

ALU has called for a wage of at least $30 per hour to accommodate New York’s high cost of living, as well as greater job security. Amazon workers must meet the company’s well-known production quotas or they can lose their jobs with no recourse, something Smalls has said needs to change.

“We demand to be treated as human beings and not mere replaceable appendages to the robots and algorithms that run the warehouses,” ALU says on its website.

The union originally petitioned the labor board for an election last year, then withdrew it ahead of a vote. After gathering more signatures, the union returned to the board to file its petition with greater support from workers.

Later this month, workers at another, smaller Amazon facility on Staten Island are expected to vote on whether to join the ALU as well.

Congratulations to the ALU!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Sam Roberts, veteran New York Times reporter, has an article today that reviews and questions the authorship of our country’s Pledge of Allegiance.  Entitled “We Know the Pledge. Its Author, Maybe Not”, Roberts reports on the possibility that Francis Bellamy, long considered the writer of our Pledge, was not truthful in claiming authorship.  Here is an excerpt.

“For well over a century, the Pledge of Allegiance has been a pillar of America’s national identity. New evidence has emerged, though, to indicate that perhaps the man who pledged that he originated it did not.

Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist from upstate New York, went so far as to swear in at least two affidavits that he had formulated the oath one blistering August night in 1892 in the Boston headquarters of a magazine for young people that he was promoting.

Bellamy’s authorship was reaffirmed during the 20th century by, among others, the American Flag Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Legislative Research Service (now the Congressional Research Service) and the Library of Congress. He was credited again as recently as last year in a resolution by the United States Senate and a citation by the “New Yale Book of Quotations.”

In February, however, simmering doubts about the oath’s origin resurfaced. A New York history buff discovered a newspaper account that appears to contradict Bellamy’s.

The discovery may also vindicate a longstanding but disputed claim that the oath actually originated in 1890 when a 13-year-old Kansas schoolboy — remarkably named Frank E. Bellamy — said he submitted it to a contest that was organized by Francis Bellamy’s own magazine to promote American values such as patriotism.

In February, Barry Popik, a historian and lexicographer who had been researching the pledge’s origin, was stunned to find a clipping on newspapers.com from the Ellis County News Republican of Hays, Kan., dated May 21, 1892.

The article described a school ceremony several weeks earlier, on April 30, 1892 — more than three months before Francis Bellamy swore he wrote the pledge -— in which high school students in Victoria, Kan., swore allegiance to the American flag using virtually the same words.

Mr. Popik collaborated with Fred R. Shapiro, the associate library director for collections and special projects at Yale Law School, who immediately noticed the inconsistency in the timeline: How could Francis Bellamy have created the pledge in August 1892, as he claimed, when a nearly identical pledge had already been recited and published the previous May?

Mr. Shapiro is also the editor of “The New Yale Book of Quotations,” which attributed the pledge to Francis Bellamy in its latest edition, published last August. He said that in subsequent editions, he would credit the oath to Frank Bellamy instead.

The May 1892 newspaper clipping does not prove that Frank Bellamy wrote the pledge, but it seems to suggest that perhaps Francis Bellamy did not.

“It’s very hard to explain what you see in that newspaper,” said Debbie Schaefer-Jacobs, curator of the division of cultural and community life of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

“I think you can’t rule out that Frank may have been the author and that Francis came across it and consciously or subconsciously used the words,” she added in an email this month.

Elizabeth L. Brown, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress, agreed that “if Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge in August of 1892, how did it come to be published in a Kansas newspaper in May 1892?”

In 1957, the Library of Congress certified Francis Bellamy as the author of the pledge on the basis of a 148-page investigative summary submitted by the Legislative Research Service. It was requested by Representative Kenneth B. Keating, a New York Republican, whose upstate district included Bellamy’s birthplace.

But that report focused almost entirely on determining whether the pledge had been written by Bellamy or by his boss, the magazine’s editor, James B. Upham, as the deadline loomed for the Sept. 8 edition of Youth’s Companion, which was to feature the oath in a printed program that schools could follow for the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage of discovery the following month.”

