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New Private Terminal at LAX Allows Oligarchs to Mock Debt Serfs Hauling Luggage Via Telescreen

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If there was ever an article that perfectly summed up the times we live in, it’d have to be the one published yesterday at The Guardian titled, At LA Airport’s New Private Terminal, the Rich Can Watch Normal People Suffer.

Here are a few excerpts:

The guiltiest pleasure at Los Angeles international airport’s (LAX) new private terminal for the mega-rich is not the plush, hushed privacy, or the beds with comforters, or the massages, or the coriander-scented soap, or the Willie Wonka-style array of chocolates and jelly beans, or the Napa Valley cabernet.

It is the iPad that sits on a counter at the entrance, with a typed little note: “Here is a glimpse of what you’re missing over at the main terminal right now.”

The screen shows travelers hauling bags through packed terminals, queuing in long lines, looking harassed and being swallowed into pushing, shoving paparazzi scrums – routine hazards for the 80 million people who pass through LAX each year.

“There they process thousands of people at a time, they’re barking. It’s loud. Here it’s very, very lovely,” said Gavin de Becker, who runs the new terminal, called Private Suite.

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Do Ends Justify the Means?

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I think the U.S. citizenry is being afflicted by a sort of mass insanity at the moment. There are no good outcomes if this continues. As a result, I feel compelled to provide a voice for those of us lost in the political wilderness. We must persevere and not be manipulated into the obvious and nefarious divide and conquer tactics being aggressively unleashed across the societal spectrum. If we lose our grounding and our fortitude, who will be left to speak for those of us who simply don’t fit into any of the currently ascendant political ideologies?

– From February’s post: Lost in the Political Wilderness

Given our increasingly hysterical, polarized and downright rabid political environment, I think it’s important for those of us who see ourselves as relatively conscious individuals to reflect upon our principles and how they play a role in our everyday lives. As such, today’s piece will examine the concept of whether “the ends justify the means” when it comes to achieving ones objectives, political or otherwise. It’s an extraordinarily important philosophical exercise to undertake, particularly since the turbulent period we inhabit is likely to get far more insane and divisive before it gets better.

I think many people will quickly answer the question “do the ends justify the means” without putting enough thought into it. The question is meant to be considered when it comes to premeditated voluntary actions of questionable ethics taken with a defined objective in mind. It has nothing to do with matters of self-defense, or anything in that category. For example, if someone is coming at your family with an intent to inflict harm, the ethical decision might be to harm the aggressor to protect your family despite the fact that harming another person in itself is an immoral act. Pretty much everyone can agree with this, so it doesn’t add anything to the argument of whether the ends justify the means.

That case is obvious. What about if you’re walking down the street and you see someone come from behind an old lady, hit her on the head and then struggle with her on the ground in an attempt to take her purse. You aren’t being directly attacked, so should you intervene with violence if necessary against the perpetrator to help an innocent bystander? Again, I think the right and ethical decision here is to step in to try to help the victim if possible.

In both these cases the negative “means” of violence you might be required to use against violent aggressors do indeed justify the ends — in the first instance the protection of your family, and in the second a vulnerable old lady. Given these examples, one might be led to believe that the ends can often justify the means, but I would argue that this only holds true in extreme examples such as the ones described above, and that for a principled person, the ends almost never justify the means.

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A Tale of Two Justice Systems – Wall Street vs. Main Street

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

One of the major objectives of this site over the years has been to highlight the demoralizing and extremely destructive reality that two completely different justices systems exist in America — one for the wealthy, powerful and connected, and another for everyone else. While there will always be some element of this in any society of humans, extremes can and do occur, and the pendulum now has shifted in these United States to extremely dangerous Banana Republic-like levels.

Nowhere is this divergence of justice more in your face and deplorable than with respect to how Wall Street financiers are treated compared to the rest of us. Not only was the industry rewarded with endless financial lifelines and zero executive prosecutions after it destroyed the global economy, but the industry continues to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, with zero repercussions. It doesn’t take genius to understand that if there’s no risk in committing financial crimes, you get a lot more of them.

