ALL billionaires, GATES, ZUKERBERG,
BLOOMBERG, BEZOS and secretly, even
TRUMP want wider open borders, no cap
visas, and unlimited foreign of invasion of
"cheap" labor.
It's all about keeping wages depressed.
"GOP estb. is using
the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up
to four blue/white-collar
cheap-labor programs in lame-duck
DHS budget. Donors are worried that salaries
are too damn
high, & estb. media does not want to know." MORE BELOW
Notable mentions of corporations not quite evil enough to make the top list:
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar
and white-collar employees. The policy also
drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-
gaps, reduces high-tech investment,
increases state and local tax burdens,
hurts kids’ schools and college education,
pushes Americans away from high-tech careers,
and sidelines at least 5 million
marginalized Americans and their families,
including many who are now struggling
with opioid addictions. Immigration also pulls
investment and wealth away from heartland states
because investment flows towards the large
immigrant populations living in the coastal states.
TAKE THE INDIAN AND TAIWANESE OUT
OF SILICON VALLEY, AND YOU WILL
HAVE THOUSANDS OF JOBS FOR
AMERICAN BORN LEGALS!
"Many
reports show high levels of corruption in the
H-1B program, reflecting the high levels of corruption in the home countries.
For example, corruption in India is ranked as the 81st most corrupt country, partly
because of caste vs. caste hostility, according to Transparency International.
The corruption debilitates the
country’s economic growth, say critics."
"The home-country corruption has
ensured numerous arrests of Indian executives in the United States, plus a
series of lawsuits against large Indian outsourcing companies. The lawsuits
charge the Indian companies with discriminating against Americans to ensure the
placement of more Indian workers in U.S. jobs.: MORE BELOW
BLOOMBERG, BEZOS and secretly, even
TRUMP want wider open borders, no cap
visas, and unlimited foreign of invasion of
"cheap" labor.
It's all about keeping wages depressed.
"GOP estb. is using
the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up
to four blue/white-collar
cheap-labor programs in lame-duck
DHS budget. Donors are worried that salaries
are too damn
high, & estb. media does not want to know." MORE BELOW
Notable mentions of corporations not quite evil enough to make the top list:
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section
manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar
and white-collar employees. The policy also
drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-
gaps, reduces high-tech investment,
increases state and local tax burdens,
hurts kids’ schools and college education,
pushes Americans away from high-tech careers,
and sidelines at least 5 million
marginalized Americans and their families,
including many who are now struggling
with opioid addictions. Immigration also pulls
investment and wealth away from heartland states
because investment flows towards the large
immigrant populations living in the coastal states.
OF SILICON VALLEY, AND YOU WILL
HAVE THOUSANDS OF JOBS FOR
AMERICAN BORN LEGALS!
"Many
reports show high levels of corruption in the
H-1B program, reflecting the high levels of corruption in the home countries.
For example, corruption in India is ranked as the 81st most corrupt country, partly
because of caste vs. caste hostility, according to Transparency International.
The corruption debilitates the
country’s economic growth, say critics."
"The home-country corruption has
ensured numerous arrests of Indian executives in the United States, plus a
series of lawsuits against large Indian outsourcing companies. The lawsuits
charge the Indian companies with discriminating against Americans to ensure the
placement of more Indian workers in U.S. jobs.: MORE BELOW
Silicon Valley’s corrupt nexus: War, censorship and inequality
17 September 2018
On Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, will give the keynote address to the US Air Force Association’s annual conference. Bezos will discuss “how industry can better partner” with the US military.
Bezos’ speech comes amid his Seattle-based firm’s lobbying to win a $10 billion contract, known as “Project JEDI,” to host large sections of the Pentagon’s operations infrastructure on the internet cloud. In a move that will likely win him points with the military brass awarding the contract, Bezos recently donated $10 million to a Virginia-based super PAC seeking to elect veterans to office and create a “less polarized government.”
The Amazon CEO will appear as the representative of the world’s second-largest company by market capitalization, the second-largest employer in the United States, the world’s biggest provider of cloud computing services, and America’s largest e-commerce retailer, with twice the sales of the next nine competitors.
Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, is
among America’s most powerful oligarchs. His
speech to the Air Force Association embodies the
corrupt nexus between the military, the financial
oligarchy, the media and the high-tech companies,
all of which are working to create a regime of
censorship targeting left-wing, anti-war and
socialist viewpoints.
among America’s most powerful oligarchs. His
speech to the Air Force Association embodies the
corrupt nexus between the military, the financial
oligarchy, the media and the high-tech companies,
all of which are working to create a regime of
censorship targeting left-wing, anti-war and
socialist viewpoints.
This partnership expresses, in practice, the vision laid out in the Pentagon’s latest National Security Strategy, which calls for “the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military.”
This is a formula for a society in which all of the mechanisms of social control are jointly harnessed to defend and expand the wealth and power of America’s financial oligarchy. Toward this authoritarian end, Bezos and company are mobilizing one of the critical mechanisms—the media.
Bezos’ Washington Post has prepared its owner’s appearance at the Air Force event with a series of op-eds and editorials calling for a closer partnership between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. More than any other major US newspaper, the Post has argued for the fusion of America’s high-tech sector with its military, in line with the Pentagon’s so-called “third offset” strategy, which aims to regain America’s “military edge” by “harnessing a range of technologies, including robotics, autonomous systems and big data,” in the words of the Economist.
The Post’s campaign for a further integration of technology corporations with the military has been combined with attacks on tech workers who oppose the alliance of the firms for which they work with the US war machine.
Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of America’s brightest minds have gone to work in Northern California’s Silicon Valley and its offshoot in Seattle, lured by promises that “people with passion can change the world for the better,” in the words of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and the promise that they would help “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” in the words of Google’s mission statement.
But each year, more and more technology workers have found themselves involved in developing the means to carry out mass murder, censorship and political repression, prompting protests by workers at Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
In June, Amazon workers issued an open letter opposing the company’s provision of facial recognition technology to police forces as well as its cloud computing contracts with the agencies carrying out Trump’s Gestapo-style attacks on immigrants.
That same month, Google announced that it would end its involvement in a Pentagon program to build artificial intelligence capabilities for military drones after more than a thousand Google employees signed a letter demanding that Google swear off building “weapons of war.”
The Washington Post has opposed these protests. In an August 8 op-ed, two executives from Anduril Industries, a military defense contractor seeking to sell virtual reality systems to the Pentagon, condemned the protesting workers. “We understand that tech workers want to build things used to help, not harm,” the executives wrote. “We feel the same way,” they continued. “But ostracizing the US military could have the opposite effect of what these protesters intend: If tech companies want to promote peace, they should stand with, not against, the United States’ defense community.”