The entire article is an interesting read.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Lincoln and the Fight for Peace by John Avlon.   Abraham Lincoln and Civil War  buffs will find this an enjoyable and insightful read.  It covers the period leading up to the end of the Civil War, the Reconstruction and beyond and concludes with commentary of the present day.  John Avlon is a regular commentator for CNN and is usually on its morning show with a segment entitled “Reality Check” that reviews a current issue and provides data-backed commentary on whatever position he takes.  These segments are smart and helpful.  I would say the same for his book.  People who know the Civil War period and its aftermath well will probably not learn anything new but for others, it will be a quick and interesting read.  One of Avlon’s main themes is that we could use the wisdom of a Lincoln for our modern times.

In one provocative passage Avlon quotes Ulysses S. Grant a decade after Appomattox:   

“If we are to have another Civil War, I predict that the dividing line will not be the Mason and Dixon [Line}, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other”

Good read!

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

———————————————————————–

The New York Times Review of Books

A Lincoln for Our Polarized Times

By Allen C. Guelzo

Feb. 15, 2022

LINCOLN AND THE FIGHT FOR PEACE

By John Avlon

Political polarization and the weather have this in common: Everyone talks about them, but nobody seems to do anything about them. John Avlon — who edited The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018, is now an analyst for CNN and has published serious studies of American political centrism — believes he has a solution to polarization, if not polar weather, and that is the figure of Abraham Lincoln. In this elegant, almost conversational, exposition of Lincoln the “soulful centrist,” the 16th president appears as the reconciler in chief, who not only saved democracy from destruction in war but also pointed the way to saving it from inertia and futility in peace. And, Avlon believes, the Lincolnian example could be a similar balm for our political wounds today.

Avlon devotes much of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace” to the last six weeks of Lincoln’s life, from his eloquent Second Inaugural (and its memorable exhortation, as the Civil War folded to its close, to show “malice toward none” and “charity for all”) to his assassination on April 14, 1865. Studding this story are abundant examples of Lincoln’s determination at war’s end to blend justice with reconciliation, lest justice alone become punishing and reconciliation alone produce a peace that made the war’s horrendous loss of life “meaningless.”

To read these chapters is to discover Lincoln’s rare compound of “empathy, honesty, humor and humility.” This is the Lincoln who surprised the Confederate judge John A. Campbell with his “genuine sympathy for the bereavement, destitution, impoverishment, waste and overturn that war had occasioned at the South.” But this is also the Lincoln who tells the African American soldiers of the Black 29th Connecticut that “you are now as free as I am,” and if they meet any Southerners who “claim to not know that you are free, take the sword and the bayonet and teach them that you are; for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

These are not unfamiliar tales to students of Lincoln, but Avlon makes the retelling affecting and powerful. At the same time, Avlon plays down the highly ideological Lincoln. However much he preferred to avoid controversy, Lincoln relentlessly dedicated his political life to deploying a domestic agenda of tariffs, banking and economic infrastructure-building that deliberately overturned six decades of Democratic economic policy and set the country on a new path, which endured until 1932. What’s more, his most famous utterance before the war — the “House Divided” speech of June 1858 — was a confrontational demand that the nation make up its mind over slavery and freedom, and become “all one thing or all the other.”

As much as Avlon is convinced that Lincoln’s “commitment to reconciliation retains the force of revelation,” “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace” is short on the exact content of that revelation for the postwar years. Frederick Douglass insisted in 1866 that “Mr. Lincoln would have been in favor of the enfranchisement of the colored race,” and Avlon is not wrong to see Lincoln favoring a reinvention of the South as a small-scale manufacturing economy to replace the plantation oligarchy that triggered the war. But Lincoln played his political cards so close to the chest that, beyond this, it is unclear exactly what directions he thought Reconstruction should take. It is still less clear whether even he would have been successful (had he survived the assassin’s bullet) in pulling any of it off in just the three years that remained to him in his second term.

We suffer today from political cultures that have grown so incommensurate in their substance and goals that we hardly seem to speak with one voice as Americans anymore. Avlon is right to offer us comfort from the fact that we have been at moments like this before, and survived. But Lincoln was not entirely the “soulful centrist.” And centrism, unhappily, did not spare us either a hideous civil war or a botched reconstruction.

Allen C. Guelzo is the author, most recently, of “Robert E. Lee: A Life.”

Dear Commons Community,

Axios reported yesterday that White House Press Secretary,Jen Psaki will be leaving her position to join MSNBC. Other outlets said they had confirmed the news, and reported that Psaki was expected to stay through the end of April.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the deputy White House press secretary, and Kate Bedingfield, the communications director, were among names touted as possible successors.

