THE BIDEN INVASION - Health inspections for foreign nationals entering our country illegally have gone out the window. That's enabled the importation of many diseases which affect livestock and other agricultural output, and already these things are happening. Legal immigrants and even returning U.S. citizens must pass these inspections to protect the U.S. food supply. But under Joe Biden's catch-and-release, illegals are exempt from such cumbersome requirements. MONICA SHOWALTER
Monday, September 17, 2018
BILL GATES, ZUCKERBERG, JEFF BEZOS, MICHAEL BLOOMBERG PARTNER TO WAR ON THE AMERICAN (LEGAL) WORKER
ALL billionaires, GATES, ZUKERBERG, BLOOMBERG, BEZOS, GEORGE SOROS, KOCH FASCIST BROTHERS 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
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
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
BLOG: HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A NON-HISPANIC WORK AT McDONALD'S???
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.
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.
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.
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).”
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.”
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.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
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 advocatingfor 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.
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:
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.”
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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