Speaking of Wall Street being able to do whatever it wants, let’s take a look at what Goldman Sachs is up to courtesy of some excerpts from a recent article by David Dayen published at The Fiscal Times:

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The Consensus Echo Chamber Take on Trump Firing Comey is All Wrong

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The unanimous very smart person take on Trump’s firing of James Comey is that it’s a political disaster which will lead to total ruin and possibly his impeachment. I disagree.

The key factor that will determine how this ultimately turns out hinges largely on whether or not there was actual coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to sway the election through hacking or other nefarious means. Personally, I don’t think there was, which is why I don’t expect Donald Trump to be removed from office. The consensus view right now is that Trump’s firing of Comey offers further circumstantial evidence that he’s trying to cover up coordination with Russia in order to end the ongoing investigation. This is certainly a possibility to consider, but it’s definitely not the only possibility, nor is it the most likely explanation.

First, the optics. The timing of this move looks unquestionably bad, particularly if a story published in today’s New York Times is correct. It reports:

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Are U.S. Taxpayers Now on the Hook for Risky Wall Street Real Estate Backed Bonds?

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I’m fairly certain very few of you have heard of broker price opinions, or BPOs, but it’s something I think we should all become aware of given the influence of BPOs in the market for valuing residential real estate securitized bonds.

Before we get to that, let’s revisit a little contemporary American robber baron history. In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. financial crisis, financial oligarchs immediately got to work helping Main Street climb out of the Wall Street created ditch by buying foreclosed homes from hordes of newly destitute Americans and then renting them back to those same people.

I wrote many articles about this trend over the years, starting with the January 2013 piece, America Meet Your New Slumlord: Wall Street. Here’s an excerpt:

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Kushner Companies Seen Hawking Shady U.S. Visa Buying Residency Program to Wealthy Chinese

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When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

– Frédéric Bastiat

I’ve written about the EB-5 visa program previously, something I consider a total racket that allows wealthy foreigners to buy their way into U.S. residency while funding real estate catering to, you guessed it, wealthy Americans. It’s more or less a system by which really rich people abuse a government program simply to help out other really rich people. What a country.

This wasn’t always the case. In fact the EB-5 visa program was originally meant to connect wealthy foreigners with projects to help the less fortunate here at home. Naturally, the entire thing has been completely corrupted.

As I noted in the 2015 post, More American Cronyism – U.S. Government Selling Visas to Fund Luxury Apartment Buildings:

Merging, on paper, the affluent midtown neighborhood and the struggling one uptown placed Hudson Yards in a community with an overall high unemployment rate, positioning developer Related Cos. to gain low-cost financing from foreigners seeking green cards.

The program through which that happens, known as EB-5, enables foreign nationals to obtain U.S. permanent-resident status by putting up money for new business ventures that create American jobs. It gives ventures in high-unemployment and rural areas a special status to encourage investment. But as the program’s popularity has soared in recent years, the bulk of immigrant investment is going to projects that are located, like $20 billion Hudson Yards, in prosperous urban neighborhoods.

At least 80% of EB-5 money is going to projects that wouldn’t qualify as being in Targeted Employment Areas without “some form of gerrymandering,” estimates Michael Gibson, managing director of USAdvisors.org, which evaluates projects for foreign investors.

Increasingly, the money appears to be flowing to the flashiest projects, which the investors often see as safest, EB-5 professionals say. Among those getting EB-5 money are an office building set to host Facebook Inc. near Amazon.com Inc.’s Seattle headquarters, a boutique hotel in high-end Miami Beach, and a slim Four Seasons condo-hotel in lower Manhattan that sports a penthouse with an asking price above $60 million. In all of them, geographic districts were crafted to include higher-unemployment areas. 

The Kushner Companies have been taking advantage of this program for years, and continue to do so despite Donald Trump being the current U.S. President.

As reported by The Washington Post:

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Can Bernie Sanders Be Convinced to Launch a New Political Party?