Axios said Psaki, 43, had been “treading carefully on the ethics and legal aspects of her plans” and had not yet signed a deal, but was in line to host a show on the Peacock streaming service and feature as a commentator elsewhere.

The site also said Psaki would not replace Rachel Maddow, the liberal-leaning network’s biggest star, in its 9pm weekday slot, contrary to speculation.

MSNBC did not immediately comment. A White House official said: “Jen is here and working hard every day on behalf of the president to get you the answers to the questions that you have, and that’s where her focus is.”

At the daily White House briefing, Psaki told reporters: “You can’t get rid of me yet. I have nothing to confirm about my length of public service or planned service, or anything about consideration about next plans.”

Referring to her recent positive test for Covid-19, she said: “I’m very happy to be standing up here today after it felt like an endless time in my basement quarantining away from my family. Believe it or not, I missed you a lot.

“My focus every day continues to be speaking on behalf of the president, answering your questions, as tough as they may be … I hope that I meet my own bar of treating everybody with fairness and being equitable.”

Psaki was pressed about whether it was ethical to negotiate a move to an outlet to which she continues to speak on the president’s behalf.

“I have always gone over and above the stringent ethical and legal requirements of the Biden administration,” she said, adding that she had “taken steps to recuse myself from decisions as appropriate” and worked with the office of the White House counsel as required.

Psaki also said: “At whatever time I leave the White House, I can promise you the first thing I’m going to do is sleep and spend time with my three- and six-year-old, who are my most important audiences of all.”

Psaki worked for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 and then in his White House press team. After a spell as spokesperson for the state department she became White House communications director.

With Donald Trump in office, Psaki became a commentator for CNN. On returning to the White House in January 2021, she indicated that she expected to work for Biden for not much more than a year.

After four chaotic years under Trump, Psaki returned White House press briefings to normal daily order. She became celebrated by some on the left, however, for sometimes caustic exchanges with reporters, prominently including Peter Doocy, a correspondent for Fox News.

Last month, Doocy asked Psaki if it was true she was leaving.

“I have more than enough on my plate here,” Psaki said. “So you can’t get rid of me quite yet. Sorry, Peter, for you on that.”

The path from Brady Briefing Room to TV studio has become well-trodden.

Trump’s fourth and last White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, now works for Fox News. Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, works for Newsmax. Another Trump-era White House official, former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, this week joined CBS News, reportedly causing controversy among staff.

On the left, Symone Sanders, a former adviser to the vice-president, Kamala Harris, is scheduled to begin hosting for MSNBC and Peacock in May.

We wish Psaki well!  She has been a breadth of fresh air after four years of the Trump group of press secretaries.

Tony

Roman Abramovich at the peace talks between delegations from Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on Tuesday. (Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Dear Commons Community,

Since the beginning of the Ukraine War, there has been a lot of reporting on Russian oligarchs especially those who have been the objects of sanctions on the part of the United States and the European Union. They are not often mentioned by name and it is difficult to know exactly who they are other than they  have served in various official and non-official advisory positions to Vladimir Putin.  Reuters and Yahoo News have put together an article describing one of these oligarchs, Roman Abramovich, who has been close to Putin and may be serving as an important link in peace negotiations. He has been thrust into the spotlight over the past few weeks following the British government’s March 10 announcement of sanctions against him over his close ties to the Kremlin. Abramovich’s British assets were frozen, which led the Premier League board to disqualify him as a director of the Chelsea Football Club.

Last Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Abramovich and others had suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after attending peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in Kyiv on March 3. It is not clear who may have conducted the alleged attack. The Journal reported that “people familiar with the matter blamed the suspected attack on hard-liners in Moscow who they said wanted to sabotage talks to end the war.”

But who is this Abramovich and what is his story. Below is an excerpt from the Reuters/Yahoo News article. I found it very illuminating

Tony

———————————————————————–

Who is Roman Abramovich?

Abramovich, 55, is an entrepreneur and former politician who made billions of dollars in 2005 after selling his majority stake in a Russian oil firm to the government, from which he had bought it a decade earlier at a much lower price. After losing both parents by the age of 3, Abramovich was raised by relatives in the northern Russian region of Komi. He left school at 16 and served in the Red Army before selling toys in Russia’s capital, Moscow.

