FACEBOOK'S MARK ZUCKERBERG APPLIES FOR FOOD STAMPS - TOLD TO GET TO THE BACK OF THE LINE OF THE 20 MILLION ILLEGALS IN MEXIFORNIA HE WANTS HANDED AMNESTY!

 HOME TO DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM

 

Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California    
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEAGLS). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 

Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.

"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.

 

CEOs of Tech Titans Lost a Collective $25 Billion in Market Sell-Off

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/Getty

LUCAS NOLAN

7 Sep 202028

4:27

The CEO’s of America’s biggest tech giants lost a collective $25 billion following last week’s market sell-off with the S&P tech sector closing down by 5.8 percent.

CNBC reports that the CEO’s of Amazon, Tesla, Facebook, and Microsoft saw their net worth fall by a collective $25 billion following Thursday’s market sell-off. The S&P 500 tech sector closed down by 5.8 percent on Thursday pushing the markets into the red.

CNBC created a scorecard showing the losses the tech executives faced, it reads:

• Amazon stock closed down 4.63%, taking $9 billion off CEO Jeff Bezos’s net worth.
• Tesla chief Elon Musk also lost $9 billion, after its stock slipped 9.02%.
• Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw its stock drop 3.76%, taking $4 billion off of his net worth.
• Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’ net worth fell $3 billion after a 6.19% stock slip.

Breitbart News reported in August that Jeff Bezos became the first person to cross the $200 billion threshold after seeing his net worth grow to $202 billion. Bezos’ personal wealth is largely based on Amazon stock which has increased massively in value in recent years along with the company’s share price. As a result, Bezos’ net worth has now dropped to approximately $194.3 billion according to Forbes.

Zuckerberg’s net worth is still $105.1 billion, the CEO recently announced that he and his wife Priscilla Chan, both of whom run the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative charitable foundation, plan to donate $300 million to help with preparations for the upcoming presidential election amidst the Chinese virus pandemic.

Zuckerberg and Chan plan to donate to two non-partisan organizations in order to help them recruit poll workers, rent polling places, purchase PPE kits for poll workers, and a number of other measures needed to ensure that voting stations will be safe as the pandemic continues. The organizations they have chosen are the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

After losing $9 billion following a decline in Tesla stock, CEO Elon Musk is still worth around $88.7 billion according to Forbes. Musk recently announced that Tesla’s production plant in Brandenburg, Germany, will be used to demonstrate a new complete overhaul of how its cars are constructed, as well as making new electric car battery cells and battery packs.

Musk made the comments to bystanders at Gruenheide which is located on the o outskirts of Berlin where Telsa is building a new European factory. Tesla plans to manufacture a new version of its Model Y crossover vehicle and maybe even new battery cells at the site, according to Musk.

“It will be the first time that there will be a transformation in the core structural design of the vehicle. It’s quite a big thing. Both manufacturing, engineering and design as well,” Musk said in a video posted to the Teslarati website. 

Bill Gates’ net worth lags behind Bezos’ at $115.8 billion. Gates’ main focus in recent years has been philanthropic efforts, running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private charitable foundation in the world. The foundation launched a Covid-19 Accelerator program in March with a fund of $125 million backed by the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan’s philanthropic arm then announced a $24 million gift to the fund in April. Pop singer Madonna and the U.K. government have also donated but the size of their donations was not disclosed. Zhang Timing, the 36-year-old Chinese billionaire and founder of the social media app TikTok, has pledged $10 million to the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

Judge Upholds President Trump’s Curbs on H-1B Outsourcing

MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty

NEIL MUNRO

7 Sep 2020489

3:30

A federal judge on Friday rejected a lawsuit by business groups and is allowing President Donald Trump to temporarily bar the entry of foreign contract workers who are hired to take the U.S. jobs needed by Americans.

The decision is a big labor rights win for American employees because it recognizes a president can use his authority under section 212(f) of federal law to block the inflow of foreign workers if they have a damaging impact on Americans’ economic circumstances.

“The court expands executive authority under 212(f) to previously unknown limits,” said a tweeted complaint from one of the lawyers who helps to import the foreign workers for U.S. jobs.

The decision is a big setback for the Fortune 500 companies objecting to Trump’s June 22 proclamation. The proclamation temporarily bars the entry of foreign workers via the huge H-1B, J-1, H-2B, and L-1 labor pipelines, which keep roughly two million compliant and cheap contract workers in jobs needed by unemployed blue collar and white collar Americans.

The decision will likely be appealed, and tech sector business groups have filed a similar lawsuit in California.

Trump's June 22 visa-curbs create jobs for American youths on the nation's ski slopes.
Companies prefer to hire the gov't-supplied compliant blocs of foreign workers over independent US workers — and US journos have to pretend they don't notice. https://t.co/aCCRRmlLaN

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 27, 2020

“The court rejects the Plaintiffs’ statutory and constitutional challenges to the Proclamations … [and] the court concludes that the Plaintiffs are not likely to succeed on their challenges to the Proclamations,” said the 85-page decision by Judge Amit Mehta, at the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C.

