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My Response to the Common Question: What Can I Do to Help?

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We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

– Mahatma Gandhi

Over the years, many people have asked me, “what can I do to help?” and I never really had a good answer. After five years of consistent writing and thinking, I finally have something concrete to say, but it might not be what you expect. The answer is to work on yourself. Be a better person. It’s something I need to do, and it’s something all of us can strive for every day of our lives since every one of us is flawed.

It doesn’t matter what you do for a living, or what your individual circumstances are, we’re all presented with a variety of choices on a consistent basis. We are all constantly faced with the opportunity to be kind, apathetic or downright mean to someone else, and it doesn’t matter how small the gesture is, every single act is meaningful. I have become convinced that the choices we make in seemingly minor situations resonate and impact the world. It seems clear to me that if everyone acted even a little bit kinder to their fellow humans the world would improve dramatically.

If we all become better people, we would simply not put up with the rampant violent and unethical behavior coming from politicians/oligarchs and things would eventually change. I believe the rot at the top of society influences the bottom, and vice versa. The best way to break the cycle is for each of us to take responsibility for ourselves and our own minds. At that point, consciousness can truly take a leap forward. Being kind, is in fact, a revolutionary act.

Trying to be a decent, rational and informed adult in a world increasingly filled with madness, childish dialogue and violence is hard enough. Being a parent compounds these challenges significantly. You suddenly become endowed with the truly awesome responsibility of guiding children into adulthood and helping them find their way in the world. In this day and age, accepting this challenge has become increasingly difficult.

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Certain U.S. Airlines Are Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition Scans on Americans Flying Abroad

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Just when you thought air travel couldn’t get any more invasive, authoritarian and downright miserable, the Department of Homeland Security and two U.S. carriers are determined to prove you wrong.

Yesterday, Harrison Rudolph, a law fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, wrote a very troubling article at Slate titled, DHS Is Starting to Scan Americans’ Faces Before They Get on International Flights. Here’s some of what we learned:

Decades ago, Congress mandated that federal authorities keep track of foreign nationals as they enter and leave the United States. If the government could record when every visitor stepped on and off of U.S. soil, so the thinking went, it could easily see whether a foreign national had overstayed a visa.

But in June of last year, without congressional authorization, and without consulting the public, the Department of Homeland Security started scanning the faces of Americans leaving the country, too.

You may have heard about new JetBlue or Delta programs that let passengers board their flights by submitting to a face recognition scan. Few realize, however, that these systems are actually the first phase of DHS’s “Biometric Exit” program.

For certain international flights from Atlanta and New York, DHS has partnered with Delta to bring mandatory face recognition scans to the boarding gate. The Delta system checks a passenger is supposed to be on the plane by comparing her face, captured by a kiosk at the boarding gate, to passenger manifest photos from State Department databases. It also checks passengers’ citizenship or immigration status. Meanwhile, in Boston, DHS has partnered with JetBlue to roll out a voluntary face recognition system for travelers flying to Aruba. In JetBlue’s case, you can actually get your face scanned instead of using a physical ticket.

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The U.S. Economy is a Perverted, Neo-Feudal, Rent-Seeking Abomination

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The banker bailouts of the 2008/09 period changed my life forever. I was working on Wall Street at the time, and the way in which the government rallied around the financial institutions that torched the world and left its victims in the dust threw my entire delusional worldview into disarray. Prior to that, I had bought into the absurd assumption that I was financially successful at a young age primarily because I was hard-working and talented. The ensuing bailouts and the government’s emphasis on obsessively rescuing some of the most degenerate people in our society made me realize once and for all how completely rigged and sleazy the U.S. economy really is. As you might expect, it only got worse under Obama’s oligarch-coddling policies and will surely continue to deteriorate under Trump (Goldman Sachs is not your friend).

Ever since I left my cushy financial services job to do the challenging and often draining work of chronicling our ongoing crime scene, I’ve spent the vast majority of my free time trying to further educate myself on exactly how this system works. What I’ve discovered over and over again is that it is far more abusive than even I imagined.

Today’s post highlights two important articles that came to my attention over the past couple of days. Both are extremely disturbing, and both should be seen as completely unacceptable in a remotely ethical civilization (which we are not).

First, here’s a short excerpt from a recent Bloomberg article highlighting GE’s pension shortfall, and how it’s gotten worse as executives focused on share-buybacks as opposed to funding the pension.