In his late 20s, Abramovich came into good fortune following the fall of the Soviet Union. According to the BBC, he seized the oil company Sibneft from the Russian government in a rigged auction in 1995. He won the bid for around $250 million and sold it back to the state-owned fossil fuel company Gazprom for $13 billion. Abramovich’s lawyers stated that there was no basis for alleging he amassed his wealth through criminality. But the BBC notes that “in 2012, he admitted in a UK court that he had made corrupt payments to help get the Sibneft deal going.”

Abramovich came to meet Putin through former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who Abramovich became friendly with in the 1990s. Following Yeltsin’s resignation in 1999, Abramovich was reportedly among those who wanted Putin as the next president. His career in politics moved hand in hand with Putin, and in 2000 Abramovich was elected as governor of Chukotka, a remote region in Russia’s northeast. According to Forbes, Abramovich spent $2.5 billion of government money in the region, gaining popularity through improving social services. He stepped down from his position eight years later.

How rich is he?

Abramovich’s net worth peaked at $23.5 billion in 2018. According to Forbes, he now owns stakes in steel giant Evraz and Norilsk Nickel, and holds the vast majority of the Premier League Chelsea FC soccer team. Abramovich reportedly owns the world’s second-largest yacht, which he bought for $400 million in 2010. The Antiguan government confirmed on Friday to the Financial Times that two yachts moored in the Caribbean nation are owned by Abramovich.

What about the recent sanctions?

The Russian billionaire was sanctioned by the British government last month as part of the West’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Despite Abramovich’s attempts to distance himself legally from Putin, the British government still claimed that Abramovich obtained “a financial benefit or other material benefit from Putin and the government of Russia.” Sanctions stopped Abramovich’s football club from selling any more game tickets and merchandise. The club has also been banned from buying or selling players on the transfer market. A week into the war, Abramovich said he had made the “difficult decision” to sell the club; however, after his assets were frozen, the sale was stalled.

What are his international connections?

Abramovich is Jewish, and in 2018 he was granted Israeli citizenship. An Israeli government spokesperson told a local television station at the time: “Roman Abramovich arrived at the Israeli Embassy in Moscow like any other person. He filed a request to receive an immigration permit, his documents were checked according to the law of return, and he was indeed found eligible.” Before Washington imposed sanctions against Abramovich, several influential figures in Israel asked the U.S. ambassador not to sanction him. Their letter was sent to Tom Nides, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, on Feb. 6, weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Last year the tycoon became an EU citizen after securing Portuguese citizenship. His successful application used a Portuguese law that offered naturalization to descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled during the Inquisition in the 15th century. Through his philanthropy, Abramovich has given half a billion dollars to charities in Israel over the past two decades, the Jerusalem Post reported.

On Feb. 22 Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, announced “a new long-term strategic partnership” with Abramovich, which included a donation of several million dollars from the Russian businessman. On March 10, Yad Vashem said it was “suspending the partnership.”

Abramovich at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2006. (Orel Cohn/AFP via Getty Images)

What role is he playing in peace negotiations?

Officials from both Ukraine and Russia have said that Abramovich is not an official member of their delegation, and he wasn’t seated at the main negotiating table during the peace talks. According to the Wall Street Journal, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked President Biden to hold off on sanctioning the oligarch as he could be used as a go-between in peace talks. Shortly after the war broke out, a spokesperson for Abramovich revealed that the billionaire had been contacted by Ukrainian officials “in support of achieving a peaceful resolution.” His spokesperson added that he has been “trying to help ever since.”

“As far as I am aware, he [Abramovich] was helping with the humanitarian issue: with the humanitarian convoy taking people out of Mariupol,” Zelensky told reporters on Sunday. Abramovich has been traveling between Ukraine, Israel, Belarus, Russia and Turkey to engage in negotiations. However, it remains unclear what his personal motives are.

Was he poisoned?

According to the investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat and the Wall Street Journal, Abramovich and other members of the delegation who attended peace negotiations in Kyiv in early March suffered symptoms that were consistent with poisoning. The three men complained of red, teary eyes and peeling skin, a source told Sky News. However, a U.S. official told Reuters the intelligence “highly suggests” that the symptoms were caused by environmental factors. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the reports of the suspected poisoning of Abramovich are untrue and have “nothing to do with reality.

Dear Commons Community,

Russian technology workers are fleeing the country by the tens of thousands as the economy goes into a tailspin under pressure from international sanctions.  