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I am 100% in the camp that supports Bernie Sanders severing himself completely from the hopelessly captured and corrupt Democratic Party and launching an entirely new movement. I’ve spent a lot of time since the 2016 election writing about how worthless the Democratic Party is and why it will never fundamentally change. The sad truth when it comes to American politics at the moment is “we the people” have no political representation whatsoever. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are corporate and oligarch donor owned, and will never push forward the sort of sweeping change average Americans need in order to enjoy a higher quality of life.

This post isn’t meant as an endorsement of Sanders or all of his policies, but it’s an endorsement of creating something new so that the public can enter a new era in which the needs of the people are addressed. Truth be told, we’ve been fooled into thinking that we have two distinct political parties proposing vastly different policy solutions to help the public. The reality is we have two political parties proposing various solutions to help the donors. Nobody represents the people. We need to discard these parties and form new ones, and the sooner we do so, the better.

As I wrote in the post, In Defense of Populism:

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Student Loans and Healthcare – Two Issues that Will Define American Politics Going Forward

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Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, a man of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wealth

Liberty Blitzkrieg readers know that I’ve been extremely critical of our modern U.S. economy for nearly a decade now. I’ve used harsh, but entirely appropriate language, such as rent-seeking, parasitic and criminally corrupt to describe our current financial/economic system. These are not words I use lightly.

I have absolutely no problem with wealth differences within a society, even large discrepancies are fine as long as the general population benefits substantially from overall growth trends. This is not the case in today’s economy.

I support a real free market economy where barriers to entry are low, and in which small business and competition thrives. Unfortunately, this is not the case in today’s economy. Rather, America has largely become a neo-feudal society where a mass of debt slaves are lorded over by government protected, monopolistic, rent-seeking oligarchs and racketeers.

Societies work when people think the system is fair enough and have genuine opportunity for success and standard of living improvement. Societies work when the people who become fabulously wealthy are individuals who have created a product or service that benefits society at large. In contrast, people shouldn’t become wealthy by preying on their fellow citizens and driving them into destitution and debt bondage, but that’s precisely what is happening in many industries today. Our society rewards the worst sort of behavior, and as we observed in the aftermath of the financial crisis, protects and further empowers white collar criminals for destroying the global economy.

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Robert Parry Warns – The New York Times is Cheering on Censorship Algorithms

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The 2016 Presidential election was a gigantic wakeup call for the corporate press in the U.S. not so much because Hillary Clinton lost, but because it represented the end of mainstream media’s ability to seamlessly force feed narratives down the throats of a gullible and pliant American public. The marketplace of ideas had been flooded by the internet and the people made a decision. The media wars came and went, and the corporate press lost, badly.

The election of Donald Trump was as much a middle finger to the U.S. corporate press as anything else, and the corporate media didn’t take too kindly to that. Rather than admit failure, refocus and compete within the freewheeling information age, the corporate media has resorted to endless whining and support for tech-overlord censorship. It simply knows it can’t win a fair fight, so it has decided to cheat.

As Robert Parry of Consortium News explains in his recent post, NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms:

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Survey Shows a Majority of European Youth Would Participate in Uprising to Overthrow Status Quo

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As the title of today’s piece implies, something very rotten is happening across the Western world and it’s starting to push many people, especially the youth, toward a breaking point. In the U.S., much of the problem relates to increased corporate power and monopoly, which has resulted in a less dynamic economy characterized by a neo-feudal plantation model where a small group of people continue to rent-seek profits at the expense of society at large.

Surprisingly enough, today’s piece will zero in on the observations of fund manager Jeremy Grantham to make the point. In his quest to understand why P/E multiples and corporate profit margins have failed to revert to the prior mean over the past couple of decades, Mr. Grantham of GMO made some very important points about how the American economy has changed for the worse during the 21st century. Indeed, much of what he observes can be seen as key factors in rising income equality, which in turn leads to social instability.

Here are some of his key points from the latest GMO Quarterly Letter (it starts on page 9):

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