The authors added: “The world is safer and more peaceful with strong US leadership. That requires the US government to maintain its advantage in critical technologies such as AI. But doing so will be difficult if Silicon Valley’s rising hostility toward working with Washington continues.”
The Post reiterated these points in an editorial last week entitled “Silicon Valley should work with the military on AI.” Bezos’s newspaper made the cynical argument that the technology companies should partner with the Pentagon because the result might be technologies with applications outside of mass murder. “DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] contractors will probably develop products with non-lethal applications,” the Post declared.
The open secret of Silicon Valley’s collaboration with the Pentagon is that the wars to be fought with the help of artificial intelligence will not take place only beyond America’s borders—they will also include class and civil wars.
America’s financial oligarchy, whose wealth has more than doubled
since the 2008 financial crash, is issuing warnings about the dangers
posed to its wealth by an increasingly restive and angry working class.
In a report published last week, JPMorgan
Chase warned about the potential impact of a
new financial crisis in fueling political
opposition.
since the 2008 financial crash, is issuing warnings about the dangers
posed to its wealth by an increasingly restive and angry working class.
In a report published last week, JPMorgan
Chase warned about the potential impact of a
new financial crisis in fueling political
opposition.
The balance sheet by the biggest US bank stated:
“The next crisis is also likely to result in social
tensions similar to those witnessed 50 years ago
in 1968”—a year that saw urban rebellions and
mass protests against the Vietnam war in the US,
the May–June general strike in France, and a
global radicalization of the working class.
“The next crisis is also likely to result in social
tensions similar to those witnessed 50 years ago
in 1968”—a year that saw urban rebellions and
mass protests against the Vietnam war in the US,
the May–June general strike in France, and a
global radicalization of the working class.
“In 1968,” the report continued, “TV and investigative journalism provided a generation of baby boomers access to unfiltered information on social developments such as Vietnam and other proxy wars, civil rights movements, income inequality, etc. Similar to 1968, the internet today (social media, leaked documents, etc.) provides millennials with unrestricted access to information on a surprisingly similar range of issues. In addition to information, the internet provides a platform for various social groups to become more self-aware, polarized and organized.”
Such groups “span various social dimensions based on differences in income/wealth,” warned the bank. In other words, the looming financial crisis will likely spark a mass movement of the working class against social inequality.
Recognizing the immense power of the internet to mobilize opposition to the existing social order, under conditions where a mass audience for socialism is emerging among workers and young people, America’s leading technology companies, working with the state, are scrambling to impose political censorship.
At a congressional hearing last week, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg pledged to replace “bad speech” with “alternative facts” in users’ news feeds. She boasted that her company now employs some 20,000 people to censor content.
Google, for its part, has continued and intensified its censorship of left-wing, anti-war and socialist websites. Since we first reported last year that changes to Google’s algorithms had led to a sharp fall in the readership of 13 left-wing sites, the search traffic of these sites has plunged even further, hitting a combined decline of 50 percent.
The reactionary nexus between Silicon Valley, the CIA and the
Pentagon must be—and will be—opposed. All over the world, workers are entering into struggle—from teachers and Amazon, UPS and postal workers in the United States, to pilots and cabin crew in Europe, to construction workers in Turkey. These workers must understand that they are the targets of censorship, and that they must mobilize to fight the drive to silence socialist and left-wing oppositional views.
Pentagon must be—and will be—opposed. All over the world, workers are entering into struggle—from teachers and Amazon, UPS and postal workers in the United States, to pilots and cabin crew in Europe, to construction workers in Turkey. These workers must understand that they are the targets of censorship, and that they must mobilize to fight the drive to silence socialist and left-wing oppositional views.
Decade after financial crisis
JPMorgan predicts next one’s
coming soon
Published
time: 13 Sep, 2018 14:00
© Ole Spata
/ Global Look Press
With the 10th anniversary
approaching of the catalyst for the last major global stock market crash – the
Lehman Brothers’ collapse – strategists from JPMorgan are predicting the next
financial crisis to strike in 2020.
Wall Street’s largest
investment bank analyzed the causes of the crash and measures taken by
governments and central banks across the world to stop the crisis in 2008, and
found that the economy remains propped up by those extraordinary steps.
According to the bank’s
analysis, the next crisis will probably be less painful, however, diminished
financial market liquidity since the 2008 implosion is a “wildcard” that’s
tough to game out.
“The main attribute of
the next crisis will be severe liquidity disruptions resulting from these
market developments since the last crisis,” the reports says.
Changes to central bank
policy are seen by JPMorgan analysts as a risk to stocks, which by one measure
have been in the longest bull market in history since the bottom of the crisis.
JPMorgan’s Marko
Kolanovic has previously concluded that the big shift away from actively
managed investing has escalated the danger of market disruptions.
“The shift from active to
passive asset management, and specifically the decline of active value
investors, reduces the ability of the market to prevent and recover from large
drawdowns,” said JPMorgan’s Joyce Chang and Jan Loeys.
The bank estimates that
actively managed accounts make up only about one-third of equity assets under
management, with active single-name trading responsible for just 10 percent or
so of trading volume.
JPMorgan referred to its
hypothetical scenario
as the “great liquidity crisis,” claiming
that the
timing of when it could occur “will largely be
determined by
the pace of central bank
normalization, business cycle dynamics, and
various
idiosyncratic events such as escalation of
trade war waged by the current US
administration.”
World’s top 5
‘most evil’ corporations
Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon, poses
as he stands atop a supply truck during a photo opportunity at the premises of
a shopping mall in the southern Indian city of Bangalore © Abhishek N.
Chinnappa / Reuters
Most companies become successful thanks to their stellar reputations.
But not always. RT Business scraped the bottom of the barrel to find the most
hated companies trending on the internet.
Monsanto
The company that needs no introduction, creator of DDT and Agent
Orange, Monsanto is one the world’s largest pesticide and GMO seed
manufacturers. It is known for being the first company to genetically modify a
seed to make it resistant to pesticides and herbicides. Monsanto’s herbicides
have been blamed for killing millions of crop acres, while its chemicals were added
to blacklists of products causing cancer and many other health problems.
EU to approve ‘marriage made in hell’
between #Bayer & #Monsanto https://on.rt.com/903s
Apple
Once the darling of Microsoft-hating gadget lovers, Apple more
recently has been accused of mistreating or underpaying their employees, hiding
money offshore, and not paying taxes. It has also been accused of violating
health or environmental legislation, and misusing its position where they have
a monopoly in the market. And, oh yes, deliberately slowing older iPhones and
overcharging for its products to boot.