By one estimate, up to 70,000 computer specialists, spooked by a sudden frost in the business and political climate, have bolted the country since Russia invaded Ukraine five weeks ago. Many more are expected to follow.  Many of these individuals worked for major tech companies that have also pulled out of Russia.

For some countries, Russia’s loss is being seen as their potential gain and an opportunity to bring fresh expertise to their own high-tech industries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has noticed the brain drain and has approved legislation to eliminate income taxes between now and 2024 for individuals who work for information technology companies.

Some people in the vast new pool of high-tech exiles say they are in no rush to return home. An elite crowd furnished with European Union visas has relocated to Poland or the Baltic nations of Latvia and Lithuania. 

A larger contingent has fallen back on countries where Russians do not need visas: Armenia, Georgia and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. In normal times, millions of less-skilled laborers emigrate from those economically shaky countries to comparatively more prosperous Russia.  As reported by the Associated Press and ABC News.

Anastasia, a 24-year-old freelance computer systems analyst from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, chose Kyrgyzstan, where her husband has family.

“When we heard about the war on (Feb. 24), we thought it was probably time to leave, but that we might wait and see. On February 25, we bought our tickets and left,” Anastasia said. “There wasn’t much thinking to do.”

Like all the Russian workers contacted for this story, Anastasia asked to remain anonymous. Moscow was cracking down on dissent even before the invasion of Ukraine, and people living outside Russia still fear reprisals.

“As long as I can remember, there has always been fear around expressing one’s own views in Russia,” Anastasia said, adding that the war and “the background noise of patriotism” made the environment even more forbidding. “I left one day before they began searching and interrogating people at the border.”

The scale of the apparent brain drain was laid bare last week by Sergei Plugotarenko, the head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, an industry lobbying group.

“The first wave – 50,000-70,000 people – has already left,” Plugotarenko told a parliamentary committee.

Only the high cost of flights out of the country prevented an even larger mass exit. Another 100,000 tech workers nevertheless might leave Russia in April, Plugotarenko predicted.

Konstantin Siniushin, a managing partner at Untitled Ventures, a tech-focused venture capital fund based in Latvia, said that Russian tech firms with international customers had no choice but to move since many foreign companies are hastily distancing themselves from anything Russia-related.

“They had to leave the country so their business could survive, or, in the case of research and development workers, they were relocated by HQs,” Siniushin wrote in emailed remarks.

Untitled Ventures is helping in the migration; the firm charted two flights to Armenia carrying 300 tech workers from Russia, Siniushin said.

Some nearby countries are eager to reap the dividends.

Russian talent is primed for poaching. A 2020 Global Skills Index report published by Coursera, a leading provider of open online courses, found that people from Russia scored highest for skill proficiency in technology and data science.

As soon as the war started in Ukraine, the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan radically streamlined the process for obtaining work visas and residence permits for IT specialists.

Anton Filippov, a mobile app programmer from St. Petersburg, and the team of freelancers with whom he works made the move to Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, where he grew up, even before those incentives were made public.

“On February 24, it was like we had woken up to this different terrible reality,” Filippov said. “We’re all young, less than 27 years old, and so we were afraid we might be called up to take part in this war.”

As in-demand tech workers explore their options, their diaspora resembles a roaming caravan. Some countries, like Uzbekistan, are picked as stepping stones because Russian citizens do not need visas for short-term stays. But young professionals like Filippov do not plan to necessarily stay where they first landed.

“If the conditions they find differ from the ones they were promised, they will simply move on,” he said.

In many cases, entire companies are looking to relocate to avoid the fallout from international sanctions. A senior diplomat from another Russian neighbor, Kazakhstan, made a naked appeal this week for fleeing foreign enterprises to come to his country.

Kazakhstan is eyeing high-tech investors with particular interest as the country tries to diversify its economy, which relies on oil exports. In 2017, the government set up a technology park in the capital, Nur-Sultan, and offered tax breaks, preferential loans, and grants to anybody prepared to set up shop there.

The uptake has been moderate so far, but the hope is that the Russian brain drain will give this initiative a major shot in the arm.

“The accounts of Russian companies are being frozen, and their transactions do not go through. They are trying to keep customers, and one available opportunity is to go to Kazakhstan,” said Arman Abdrasilov, chairman of Zerde Holding, an investment fund in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s business hub.

Siniushin, the managing partner at Untitled Ventures, is urging Western nations to throw open their doors so their employers can take advantage of the unusual hiring opportunity the war created.