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Sleazy Democratic Senator Advocates Colleagues Sign “Pledge” to Protect Each Other from Voters

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If there was ever any doubt that most members of Congress work for themselves and not the people, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia wants to dispel you of such hallucinations. Here’s a disturbing excerpt from a section of a recent post on his official website, Manchin Pledges to Return to Era of Bipartisan Cooperation and Agreement:

“Several years ago I took a personal pledge to not campaign against a sitting colleague,” Senator Manchin said. “I think the time has come for all Senators to make this pledge and commit ourselves to being Americans first – not Republicans or Democrats. I made this pledge because I simply don’t think you can build working relationships with your co-workers during the week if you are showing up in their backyard every weekend to run their name through the dirt. Now more than ever, it’s so important for the Senate to work together as opposed to against one another. I am proud to take this pledge and I encourage all of my Senate colleagues to join me.”  

What utter garbage. The last thing the American people need is for 100 of our most compromised, corporate and foreign government-owned “public servants” to band together to protect each other as the general public suffers from the putrid environment their corrupt and idiotic policies have created.

Not that any level of idiocy and shadiness should ever shock us when it comes to the honorable Mr. Manchin. After all, he proves how awful he is on a regular basis. Just last week he was only one of five Democrats to vote in favor of selling more arms to the world’s leading sponsor of radical islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia.

As Politico reported:

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People Are Devolving Into Degeneracy and Violence – Don’t Join the Club

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The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”

– Stephen Crane, The Wayfarer

When times get tough people can unite and fight back against a common enemy, or they can be manipulated into fighting each other. Unfortunately, the latter has become increasingly popular amongst all sides in what has become an increasingly deranged, adolescent and counterproductive political environment.

Meanwhile, the people who are truly powerful, the oligarchs of industry and their bought and paid for political minions are the ones who really benefit. The primary purpose of this website from the very beginning has been to highlight how power actually functions in imperial America with the hope that people across the political spectrum could unite and push back against the unaccountable rent-seeking practices of a common enemy. It seems I was extraordinarily naive.

When a writer and thinker such as myself is forced to admit failure, it’s a very tough pill to swallow. Writing this blog is in many ways a thankless task. I’m essentially doing volunteer work day in and day out because I passionately believe in the ideas I put forth, and to see them have little to no effect on the public debate can be very depressing. Rather than seeing human beings unite to throw off the predatory shackles that bind them as I had hoped, I see people who should be coming together punching and yelling at each other in the streets — and that’s on a good day. On bad days, people are getting shot or run over, from Virginia to London. Watching all this madness unfold while the truly powerful sit back and grin, more secure in their positions as ever before thanks to rabble fighting each other, sometimes makes me want to just stop doing this writing thing. After all, what’s the point?

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Even Google Employees Can No Longer Afford Housing in San Francisco

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You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the new Google modular home

Every now and then a story appears in the national media that causes a lightbulb to start flashing incessantly in my head. For me, such a story came to my attention today and relates to how Google is manufacturing housing for some of its employees due to the ridiculous cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here’s a summary from The Verge:

Google’s employees can’t find affordable housing in Silicon Valley, so the company is investing in modular homes that’ll serve as short-term housing for them. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has ordered 300 units from a startup called Factory OS, which specializes in modular homes. The deal reportedly costs between $25 and $30 million.

Modular homes are completely built in a factory and assembled like puzzle pieces onsite. This method of construction can reduce the cost of construction by 20 to 50 percent, the Journal reports. These apartments can also be put up more quickly to address dire housing needs. In one case the Journal cites, tenants saved $700 a month because of reduced construction costs.

Earlier this year, CNBC published a piece that detailed the difficulty tech companies have in trying to convince possible employees to move to San Francisco, especially when they live abroad. In response, some startups are establishing offices in other cities, like Chicago and Seattle. The other option is to out-tech the housing crisis, as Google appears to be doing with its modular home investment.

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The Corporate Media Continues to Torch Its Reputation. Good.

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Last December, I noted the following in the post, ‘Then We Will Fight in the Shade’ – A Guide to Winning the Media Wars:

It is when you get desperate, scared and panicky that you make the biggest mistakes, and the legacy media is currently desperate, scared and panicky.  As Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly said:

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Whether or not he actually said them, those words still ring true. We mustn’t get in the way of the legacy media’s inevitable self-destruction. Part of this means that we do not self-destruct in the process. We need to recognize that there’s a reason independent, alternative media is winning the battle of ideas in the first place. For all the warts, mistakes and bad actors, the emergence of the internet is indeed the historical equivalent of the invention of the printing press on steroids.