'No consent': #Apple sued for deliberately slowing down older
iPhones https://on.rt.com/8ven
Apple sued for
deliberately slowing down older iPhones — RT Business News
Nestle
The world's largest food and beverage company Nestle says it is
committed to enhancing quality of life and contributing to a healthier future.
However, it has been dragged through numerous scandals involving slave labor.
The multinational is one of the most boycotted corporations in the world, as
violations of labor rights have been reported at its factories in different
countries.
Nestlé admits possibility of slave labor in
its coffee #supplychain http://hubs.ly/H02j9Hs0
Philip Morris
The products of the American multinational cigarette and tobacco
manufacturing company are sold in over 180 countries outside the United States.
Philip Morris owns Marlboro, one of the world's biggest brands. Back in 1999,
Philip Morris courted officials of the Czech Republic by explaining how smoking
would in fact help their economy, due to the reduced healthcare costs from its
citizens dying early.
McDonald's
American fast-food company McDonald's was founded in 1940. The
company serves more customers each day than the entire population of Great
Britain, but has a long history of terrible labor practices. It has been
constantly under fire for serving unhealthy junk food, which contributes health
problems. Researchers have found that McDonald’s burgers cannot decompose on
their own.
McDonald’s becomes weed users’
highest-ranking fast food joint. https://on.rt.com/8ofp
McDonald’s becomes
weed users’ highest-ranking fast food joint — RT US News
Notable mentions of corporations not quite evil enough to make the
top list:
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIESJPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google
Facebook
Amazon
Walmart
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business
section
Ten years since the collapse of Lehman
Brothers
15 September 2018
Ten years ago on this
day, the global capitalist system entered its most far-reaching and devastating
crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A decade later none of the
contradictions which produced the financial crisis has been alleviated, much
less overcome. Moreover, the very policies carried out to prevent a total
meltdown of the financial system, involving the outlay of trillions of dollars
by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks, have only created the
conditions for an even bigger disaster.
The immediate trigger
for the onset of the crisis was the decision by US financial authorities not to
bail out the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers and prevent its
bankruptcy. There is considerable evidence to suggest that this was a
deliberate decision by the Federal Reserve to create the necessary conditions
for what they knew would have to be a massive bailout, not just of a series of
banks but the entire financial system.
The previous March, the
Fed had organised a $30 billion rescue of Bear Stearns when it was taken over
by JP Morgan. But as the Fed’s own minutes from that time make clear the Bear
Stearns crisis was just the tip of a huge financial iceberg. The Fed noted that
“given the fragile conditions of the financial markets at the time” and the
“expected contagion” that would result from its demise it was necessary to
organise a bailout. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke later testified, a sudden
failure would have led to a “chaotic unwinding” of positions in financial
markets. The bailout of Bear Stearns was not a solution but a holding operation
to try to buy time and prepare for what was coming.
While the demise of
Lehman was the initial trigger, the most significant event was the impending
bankruptcy, revealed just two days later, of the American insurance firm AIG,
which was at the centre of a system of complex financial products running into
trillions of dollars.
Due to the
interconnections of the global financial system, the crisis rapidly extended to
financial markets around the world, above all across the Atlantic to Europe where
the banks had been major investors in the arcane financial instruments that had
been developed around the US sub-prime home mortgage market, the collapse of
which provided the immediate trigger for the crisis.
The value of every
crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals and starkly lays bare the
underlying socio-economic and political relations that are concealed in
“normal” times. The collapse of 2008 is no exception.
In the twenty years and
more preceding the crisis, particularly in the aftermath of the liquidation of
the Soviet Union in 1991, the bourgeoisie and its ideologists had proclaimed
not only the superiority of the capitalist “free market” but that it was the
only possible socio-economic form of organisation. Basing themselves on the
false identification of the Stalinist regime with socialism, they maintained
that its liquidation signified that Marxism was forever dead and buried. In
particular, Marx’s analysis of the fundamental and irresolvable contradictions
of the capitalist mode of production had proved to be false. According to the
central foundation for what passed for theoretical analysis, the so-called
“efficient markets hypothesis,” a financial meltdown was impossible because
with the development of advanced technologies all information had been priced
into decision making and so a financial collapse was impossible.
Rarely have the
nostrums of the bourgeoisie and its ideologists been so graphically exposed.
Two days after the
crisis erupted, President George W. Bush declared “this sucker’s going down.”
Later, the high priest of capitalism and its “free market,” the now bewildered
former head of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, testified to the US
Congress that he had been completely confounded because markets had failed to
behave according to his “model” and its assumptions.
The crisis also exposed
in full glare another of the central myths of the capitalist order—that the
state is somehow a neutral or independent organisation committed to regulating
social and economic affairs in the interests of society as a whole.
It confirmed another
central tenet of Marxism, expounded more than 170 years ago, that “the
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the bourgeoisie.”
This was exemplified in
the naked class response to the financial meltdown. The plans, already
developed by the Fed and other authorities to cover the losses of the financial
elite, whose speculative and in many cases outright criminal activities had
sparked the crisis, were put into operation.
In the lead-up to the
presidential election of November 4, Wall Street swung its support behind
Obama—with the media promoting him as the candidate of “hope” and “change you
can believe in”—over McCain. The Democrats had committed themselves to the
bailout, securing the passage of the $700 billion TARP asset-purchasing program
through Congress. This massive increase in the national debt of the United
States was authorised with virtually no debate.
Of course, a new
political fiction was immediately advanced. It was necessary to bail out Wall
Street first, the public was told, in order to assist Main Street. However,
this lie was rapidly exposed. The crisis was the starting point for a massive
assault on the working class. While bankers and financial speculators continued
to receive their bonuses, millions of American families lost their homes. Tens
of millions were made unemployed.
In the following year,
the rescue operation organised by the Obama administration of Chrysler and
General Motors, with the active and full collaboration of the United Auto
Workers union, resulted in the development of new forms of exploitation, above
all through the two-tier wages system, paving the way for even more brutal
systems such as those pioneered by Amazon.
This was the other side
of a Wall Street bailout—a massive restructuring of class relations in line
with the edict of Obama’s one-time chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to “never let a
serious crisis go to waste” because it provides “an opportunity to do things
you think you could not do before.”
The same class response
was in evidence elsewhere. After the initial effects of the crisis had been
overcome, the European bourgeoisie initiated an austerity drive forcing up
youth unemployment to record levels. In Britain workers have endured a
sustained decline in real wages not seen in more than a century.