The plaintiffs and business groups had argued Trump’s curbs on the hiring of foreign workers were not justified because they were “rational,” according to their studies and claims. The judge dismissed that argument, saying the business groups:

… insist that nonimmigrants like H-1B and H-2B visa applicants work in sectors where “unemployment is low, rather than in the high-unemployment areas that the entry suspension is supposedly meant to target.” Finally, they maintain that the exclusion of immigrant and nonimmigrant labor actually is counterproductive to the President’s stated goal of improving the economic prospects of American workers. They cite declarations from experts, economic studies, and even statements from federal agencies to make the point that the entry of aliens in fact creates jobs for American workers, and the idea that new arrivals take jobs from Americans is a fallacy. None of these arguments is ultimately persuasive.

The argument fails, the judge said, because the business lawyers “demand for a “rational justification” and a “rational investigation” far exceeds what the [Supreme] Court in Trump v. Hawaii required for a valid presidential “finding.”

The lawsuit was filed in the name of 169 contract workers from India and their spouses. The Indians hold valid H-1B visas and are being denied entry to the United States to retake jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.

However, the judge sided with roughly 40,000 foreigners who had won the right to immigrate into the United States via the 2020 diversity visa lottery. The judge directed the Department of State to register their documents before the year is over.

The case is “Panda et al., Plaintiffs, v. Chad Wolf, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security.” The case number is 1:20-01907-KBJ.

Immigration is "American self-cannibalization,” b/c it allows the elite to devour the work rights of ordinary Americans, said Eric Weinstein, dir. of Thiel Capital.
Street "crazies" are symptoms of the elites' failure, says the ex-Harvard math Ph.D. #H1Bhttps://t.co/FbtLyyzGLe

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) July 25, 2020

 The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the financial elites is taking place as the conditions for the working class continually worsen as even the limited relief earlier provided is cut off or significantly reduced. The jobs report issued last week has been seized on to continue that policy.

While the billionaires continue to rake in money through speculation, with the potential to set off a financial crash as the downdraft on Wall Street at the end of last week showed, the situation in the real economy is worsening.

Massive speculation fuelled by the Fed has driven Wall Street surge

7 September 2020

The turbulence on Wall Street at the end of last week, when markets sold off, has revealed at least some of the rampant speculation that has been at the centre of the market surge since its crash in the middle of March.

The main factor in the surge has been the $3 trillion of support provided by the Federal Reserve through its intervention as the backstop for all areas of the financial market, coupled with its commitment to ultra-low interest rates. This policy was guaranteed for the indefinite future last month when the Fed shifted the parameters of its monetary policy by removing the threat to lift interest rates if inflation rose and unemployment fell.

Its interventions have resulted in a rise in market indexes back to their all-time highs reached earlier this year. But this has been concentrated in the biggest US companies by market capitalisation—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Microsoft and Facebook—with a combined value of more than $8 trillion.

Trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

According to the Wall Street Journal they have been trading at an average of 44 times their expected earnings, a level only exceeded by the 50 times price-to-earnings ratio which occurred during the dot.com bubble at the turn of the century.

There were reminders of the collapse of that bubble last Thursday when the tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped nearly 5 percent, while the S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent and the Dow was down by more than 800 points or 2.8 percent. There were further, smaller, falls on Friday after the market had moved down sharply earlier in the day but then recovered somewhat in the final hours of trading.

The size of the escalation in tech stocks is indicated by Apple. Last month its market capitalisation reached more than $2 trillion—making it the first company to attain that level —having gained more than $1 trillion in just 21 weeks and $700 million in July alone.

Apple had the biggest loss on Thursday as its shares dropped by 8 percent, causing it to lose almost $180 billion in market capitalisation, the biggest one-day loss for a US company on record. But the extent of its rise is indicated by the fact that this loss was larger than the individual market capitalisation for 470 of the 500 companies listed in the S&P index.

The escalation of the market capitalisation of high-tech companies has given rise to what has been called a K-shaped phenomenon—the movement of a narrow group of companies away from the rest of the market.

This shift was underscored last week when the oil and energy giant ExxonMobil was removed from the list of 30 major companies that make up the Dow Jones index. It was the company with the longest tenure in the Dow, entering it in 1928, and as recently as 2011 was the largest company by market capitalisation in the world.

One of the key factors in the high-tech surge in August has been the use of financial derivatives, most notably call options. A call option is the right to buy a share at an agreed price at some point in the future. The purchaser is then able to make a gain if the share price rises above the contract level.

According to reports in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal last week, the Japanese financial conglomerate SoftBank has been a major buyer of call options in high-tech companies.