“The more talent that Europe or the United States can take away from Russia today, the more benefits these new innovators, whose potential will be fully realized abroad, will bring to other countries,” he said.

Welcome Russian techies!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Postal Service Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into iCOP — which stands for Internet Covert Operations Program — at the request of Congress and  concluded that the agency did not have the legal authority to conduct the sweeping intelligence collection and surveillance of American protesters and others between 2018 and 2021. 

“We determined that certain proactive searches iCOP conducted using an open-source intelligence tool from February to April 2021 exceeded the Postal Inspection Service’s law enforcement authority,” the March 25, 2022, inspector general report stated.

“Furthermore, we could not corroborate whether other work analysts completed from October 2018 through June 2021 was legally authorized.”

The audit of the program was prompted by Yahoo News reporting that revealed the existence of the secret program, as well as its use of facial recognition software and other sophisticated technology and software to compile and disseminate reports on Americans’ online speech and movements. A March 16, 2021, iCOP intelligence bulletin on American protesters was widely circulated by the Department of Homeland Security to state, local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Yahoo News’ reporting on the program prompted outrage from lawmakers and constitutional experts, who questioned whether the post office had the legal authority to target and collect information on U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime and with no connection to the post office.

In April 2021, Yahoo News revealed the existence of the iCOP surveillance, which used analysts to trawl the internet looking for “inflammatory” posts about nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. A series of follow-up reports revealed further details about the program, which had been operating without the oversight or even the knowledge of Congress.

“The Oversight Committee requested this report because of our significant concerns about intelligence activities conducted by the Postal Service Inspection Service’s analytics team related to First Amendment activity,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, told Yahoo News in a statement yesterday. “The inspector general’s audit makes clear that the committee’s concerns were justified, and that the use of open-source intelligence by the analytics team ‘exceeded the Postal Inspection Service’s law enforcement authority.’”

Using sophisticated technology and software, iCOP was running keyword searches like “protest” on social media to collect online speech about a host of different events that contained no threats and had nothing to do with the Postal Service’s work.

The inspector general report notes that in April 2021 Postal Inspection Service lawyers asked iCOP to remove “protest” from its keyword searches “to protect constitutional rights.”

Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Yahoo News that the Postal Inspection Service had “lost their way.”

“At this point they might as well take their mission statement of protecting the Postal Service and its employees and throw it in the garbage,” Albergo said, arguing that not enough attention is being paid by the agency to the “mail theft epidemic” of postal property that was happening at the same time.

The 26-page report concluded that the post office did not have the legal authority to compile reports on Americans involved in Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the nation. The report also found across-the-board violations of statutory and legal authority ranging from lack of legal authority to noncompliance with federal records retention to use of facial recognition software. It also said there was no record-keeping policy or procedures in place to make sure the work was legal.

The report repeatedly stressed that the Postal Service’s surveillance efforts need a “postal nexus,” or a connection to the Postal Inspection Service’s work.

“The Postal Inspection Service’s activities must have an identified connection to the mail, postal crimes, or the security of Postal Service facilities or personnel (postal nexus) prior to commencing,” the report said.

“However, the keywords used for iCOP in the proactive searches did not include any terms with a postal nexus. Further, the postal nexus was not documented in 122 requests and 18 reports due to a lack of requirements in the program’s procedures. These issues occurred because management did not involve the Postal Inspection Service’s Office of Counsel in developing iCOP or its procedures.”

The inspector general made a series of recommendations, including a complete review and overhaul of the program and the analyst division under which it operates. Postal Service leadership responded to each recommendation, objecting to most of the report’s conclusions and arguing that it has the authority to conduct wide-ranging surveillance and intelligence collection on U.S. citizens — without needing a nexus to the post office. It agreed to review some of its policies after the completion of the internal review recommended by the inspector general.

“We strongly disagree with the overarching conclusion that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (Inspection Service) exceeded its legal authority and conducted improper intelligence searches,” the Postal Inspection Service wrote in response to the recommendations and findings of the inspector general audit. The response was included in the report.

Maloney, the Oversight Committee chair, said: “I fully support the Inspector General’s recommendation that Postal Service management perform a full review of the Analytics Team’s responsibilities, activities, and procedures, and I look forward to reviewing its result.”

I will look at my mailman and mailwoman more carefully now!

Tony