The most egregious
expression of this class logic has been seen in Greece with the imposition of
poverty levels last seen in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The numerous
bailout operations were never aimed at “rescuing” the Greek economy and its
population but directed to extracting the resources to repay the major banks
and financial institutions.
The crisis revealed the
real nature of bourgeois democracy. The euro zone and the European Union were
exposed as nothing more than a mechanism for the dictatorship of European
finance capital. As one of the chief enforcers of its diktats, the former
German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, declared, in the face of popular
opposition, “elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.”
As the working class in
every country confronts stagnant and declining wages, falling living standards,
the scrapping of secure employment and attacks on social services, leading to
mounting health and other problems, innumerable reports and data chart the
development of a global system in which wealth is siphoned up the income scale.
According to the latest
Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report some 255,810 “ultra-high net worth”
individuals, with a minimum of $30 million in wealth, now collectively own
$31.5 trillion, more than the bottom 80 percent of the world’s
population—comprising 5.6 billion people. Overall the wealth of this cohort
increased by 16.3 percent in 2016–17, rising by 13.1 percent in North America,
13.5 percent in Europe and 26.7 percent in Asia.
The full significance
of the bailouts of the financial system and the subsequent provision of
trillions of dollars is clear. It has brought about the institutionalisation of
a process, developing over the preceding decades, where the financial system,
with the stock market at its centre, functions as a mechanism for the transfer
of wealth to the heights of society.
In its analysis of the
financial crisis, the World Socialist Web Site insisted from
the outset that this was not a conjunctural development, from which there would
be a “recovery,” but a breakdown of the entire capitalist mode of production.
That analysis has been
completely confirmed. While a total financial meltdown was prevented, the
diseases of the profit system that gave rise to the crisis have not been
overcome. Rather, they have metastasised and mutated into new and even more
malignant forms.
The actions of the US
Federal Reserve and other major central banks in pumping trillions of dollars
into the financial system in order to “rescue” it, and to enable the
continuation of the very forms of speculation that led to the crisis, have only
created the conditions for a new disaster in which the central banks themselves
will be directly involved.
This fact of economic
and financial life can even be seen in the comments by bourgeois analysts and
pundits on the occasion of the upcoming anniversary. While they generally
maintain that the financial system has been “strengthened” since 2008—a
completely worthless assertion given that it was held to be strong in the lead
up to the crash and any warnings of growing risks were dismissed as “Luddite”
by such luminaries as former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers—no one
dares to proclaim that the underlying problems have been resolved.
Rather, taking heed
from the warning of JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon that while the trigger for the
next crisis will not be the same as the last but “there will be another
crisis”, they nervously scan the horizon for signs of where it might strike.
Some analysts point to
the rise in global debt, which is now running at 217 percent of gross domestic
product, an increase of 40 percentage points since 2007, contrary to all
expectations that, since debt was a major cause of the 2008 crisis, some
deleveraging would have occurred.
Others single out the
mounting problems in so-called emerging markets facing repayments on
dollar-denominated loans, a source of speculation when interest rates were at
record lows but which now present major refinancing problems as interest rates
have started to rise.
The seemingly
unstoppable rise of stock markets, fuelled by the provision of ultra-cheap
money by the Fed and other central banks, is also an issue of concern. The
increased use of passive investment funds tied to global indexes via computer
trading systems tends to reinforce downswings as has been seen in a series of
“flash crashes” such as that of last February when Wall Street fell by as much
as 1,600 points in intraday trading.
The greatest source of
anxiety, although it is not mentioned so much publicly, is the resurgence of
the working class and the push for increased wages. To the extent it is
discussed publicly, this fear, manifested in stock market falls generated by
news of relatively small wage increases, is generally couched in terms of
“political tensions” caused by increased social inequality.
A further expression of
the ongoing and deepening breakdown of the capitalist order is the disintegration
of all the geo-political structures and relationships that have constituted the
framework within which the movements of capitalist economy and finance have
flowed throughout the post-war period.
In the wake of the 2008
crisis, the leaders of the G20 gathered in April 2009, in the midst of a
collapse in world trade taking place at a faster rate than in 1930. They
pledged to never again go down the road of the protectionist tariff policies
that had played such a disastrous role in the Great Depression and had worked
to create the conditions for the outbreak of World War II, just ten years after
the Wall Street crash of October 1929.
That commitment lies in
tatters as the Trump administration, seeking to counter the economic decline of
the US so graphically revealed in the 2008 collapse, embarks on ever widening
trade war measures.
The principal target,
at least to this point, is China. But the Trump administration has designated
the European Union as an economic “foe,” and has already implemented trade war
measures against it, with more in the pipeline.
The G7, the grouping of
major capitalist powers set up in the wake of the world recession of 1974–75
and the end of the post-war boom to try to regulate the affairs of world
capitalism, exists in name only following the acrimonious split at its meeting
last June with the US decision to impose tariffs against its nominal “strategic
allies.”
World war has not yet
broken out. But there are innumerable flashpoints—in the Middle East, in
Eastern Europe, in North East Asia and in the South China Sea to cite just some
examples—where a conflict could erupt between nuclear-armed powers. The impetus
for a new global conflagration is the drive by US imperialism to counter its
economic decline by asserting its dominance over the Eurasian landmass at the
expense of its enemies and allies alike.
It is of enormous
significance that the civil war that has erupted in the American state
apparatus between the state and military-intelligence apparatus, whose
mouthpiece is the Democratic Party, and the Trump administration is over how
this objective should be accomplished; that is, whether the American drive
should be directed in the first instance against Russia or China. At the same
time, all the major powers are boosting their military budgets in preparation
for the escalation of military conflicts.
The political system in
every country is beset by deep crisis. The very rapidity of the crisis is
accentuating the contradictions between the objective dangers and the level of
class consciousness. The chief obstacle to achieving the necessary alignment of
working class consciousness with the objective reality of capitalist crisis on
a world scale remains the reactionary political role of the old bureaucratised
labour and trade union organisations, abetted by the various pseudo-left
tendencies, in suppressing the class struggle. But the conditions are
developing for these shackles to be broken.
In the founding program
of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky wrote: “The orientation of the mass
is determined first by the objective conditions of decaying capitalism, and
second, by the treacherous policies of the old workers’ organisations. Of these
factors, the first, of course, is the decisive one: the laws of history are
stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus.”
That perspective is now
being confirmed in the resurgence of the class struggle internationally, above
all in the centre of world capitalism, the United States.
Conscious of their
profound weakness in the face of such a movement, and fully aware of its
revolutionary implications, the ruling classes in every country have been
developing ever-more authoritarian forms of rule.