Under normal conditions, call options are to some degree balanced by put options, a contract to sell a share at an agreed price as investors seek to hedge themselves against potential falls in the market.

But as the Financial Times noted in the past few months “this has been flipped on its head for mega-cap stocks and there has been rampant buying of call options—particularly on Apple and Tesla” as investors have weighed in with bets that the market will keep on rising.

At present Softbank is reported to be sitting on trading gains so far of around $4 billion. The speculation goes beyond Softbank. According to Goldman Sachs, the overall nominal value of call options on individual US stocks reached a record high in the past two weeks, averaging $355 billion per day, triple the daily average between 2017 and 2019.

Corporate executives appear to be less confident. According to data compiled for the Financial Times some 1,042 US chief executives, chief financial officers and company directors sold $6.7 billion worth of stock in August, the highest level for any month since November 2015.

The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the financial elites is taking place as the conditions for the working class continually worsen as even the limited relief earlier provided is cut off or significantly reduced. The jobs report issued last week has been seized on to continue that policy.

The Department of Labor said employment rose by 1.4 million in August, a figure that was hailed as showing that the economy was on the improve, as Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow virtually ruled out any move to provide further assistance. “Right now the economy is on a self-sustaining recovery path in my judgement and will continue along these lines, and will continue to surprise on the upside,” he said.

The data in the report belie this assessment. There are still 11.5 million fewer jobs than there were in February and the rate of employment growth is slowing. In June employment grew by 4.7 million, falling to 1.7 million in July before dropping further to 1.4 million last month.

Moreover, many of these jobs are part-time or casual as companies cut back on the full-time workforce. The employment numbers for August were also boosted by the hiring of 238,000 temporary census data workers who will soon be laid off.

The data for August also showed that the number of workers who have been permanently axed, as opposed to being temporarily laid off, is on the increase, rising from 2.9 million in July to 3.4 million in August. A report cited in the Washington Post noted that 20 percent of the permanent sackings in May and June had been characterised as temporary a month earlier.

And this trend will continue. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, a recent study found that “nearly half of US employers that furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.”

This indicates that the pandemic is being used to carry out “restructuring” operations to boost the bottom line, in combination with measures that have resulted in 10 million private sector workers either having their pay cut or being forced to work part time.

Workers employed in small businesses have been especially hard hit, with one study finding that 50 percent of them furloughed since March have still not been able to find work. The number unemployed for 15-26 weeks is now nearly double what it was in the recession of 2009.

While the billionaires continue to rake in money through speculation, with the potential to set off a financial crash as the downdraft on Wall Street at the end of last week showed, the situation in the real economy is worsening.

According to Deutsche Bank, zombie companies—those that do not earn enough to cover their interest payments—now comprise nearly one-fifth of all listed companies in the US, compared to virtually zero at the start of the century.

Fear and uncertainty dominate Jackson Hole central bankers’ meeting

31 August 2020

The annual Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers, which concluded over the weekend, underscored the incapacity of global financial authorities to devise any policies either to bring about economic growth or counter the mounting contradictions in the financial system.

Reporting on the meeting, held in virtual format this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Financial Times noted: “It was the head of Singapore’s monetary authority who best summed up the biggest fear gripping the virtual Jackson Hole conference this year.

“‘We’re not going back to the same world,’ Tharman Shanmugaratnam warned.’”

The central initiative at the gathering was the decision by the Fed’s key policy-making body to maintain interest rates at their ultra-low levels for an indefinite period and keep pumping money into the financial system.

The decision, announced by the Federal Open Market Committee as the conclave opened and elaborated on in a keynote speech by Fed Chair Jerome Powell, was in effect a guarantee to Wall Street that its demand for “forward guidance”—lower interest rates for longer—would be met.

The Fed said it would no longer be guided by a 2 percent inflation rate limit in determining its interest policy, but would instead focus on an “average” rate of 2 percent, meaning that the cheap money regime could continue even if prices rose above that level.

As for dealing with the slump in the global economy—the most serious since the Great Depression—and combating the potential for further storms in the financial system following the market meltdown in mid-March, there were no answers, as underscored by the remarks of the Singapore finance minister.

“We’ve got to avoid a prolonged period of high levels of unemployment, and it’s a very real prospect,” he said. “It is not at all assured that we will get a return of tight labour markets even with traditional macroeconomic policy being properly applied.”

It was a significant comment because one of main themes in remarks by central bank chiefs was that monetary policy alone would not be sufficient to restore growth, and government intervention was needed to boost the economy. But, as Shanmugaratnam noted, even if “properly applied,” there were no guarantees of success.

According to the Financial Times, the notion that central bankers “need to face the reality of permanent upheaval and long-term economic damage” was the “main theme” of the event.