Only a clueless self-important elitist actually believes that the smartest, most informed people in America are the pundits on tv and the journalists employed by the mainstream media. With a handful of companies and a few oligarchs in charge, you’d have to be the most naive fool on earth to not understand that legacy media is driven by well defined narratives, and that these narratives are not in your best interest. The rest of us understand that the Internet has served as a much needed countervailing force, and has been an incredible blessing to human knowledge, connectivity and the marketplace of ideas. Just because some people can’t distinguish truth from fiction, doesn’t negate the incredible progress that decentralized information dissemination provides. It is only those who do not wish to engage in public debate on the issues themselves who want to censor stuff. The rest of us are more than happy to have an open discussion.

In a pathetic attempt to reinflate the discredited and failed neoliberal/neocon status quo political bubble it supports, corporate media has been relentless in its attacks on anyone or anything that offers an alternative vision. These attacks more often than not focus on Donald Trump, but it’s important to note that contempt for Bernie Sanders and his supporters is not far behind. It doesn’t matter what the alternative vision is, if it falls outside the neoliberal/neocon status quo, it must be demonized and destroyed by the likes of billionaire-owned media properties such as The Washington Post and The New York Times.

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Jeff Sessions Continues to Represent a Massive Liability for Donald Trump

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Ever since it became obvious that the Democratic Party had no interest in pivoting to addressing the very real economic insecurities faced by tens of millions of Americans following Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing loss in the 2016 election, I knew that Trump was being gifted a very real opportunity for a second term. That’s how corrupt and stupid Democratic leadership is.

Meanwhile, the entire “Trump colluded with Russia to influence the election” conspiracy theory is rapidly unravelling and Democrats still can’t let go. As such, if the party’s leadership is stupid enough to nominate another Wall Street-coddling neoliberal warmonger in 2020, Trump has a very strong chance of winning. The only thing that can really hurt his odds at this point is if he continues to alienate his base.

Here’s something I wrote on the topic in the post, The Consensus Echo Chamber Take on Trump Firing Comey is All Wrong:

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Lee Camp Explains How The New York Times Manufactures “Hit Piece Propaganda”

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Comedian Lee Camp has hosted a show on RT called Redacted Tonight since 2014. While I certainly don’t always agree with his conclusions, he’s clearly a passionate, genuine and highly intelligent American who cares deeply about the country and the people living in it. He believes (rightly), that our fellow citizens are are suffering unnecessarily due to our demonstrably parasitic, corrupt, imperial, oligarchic, corporate-state. Because he possesses such attributes, The New York Times found it necessary to dispatch one of its minions to write an embarrassing, unprofessional and downright shady piece of propaganda about him.

His response is lengthy, but it’s also extremely important for everyone to read in full. It provides further evidence that those who peddle in fake news and shoddy, deep state propagandist drivel should not throw stones. The New York Times needs to get its own house in order before whining about how everyone else is so deficient.

Below are some of the more outrageous excerpts from his excellent rebuttal. You can read it in full at Naked Capitalism:

This past Thursday the New York Times vomited up a hit piece on little ol’ me – a guy who has been doing stand-up comedy for nearly 20 years and thought maybe that comedy could be used to inform and inspire audiences, rather than just make fun of the differences between men and women.

At first when you’re the center of a smear job, you’re annoyed and frustrated. But as I read further through the piece, I realized it was a master class in how to write propaganda for one of the most “respected” news outlets in our country. I’m actually grateful it was written about me because now I can see with my own eyes exactly how the glorious chicanery is done. I count no less than 15 lies, manipulations, and false implications in this short article, a score that even our fearless prevaricator-in-chief Donald Trump would envy.

So here now is a “How To” for writing propaganda for the New York Times – using the smear piece against me as an example.

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Another Red Flag Emerges in the Auto Securitization Market

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Irresponsible and dangerous lending practices in the U.S. automobile market have been flagged by many people for a long time, but nobody knows exactly when it will all come to a head and create real problems. Today, I want to flag the latest warning sign.

Bloomberg reports:

Subprime auto bonds issued in 2015 are by one key measure on track to become the worst performing in the history of car-loan securitizations, according to Fitch Ratings.

This group of securities is experiencing cumulative net losses at a rate projected to reach 15 percent, which is higher even than for bonds in the 2007, Fitch analysts Hylton Heard and John Bella Jr. wrote in a report Thursday.

“The 2015 vintage has been prone to high loss severity from a weaker wholesale market and little-to-no equity in loan contracts at default due to extended-term lending, a trend which was not as apparent in the recessionary vintages,” said the analysts, referring to lenders’ stretching out repayment terms on subprime loans, sometimes to over six years, to lower borrowers’ monthly payment. That becomes riskier in the tail end of the loan, after the car has mostly depreciated and borrowers may be left owing large balances.

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