Their greatest fear is
the development of political consciousness, that is, the understanding in wider
sections of the working class, and above all the youth, of its real situation,
that its enemy is the entire capitalist system. Above all, the ruling elites
fear the development of a revolutionary socialist movement, based on the
principles and program of the Fourth International. This is why the World
Socialist Web Site is the central target of internet censorship. It
is also the reason for the escalation of attacks by the German coalition
government on the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, the German section of the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
But the efforts to
suppress the work of the International Committee will fail. The renewal of
class struggle will provide new forces for the development of the working of
the ICFI throughout the world.
The meltdown of 2008
demonstrated above all that the working class confronts a global crisis. The
crisis can therefore be resolved only on a global scale through the unification
of the working class across national borders and barriers on the basis of an
international socialist program for the reconstruction of society to meet human
need and not profit.
Nick Beams
Who Can We Blame For The Great Recession?
|
This year
marks the tenth anniversary of the “Great Recession” and the media are trying
to determine if we have learned anything from it. The Queen visited the London
School of Economics after the “Great Recession” to ask her chief economists why
they hadn’t seen this disaster coming. They told her they would get back to her
with an answer. Later, they wrote her a letter saying that the best
economic theory asserts that recessions are random events and they had
successfully predicted that no one can predict recessions.
Still,
George Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine since 2003, thinks he
knows more than the LSE academics. He wrote the following in the August 27 print issue:
"It was caused by reckless lending practices, Wall Street greed,
outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W. Bush years, and
deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest
source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no
matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into
debt...
"In February, 2009, with the
economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month, Congress passed a stimulus
bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts, aid to states, and
infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists of every
persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not a single
Republican member of the House."
Typically,
journalists will defer to an expert on matters in which they aren’t trained,
which is most subjects. But Packer didn’t bother to ask an economist as the
Queen did. Had he done so, he would have received the same answer from
mainstream economists – recessions are random events and can’t be predicted. If
economists knew the causes of recessions they could predict them when they see
the causes present.
So where
did Packer get his “causes” for the latest recession? In the classic movie
Casablanca, the corrupt and lazy policeman Renault is “shocked” to find
gambling going on at Rick’s place and orders the others to round up the “usual
suspects.” That’s what Packer does. People have blamed greedy businessmen and
bankers for crises for centuries. Since the rise of socialism they added
capitalism and the politicians who support it. The only new suspect in the
socialist line up is inequality, even though inequality has varied little since
1900 and is near its record low since then.
Had
Packer consulted the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he
wouldn’t have received much help. Keep in mind that mainstream economists think
recessions are random events. After the storm subsides, they can identify
likely contributors for the latest disaster, but those differ with each
recession. Recently Chicago Booth queried experts for the top contributing
factors of the latest recession. The top answer was flawed regulations,
followed by underestimating risk and mortgage fraud.
The
“flawed regulations” excuse assumes that bitter bureaucrats who write the
regulations are wiser than the actual bankers and ignores the fact that banking
is one of the most regulated industries. One analyst described the recent
recession as the perfect storm of regulations so massive no one group could
understand them all and many of them working against other regulations.
Blaming
“underestimated risk” is good Monday morning quarterbacking. Everyone has 20/20
hindsight, or 50/50 as quarterback Cam Newton said. The same economists don’t
explain why banks that took similar risks didn’t fail or why what seems risky
now didn’t seem so risky in 2007. As for fraud, the amount was negligible and
is always there; why did it contribute to a recession this time? Sadly, the
correct answer to what caused the Great Recession– “Loose monetary policy” –
came in next to last among Chicago Booth’s experts.
Perspective
is vital. A magnifying glass can make a lady bug look terrifying. Let’s pull
back and put the latest recession in a broader context. There have been 47
recessions/depressions since the birth of the nation. Before the Great
Depression economists called crises “depressions” and since then they are
“recessions.” They’re the same thing; economists thought “recession” was less
scary.
Recessions
before the Great Depression were mild compared to it. It took the Federal
Reserve and the US government working together trying to “rescue” us to plunge
the country into history’s worst economic disaster. Journalists like Packer
have convinced people that the Great Recession of 2008 was second only to the
Great Depression, but if we combine the recessions of 1981 and 1982, separated
only by a technicality and six months, that recession would have been worse.
The Fed did not reduce interest rates after that recession because it was still
battling the inflation it has caused in the 1970s, yet the economy bounced back
and recovery lasted almost a decade.
I want to
drive home the fact that the three worst recessions in our history assaulted us
after the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
The best
explanation of the causes of recessions, because it enjoys the greatest
empirical support, is the Austrian business-cycle theory, or ABCT. Ludwig von
Mises and Friedrich Hayek are most famous for refining and expounding it, but
the English economists of the Manchester school were the first to write about
it. They discovered that expansions of the money supply through low interest
rates motivated businesses to borrow and invest at a rapid rate. That launches
an unsustainable boom because businesses are trying to deploy more capital
goods than exist. Banks raise rates to rein in galloping inflation and the boom
turns to dust.
Banks
don’t control interest rates today as they did in the past. That’s the Federal
Reserve’s job. The Fed generally reduces interest rates or expands the money
supply through “quantitative easing,” or buying bonds from banks, in order to
force an economy in the ditch to climb out. The recovery from the Great
Recession remained on its feet for so long
because the Fed’s policy of paying interest on
reserves at banks soaked up much of the new
money it created out of thin air. Also, much of the money went overseas to buy imports or as investments.
Recession remained on its feet for so long
because the Fed’s policy of paying interest on
reserves at banks soaked up much of the new
money it created out of thin air. Also, much of the money went overseas to buy imports or as investments.
The
lesson – don’t ask medical advice from your plumber or economics from a
journalist. And if you ask an economist, make sure he follows the Austrian
school.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS
THAN BARACK OBAMA!
“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
OBAMA and HIS BANKS: THEIR PROFITS, CRIMES and LOOTING
SOAR
This
was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the
contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013
that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their
CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Why the swamp has little to fear
By Rick Hayes
The midterm elections will either
halt or hasten the current soft coup whose aim is to overthrow a legally
elected President now being conducted by the swamp. And if the
history of Washington, D.C. corruption is any indication of what will happen
after the midterms, the swamp will survive regardless of its coup's success or
failure. But the efforts to expose the treasonous plot will fade away
into the dustbin of political history after being seen as just another waste of
time and taxpayer money. The seemingly endless parade of corruption
scandals and mind-numbing criminal activity will go on unabated and continue to
escalate to unimaginable heights because of an inescapable fact of human
nature.