One of the most frequently cited academic papers produced for the meeting was prepared earlier this month by Colombia University academic Laura Veldkamp on the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper said that the biggest economic effects of the pandemic “could arise from changes in behaviour long after the immediate health crisis is resolved.” A potential source of such a long-lived change was a shift in the “perceived probability of an extreme, negative shock in the future,” and that “long-run cost for the US economy from this channel is many times higher than the estimates of the short-run losses in output.”

The paper continued: “This suggests that, even if a vaccine cures everyone in a year, the COVID-19 crisis will leave its mark on the US economy for many years to come.”

In other words, the pandemic was not only a trigger event, acting on the contradictions that had built up in the economy and financial system, but a transformative one as well.

With the Fed now having formally committed itself to the endless supply of cheap money to Wall Street, attention will turn to the European Central Bank (ECB), which is also conducting a strategic policy review, to see whether it goes down the same road.

While the governing council, under the presidency of Christine Lagarde, may be inclined to move in the same direction as the Fed, it would face certain opposition from Germany’s Bundesbank, which has expressed opposition to the easing of monetary policy.

A member of the governing council told the Financial Times, “we will look at it,” but the Bundesbank would be “very nervous” about it.

On May 5 this year the Constitutional Court in Germany ruled that the Bundesbank had to examine whether the bond-buying program of the ECB breached rules that it should not bail out individual governments. That potential crisis was averted, but the issue could be raised again if the ECB decides to replicate the actions of the Fed.

However, the ECB is likely to come under pressure to take further action because of indications that what limited recovery has taken place in the European economy is starting to slow, as COVID infections begin to rise again in parts of the euro zone.

Estimates for a growth in Spain are being revised down as infections increase, and there are warnings that the French economy could plateau below the level reached before the pandemic struck, at least until the end of 2022.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, reflecting the interests of UK finance capital in the City of London, indicated support for the Fed’s move, saying it should have been more expansive previously. Bailey again raised the possibility of negative interest rates.

“We are not out of firepower by any means, and to be honest, it looks from today’s vantage point that we were too cautious about our remaining firepower pre-COVID,” he said, adding that there are times when we “need to go big and go fast.”

The actions of the Fed have done nothing to boost the real economy, as an increasing number of companies announce that temporary layoffs will be made permanent.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a survey conducted by Randstad RiseSmart found that “nearly half of US employers that had furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.”

This indicates that the pandemic has been a trigger for a major restructuring of employment conditions.

The effects of the Fed’s policies and the further monetary easing to come are focused on the stock market, with Wall Street indexes rising to the record levels they achieved in February. The main beneficiaries have been the high tech companies—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook—which together comprise more than a fifth of the Nasdaq index.

The extent of their rise and growing financial and monopoly power is indicated by the results of an analysis carried out by Bank of America Global Research, reported by the business channel CNBC. It found that the market capitalization of the major US tech firms, now standing at $9.1 trillion, was greater than the market capitalization of the entire European market, including the UK and Switzerland, at $8.9 trillion. In an indication of the massive shift that has taken place, the research note pointed out that in 2007, total European market capitalization was four times that of US technology stocks.

 

Joe Biden Touts Wall Street Support for His Plan to Abolish American Suburbs

OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

6 Sep 20207,907

2:37

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is touting Wall Street’s support for his $640 billion housing plan that would force low-income, multi-family housing developments into America’s suburban communities.

During a visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin — where the Black Lives Matter organization and members of Antifa have led riots for weeks — Biden told supporters that Wall Street supports his housing plan because it “will increase the GDP.”

“And by the way, it’s not a waste of money. Even the folks on Wall Street point out that will increase the GDP, make it grow,” Biden said of the plan. “People will do better, people will do better.”

Biden’s housing plan, as Breitbart News has noted, would implement an unprecedented expansion of Section 8 housing vouchers while requiring that local communities abolish strict zoning laws in order to become eligible for certain federal grants.

The plan provides a $300 million investment “to give states and localities the technical assistance and planning support they need to eliminate exclusionary zoning policies and other local regulations that contribute to sprawl.”

Communities unwilling to eliminate their zoning laws to allow multi-family, mixed-income housing development in their neighborhoods would be shut out of federal grants under Biden’s plan:

Exclusionary zoning has for decades been strategically used to keep people of color and low-income families out of certain communities. As President, Biden will enact legislation requiring any state receiving federal dollars … to develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning, as proposed in the HOME Act of 2019 by Majority Whip Clyburn and Senator Cory Booker. [Emphasis added]

Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey (R), has called Biden’s housing plan “disastrous” for suburban families who would see rapid dense-housing developments pop up in their communities.

“Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned,” McCaughey wrote in July.

The plan is coupled with Biden’s expansion of illegal and legal immigration, producing a model for packed suburbs with record population growth, denser living spaces, and potentially a migration from cities to smaller, middle-class communities.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.