Category: MK

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 properties from hordes of newly destitute Americans and then renting them back to those same people. I wrote many articles on 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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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 foreigns 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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Must Reads

Trump’s Support and Praise of Despots Is Central to the U.S. Tradition, Not a Deviation From It (Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept)

Alarm Grows in Washington as Saudi Coalition Attack on Yemen Port Appears Imminent (The Washington Post)

Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant (Despicable and infuriating, The New Yorker)

James Comey Defends Himself Against Hillary Cult Obsessives (CSPAN)

Comey Says Only Reason Assange Not ‘Apprehended Yet’: He’s Out of Reach (Not good, Common Dreams)

Feinstein Says There is No Evidence of Collusion Between Trump Associates and Russia (CNN interview clip)

American Airlines Plans to Squeeze You In Even Tighter (May as well just put passengers in the overhead compartments, Bloomberg)

Anadarko is “Saddened” by Fatal Firestone Explosion (Very disturbing, The Denver Post)

Readers Pummel New York Times Writer Over His Big Bank Stance (Wall Street on Parade)

Spam Campaign Targets Google Users with Malicious Link (Be careful out there, Reuters)

U.S. Politics

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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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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 is 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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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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As the title of today’s piece implies, something very rotten in 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 point from the latest GMO Quarterly Letter (it starts on page 9):

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Last month, Donald’s Trump choice to head the CIA, Mike Pompeo, dedicated much of his first speech toward a hysterical and disturbing rant against Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange (I covered this in detail in the post: The American Empire Under Donald Trump Has Become Increasingly Desperate, Dangerous & Insecure).

Although the entire episode was an absurd and embarrassing spectacle, what really caught people off guard was Pompeo’s assertion that Assange cannot claim a First Amendment defense within the U.S. legal system because he is not an American citizen. Although the fact that the head of the CIA would harbor such an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution isn’t surprising, it’s alarming nonetheless. The following excellent interview addresses this claim and expounds on many other important topics.

Enjoy.

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If you appreciate our work, and want to contribute to genuine, independent media, consider visiting our Support Page.

Must Reads

Formerly Imprisoned Journalist Barrett Brown Taken Back Into Custody Before PBS Interview (A total disgrace, The Intercept)

The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think (Politico)

Man ‘Sentenced to Death for Atheism’ in Saudi Arabia (If the U.S. wants to bomb countries for human rights abuses…The Independent)

Saudi Arabia Elected to UN Women’s Rights Commission (Unfortunately not a joke, The Hill)

Julian Assange: The CIA director is waging war on truth-tellers like WikiLeaks (Assange op-ed in The Washington Post)

Two-Thirds of Americans Think That the Democratic Party Is Out of Touch with the Country (The Washington Post)

Google Changes Its Algorithms to Combat Fake News (Axios)

Stanley Fischer Defends the Revolving Door Between Wall Street and the Fed —Without Mentioning He’s Part of It (So incredibly shady, Business Insider)

US ‘Deep State’ Sold Out Counter-Terrorism to Keep Itself in Business (Middle East Eye)

Marine Le Pen May Get a Lift From an Unlikely Source: The Far Left (Many political similarities between the U.S. and France, The New York Times)

Meet the NU-Nerds These Colleg-Age Hackers Will Soon Shape Our Future (Wired)

The World According to a Free-Range Short Seller With Nothing to Lose (Fascinating profile of Mark Cohodes, Bloomberg)

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria (The Atlantic)

8 Reasons Why Rome Fell (History.com)

U.S. Politics

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There is no reason for the Democratic Party to exist.
– Jimmy Dore

I’ve been surprised by the number of people who lived in total denial about who Barack Obama actually was throughout his entire administration, suddenly pointing out the ethical and demoralizing implications of his recent decision to accept $400,000 for a speech to Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

For myself and countless others, the writing was on the wall from virtually day one when he appointed Wall Street sycophants Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to senior positions within his administration. Then came the polices, which were even more generous to Wall Street than any cynic could imagine. I posted countless pieces on Obama’s cronyism throughout his Presidency, constantly referring to him as an oligarch-coddling fraud, which his record unquestionably confirms.

It wasn’t just Wall Street either, although his protection and empowerment of that industry in particular was especially shameless. He coddled and elevated corporatism and cronyism in general throughout his eight years in office. As I observed in the 2015 post, Cronyism Pays – Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder Triumphantly Returns to His Prior Corporate Law Firm Job:

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