In a Forbes 2015
article entitled "The Big Bank Bailout," author Mike Collins mentions
several ways to prevent another housing bubble crisis from destroying the world
economy when he writes, "But perhaps the best solution is to make the CEOs
and top managers of the banks criminally liable for breaking these rules so
that they fear going to jail. These people are not afraid to do it
again so if you can’t put some real fear in their heads, they will do it
again."
What Collins has honed
in on is accountability and punishment, the very things lacking in today's
dealings with the swamp. Just as the major banking institutions will
soon, if not already, re-enter into risky, corrupt, and illegal lending
practices because there was not a "smidgen" of accountability for the
trillions of dollars they lost in the housing bubble catastrophe, so too will
the past and presently unknown criminals within the IRS, FBI, and DOJ continue
to thumb their noses at the law.
What the American people have been
subjected to over the past 18 months since President Trump took office is a
series of crimes that have been painstakingly unearthed but little
else. "Earth-shattering," "bombshell," and "constitutional
crisis" are just some of the words and phrases used by media outlets to
describe the newest update regarding the many ongoing
investigations. These words are meant to shock the audience but no
longer have the impact they once did because of their overuse and because of
the likely lack of any substantive outcome. What Americans have seen
are trials without consequences, clear proof of guilt with no
punishment. Draining the swamp without
any repercussions to the swamp creatures inside is like going on a diet but
eating the same foods.
Americans witnessed no accountability
regarding exhaustive investigations into the deadly circumstances surrounding
the swamp's gun-walking campaign named Fast and Furious, a program where U.S.
Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and hundreds of innocent Mexican citizens were
killed with guns the government sold to criminals. The swamp
continued on its power mission and attempted the deceitful confiscation of
America's health care with Obamacare, whose real aim was a redistribution of
the nation's wealth. After little pushback and the passage of
Obamacare, Americans witnessed Benghazi in 2012, and when nothing
was accomplished over the investigations of that tragedy, the swamp trampled on
the rights of conservatives in what became known as the IRS scandal of
2013. Nothing was done about that. And on and on, with
the swamp committing one bigger and bolder crime after the next with
impunity.
So we have arrived at the doorstep of
the Russian collusion investigation farce by first traveling through the swamp
of unsolved crimes perpetrated inside the Obama administration. With
the passage of time, swamp-dwellers like Eric Holder and Lois Lerner,
knee-deep in the mud with congressional contempt charges, continue to be
financially enriched and will slowly be forgotten, while more recognizable
swamp royalty like Hillary Clinton get to run for president.
Until Americans see
guilty members within the United States government wearing orange jumpsuits and
serving time, the investigations and congressional hearings are mere sideshow
spectacles to appease the masses.
Google Executive Profile: VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker
In a recently leaked video of a Google all-hands “TGIF” meeting, the company’s Senior Vice President for Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer, Kent Walker, made a number of disparaging comments about President Trump and other populist movements — so who is Kent Walker?
In a recently leaked video from a Google meeting, Kent Walker, the company’s Senior Vice President for Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer, can be heard making a number of comments about the election of President Trump and the broader populist movement worldwide.
During the meeting Walker stated that “Fear… xenophobia, hatred” is responsible for “self-destructive” populist victories around the world, such as President Trump’s election. Walker later states: “History teaches us that there are periods of populism, of nationalism that rise up, and that’s all the reason we need to be in the arena… That’s why we have to work so hard to ensure that it doesn’t turn into a World War or something catastrophic, but instead is a blip, is a hiccup.”
So who is Walker? Walker is Google’s Senior Vice President for Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer — one of the most senior executives in the company — and is known for recently being rejected to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. When Google was asked to testify on the topic of possible interference in the 2016 election by the Senate Intelligence Committee, they put Walker forward to testify on behalf of the company instead of CEO Sundar Pichai or co-founder Sergey Brin, a selection that the committee was not happy with.
Senator Richard Burr, Chairman of the committee at the time, rejected Google’s offer to send Walker to testify stating: “I told them I wasn’t accepting the senior vice president.” In response, Walker published his entire planned testimony online which included quotes such as:
We believe that we have a responsibility to prevent the misuse of our platforms and we take that very seriously. Our efforts in this area started many years before the 2016 election. We work to detect and minimize opportunities for manipulation and abuse, constantly tackling new threats and bad actors that arise. Google was founded with a mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful; the abuse of the tools and platforms we build is antithetical to that mission.
Walker also delivered a speech at the IAPP Privacy Summit in 2015 where he stated that “protecting privacy is tough” and discussed how Google regularly deals with privacy issues on a daily basis:
Walker has not previously discussed his own political views that openly before, his comments during the leaked Google all-hands “TGIF” meeting provided some of the first direct examples of Walker’s personal views. During the meeting, Walker made statements such as: “We do think that history is on our side in a profound and important way … the moral arc of history is long but it bends towards progress… While it may be that the Internet and globalization were part of the cause of this problem, we are also fundamentally an essential part of the solution to this problem.”
The full meeting including Walker’s comments can be found here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
‘Silent Donation’: Corporate Emails Reveal Google
Executives’ Efforts to Turn Out Latino Voters Who
They Thought Would Vote for Clinton
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/10/silent-donation-corporate-emails-reveal-google-executives-efforts-to-swing-election-to-hillary-clinton-with-latino-outreach-campaign/
An email chain among senior Google executives from the day after the 2016 presidential election reveals the company tried to influence the 2016 United States presidential election on behalf of one candidate, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In the emails, a Google executive describes efforts to pay for free rides for a certain sect of the population to the polls–a get-out-the-vote for Hispanic voters operation–and how these efforts were because she thought it would help Hillary Clinton win the general election in 2016. She also used the term “silent donation” to describe Google’s contribution to the effort to elect Clinton president.
The main email, headlined, “Election results and the Latino vote,” was sent on Nov. 9, 2016—the day after Clinton’s loss to Trump in the 2016 presidential election—by Eliana Murillo, Google’s Multicultural Marketing department head.
The four page email begins with Murillo claiming she and others at Google were engaged in non-partisan activities not designed to help any one candidate or another—only to undercut her own commentary in later passages in the emails by openly admitting the entire effort to boost Latino turnout using Google products with official company resources was to elect Clinton over Trump.
The critical miscalculation, Murillo wrote in a stunning admission in the email, was that Latino voters backed Trump by higher margins than any experts had forecast in the lead-up to the election. Trump’s 29 percent among Hispanics nationally blew prognosticators away, and he hit even higher numbers—about 31 percent—in the key battleground state of Florida, Murillo admitted.
Murillo wrote at the outset of the lengthy message:
We worked very hard. Many people did. We pushed tp get out the Latino vote with our features, our partners, and our voices. We kept our Google efforts non-partisan and followed our company’s protocols for the elections strategy. We emphasized our mission to give Latinos access to information so that they can make an informed decision at the polls, and we feel very grateful for all the support to do this important work. Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, particularly with early votes. A large percentage of Latino voters in Florida were new voters who had become citizens just in time to vote. We saw high traffic for the search queries ‘votar,’ ‘como votar,’ and ‘donde voter,’ in key states like Florida and Nevada. We will be pulling in more info in the coming hours/days but so far we definitely know there was high traffic on search in Spanish. Without translating our tools the users wouldn’t have found the information they needed. Objectively speaking, our goal was met — we pushed and successfully launched the search features in Spanish, and we thank Lisa for her support in advocating for this work. I sent Philipp a note yesterday to thank him because he and others voiced their support for this too, and we greatly appreciate it. Even Sundar gave the effort a shout out and a comment in Spanish, which was really special.
“Sundar” presumably refers to Google’s chief executive officer Sundar Pichai, who took the reins of the massive search giant in October 2015. “Lisa” presumably refers to Lisa Gevelber, the vice president of Global Marketing for Google—who forwarded Murillo’s entire four-page email to several other Google executives in another chain also obtained by Breitbart News in which Gevelber praises Murillo’s activities with official company resources as having made a “great difference.” “Philipp” presumably refers to Philipp Schindler, a senior vice president and Google’s chief business officer per his LinkedIn page.
The emails were first revealed on Fox News on Monday evening on Tucker Carlson Tonight by anchor Tucker Carlson in a special report. Breitbart News also obtained them, and has reached out to Google with a number of questions about the emails.
Carlson, in his exclusive report on Fox News Monday night, compared the revelations in the Google emails to the probe of Russian interference in the U.S. election to Special Counsel Robert Mueller—raising the question about how much influence tech giants like Google and Facebook have on election outcomes in the United States.
Carlson cited Dr. Robert Epstein, a social scientist and an expert on Google, who has said, in Carlson’s words, “Google alone could determine the outcome of almost any election just by altering its search selections and we would never know it.”
Epstein has published research detailing how
Google could influence the results of U.S.
elections. Breitbart News has exclusively
published several of Epstein’s reports, including a
recent one showing that Google search
manipulation can swing huge swaths of voters.
Google could influence the results of U.S.
elections. Breitbart News has exclusively
published several of Epstein’s reports, including a
recent one showing that Google search
manipulation can swing huge swaths of voters.
In his report on Monday night, Carlson then described the emails he obtained, which Breitbart News also obtained. Carlson said:
This wasn’t a get-out-the-vote effort or whatever they say. It wasn’t aimed at all potential voters. It wasn’t even aimed at a balanced cross-section of subgroups. Google didn’t try to get out the vote among say Christian Arabs in Michigan or say Persian Jews in Los Angeles—they sometimes vote Republican. It was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic Party. Furthermore, this mobilization effort targeted not only the entire country but swing states vital to the Hillary campaign. This was not an exercise in civics, this was political consulting. It was in effect an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
Carlson noted that in communication with Google, the company “did not deny that the email was real or that it showed a clear political preference.”
“Their only defense was that the activities they described were either non-partisan or were not officially taken by the company,” Carlson said Monday night, describing Google’s official response to his requests for comment, before challenging the company’s response: “But of course they were both. Plenty of people in Google knew what was going on and we haven’t seen any evidence anyone at Google disapproved of it and tried to rein it in.”
The email from Murillo continues by explaining just how expansive the efforts the company undertook to achieve its objective were:
We had our partners help spread the word about our features on social media, including YouTubers and influencers like Dulce Candy, Jorge Narvaez, Jessie y Joy, Barbara Bermudo, and Pamela Silva of Univision, Jackie Cruz aka La Flaca from Orange is the New Black, and more. We promoted our partner the Latino Community Foundation’s non-partisan #YoVoyaVotaryTu (I’m going to vote, are you?) campaign and leveraged our social media influencer friends’ reach to hit over 11M impressions with that hashtag. We hosted an event with over 200 people and a hangout with social media influencers about the power of the Latino vote and the new research Nielsen published about the Latino electorate. This reached 4.4M social media impressions and signaled to many that Google and our partners value the Latino community and our role in this election. We brought the same research to the LATISM conference, where people were beyond thrilled to see Google’s support and acknowledgment of the Latino community.
If Murillo had ended her email there, this probably would not amount to the level of a national news story. But she did not: She went on for another several paragraphs on the first page and an extra three pages to admit the openly partisan intent of Google’s actions, including a remarkable in-writing confirmation that at least one of Google’s actions amounted to a “silent donation”—something that could raise Federal Election Commission (FEC) red flags if authorities decide to launch an official investigation into this matter, now that these emails have been publicly revealed.
It is in the next paragraph that Murillo openly admits that Google made a “silent donation,” in her words, paying for rides to polls via leftist organization Voto Latino. Murillo wrote in the next paragraph:
We also supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states (silent donation). We even helped them create ad campaigns to promote the rides (with support from HOLA folks who rallied and volunteered their time to help). We supported Voto Latino to help them land an interview with Senator Meza of Arizona (key state for us) to talk about the election and how to use Google search to find information about how to vote. They were a strong partner, among many in this effort.
The next paragraph is where Murillo begins to make her next major admission: that the effort was not just to increase voter turnout generally but to elect Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
“Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us,” Murillo wrote. “We never anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. We saw headlines like this about early voter turn out and thought that this was finally the year that the ‘sleeping giant’ had awoken.”
On the next page, the email continues with a headline from an article in The Atlantic by James Fallows: “2016: The Year Latinos Saved America?”
Under that was a tweet from Jon Ralston of Ralston Reports in Nevada saying, among other things, that “Trump is dead” because of Latino turnout in early voting in the state. Trump did not end up winning Nevada in the end, but he did beat Clinton in 30 and a half other states.
Here is the Ralston tweet contained in Murillo’s internal Google email, as well as in the Atlantic piece. by Fallows:
Final (almost) NV early #s are in:
Trump is dead.
GOP in big trouble in #nvsen, two House seats and #nvleg control.ktnv.com/news/ralston/t…
Trump is dead.
GOP in big trouble in #nvsen, two House seats and #nvleg control.ktnv.com/news/ralston/t…
EARLY VOTING BLOG: Early voting kills Trump in NV
At that point, after the Ralston tweet, Murillo openly admits the partisan motives of Google’s electioneering efforts.
“On personal note, we really thought we had shown up to demonstrate our political power against a candidate who had vehemently offended our community by calling us rapists and drug dealers,” Murillo wrote. “We read the headline and thought WOW, we did it!”
Murillo’s email continues by including another headline, this time from the New Yorker’sBenjamin Wallace-Wells: “Latino Voters Show Trump What It Means to Be American.” That piece was written on Nov. 7, 2016, the day before the election.
Then she begins writing again: “But then reality set in. Only 71% of Latinos voted for Hillary, and that wasn’t enough.”
The third page of the email begins with another headline and image of a Latina woman in a red Make America Great Again hat and “Latinos for Trump” sign. The story, from Ruben Navarette, Jr., published in the Daily Beast, is headlined: “Why the Latino Vote Didn’t Save America.” The sub-headline, “Hispanic voters were supposed to be one of Clinton’s blue firewalls—but one in three ended up splitting for Trump,” is also included in Murillo’s Google email.
From there, Murillo continues writing for another page and a half:
The voters we wanted to reach did end up having an influence in the end, most notably in Florida. Latino voters voted for Trump more in Florida than in other states (31%), and FL was critical by popular vote and the electoral college. We’ll keep an eye on any other results that can show us the influence that our efforts had on the election. We know we gave this our best and are now figuring out what comes next. Thanks again for all your help and support in this effort.
In the next paragraph, Murillo again openly admits she was not “objective” when it came to the election.
“I have tried to stay objective, but I ask that you please give us some time to pause and reflect,” Murillo wrote. “This is devastating for our Democratic Latino community. After all these efforts and what we thought was positive momentum toward change, the results are not what we expected at all. We are afraid for our families, and especially for the millions of immigrants who now don’t know what the future holds for them.”
After that, Murillo says she cannot communicate with key organizers of the effort by Google and its partners—a project known as HOLA—because she is afraid of secret pro-Trump spies on the listservs created. She also admits ongoing discussions among these people about meeting to give grieving Hillary Clinton supporters hugs after Trump crushed her on election day. She also says those involved in Google’s get-out-the-vote efforts were openly seeking consolation after Clinton lost, and that she and another person cried after Trump won – for the first time they have cried due to an election result. Murillo wrote:
What’s most difficult for us is we can’t even email the HOLA list to reach our community and discuss what this means for us because we know that apparently some may actually be Trump supporters. There is a thread right now among the core HOLA group where people are sharing how much they hurt, how much they need support right now, and that they are coordinating in different offices to meet up to just hold each other. One in a remote office said ‘If you guys do any sort of meetings, I’d love to join virtually. I think I’m currently the only Latinx in my office. It’s kinda hard.’ #understatement. Another said, ‘I’ve never cried after an election until last night.’ Same here.
She was not done there. In the next paragraph, Murillo wrote that this election result hurt her badly. She also admits the election result was a “loss,” another indication that Google’s efforts were clearly attempting to use company resources to elect Democrat Clinton over Republican Trump and influence the results of the election. She also says that the company—and herself in particular—will redouble efforts in the future to get a different and more desired result in future elections.
“I’m in shock and it hurts more than I could have ever imagined, but trying to stay optimistic and keep my head high,” Murillo wrote. “Loss is a part of life, and I do think frustrations challenge us to work smarter and get creative. My partners have sent notes and are saying the same thing — time to keep working harder.”
At the top of the fourth page of the email, Murillo asks her colleagues at Google to give out a “smile” to grieving leftist Latinos who work at the company.
“If you see a Latino Googler in the office
(California/New York), please give them a
smile,” Murillo wrote. “They are probably
hurting right now. It’s tough to handle now that
we know not all of us were against this, so we
may be even more divided than ever. At least in
CA/NY though, you can rest assured that the
Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts
and prayers, at least for them and their
families.”
(California/New York), please give them a
smile,” Murillo wrote. “They are probably
hurting right now. It’s tough to handle now that
we know not all of us were against this, so we
may be even more divided than ever. At least in
CA/NY though, you can rest assured that the
Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts
and prayers, at least for them and their
families.”
Then, she continues by stating she is going on a planned vacation she thought she was taking to “celebrate” a Clinton win, but after Trump won, she says, her vacation “will be time to reflect on how to continue to support my community through these difficult times.”
Murillo, in the next line, reveals that she thought she was sharing her viewpoints on these matters in a tight circle that would not leak.
“I’m not sharing my personal opinions very broadly, but wanted to share openly here in the circle of trust,” she wrote.
This email leaked to Fox News and Breitbart News and is now likely to become a centerpiece in the case that Google is throwing its weight around to interfere in elections in the United States in a partisan manner against the duly elected President of the United States.
This email from Murillo was not just from some rogue staffer inside Google. Her original email was forwarded on to other Google executives by the aforementioned Gevelber, according to another email obtained by Breitbart News.
“Thought you all would want to read this,” Gevelber wrote in her own message endorsing Murillo’s email in a message to other Google bigwigs. “It’s from Eliana Murillo who runs US Hispanic Marketing on my team and who helped found HOLA our Hispanic ERC.”
Gevelber continued by commending everyone she said, “worked so hard to ensure all the Get out the Vote were done in Spanish” that their efforts “made a giant difference” in the election “to Googlers and beyond.”
President Trump and Republicans have just begun scratching the surface of bias against them among Silicon Valley’s elite, including, perhaps foremost alongside Facebook, from Google. A source close to the White House who has reviewed these emails ahead of their public release told Breitbart News that in a just world this would amount to, at a minimum, a clear violation of campaign finance law governing in-kind contributions to campaigns and causes.
“How is this any different than Michael Cohen’s alleged conduct?” the source close to the White House told Breitbart News. “Did Google disclose their contribution? No, they didn’t. I guess Bob Mueller is too busy chasing extortionist porn star fairy tales to do anything about it.”
Technically, this would not fall into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s wheelhouse, but if authorities do end up investigating, it would more likely come from the Justice Department generally speaking or any number of federal agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or Federal Election Commission (FEC). It remains to be seen where this goes from here.
“The views expressed in this email are the employee’s personal political views and are not representative of any official stance from the company,” a Google spokesperson told Breitbart News. “Google’s elections efforts — both in 2016 and leading up to this year’s midterms — have been entirely nonpartisan. We will continue to use our products in an informative, nonpartisan way to engage voters leading up to November’s election.”
But it may not matter what the company’s official spokesperson says now about these damning emails, as at least one other Google executive flagged the original email for company executives, warning that Murillo’s email demonstrates just how “partisan” her work with official company resources was.
“Forwarding this not because of the original sender but rather how explicitly it references that her work was 100% partisan,” Google Search Product Marketing official Mackenzie Thomas wrote in another company email.
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