Just Another Tale from the Oligarch Recovery – $100 Million Homes Being Built on Spec

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Neoclassical economics and the trickle down policy framework that we have derived from it argues that there is a trade-off between fairness and growth. The general idea of trickle down economics is that the richer the rich get and the less constrained they are, less burdened in regulations, the more jobs they create, the better off everyone will be. It’s the concentrated accumulation of capital which is the principal driver of market capitalism.. So, rising economic inequality isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the trickle down economics. It’s how you know things are getting better, right? Because the richer the rich get, the more jobs they create. This is a general principle of the thing.

– From Salon’s recent interview of Nick Hanauer: The 1 Percent Rigged Everything: Why No One Can End Ronald Reagan’s “Dead Wrong” Voodoo Economics

Just to give you a little sense of how all this wealth has been “trickling down” see…

More developers and investors are racing to build increasingly lavish homes on spec. Built on prime lots with master suites larger than most homes and spas and entertainment spaces comparable with those in hotels, many of these homes are also attempting to break new price records.

Real-estate agents say the surge reflects an ultraluxury housing market that is at an all-time high, fed in part by overseas buyers and house hunters looking to invest in trophy properties. 

“These are people who are going to buy these homes to park money,” says Jeff Hyland, of Beverly Hills-based Hilton & Hyland. 

Mr. Hadid declines to say what he’s spending on the home, but says the listing price will likely be in the $200 million range when the house is completed next year.

– From the Wall Street Journal article: The Race to the $100 Million Spec House

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to highlight a recent insightful interview Nick Hanauer gave to Salon. In case you forgot, Mr. Hanauer is the billionaire who came out and publicly warned of pitchforks unless our corrupt economic system is reformed. I highlighted his article and provided my own thoughts in the piece: The Pitchforks are Coming…– A Dire Warning from a Member of the 0.01%. If you never read that, I suggest taking a look now.

A very poignant point made by Hanauer in his latest interview, concerns how fake liberals like Barack Obama will pay lip service to income inequality as if it is simply some unexpected moral tragedy which happened accidentally within a well functioning economic system. Hanauer correctly points out that the economic system itself is corrupted. That all wealth is being funneled to a tiny oligarchy isn’t a a flaw within this system, it’s a deliberate part of the design itself replete with its own elitist hedging mechanism.

For example, whenever oligarch wealth is threatened, such as in the 2008/09 time period, all resources are immediately mobilized to bail them out. The interests of all other segments of society are consistently thrown to the wayside, with the exception of welfare merely meant to just lessen the probability of civil unrest, as opposed to actually lifting people into the middle or upper classes.

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Saudi Human Rights Lawyer and Activist Jailed for 15 Years for Free Speech Under New “Anti-Terror” Law

Screen Shot 2014-07-07 at 11.14.53 AMBack in April, I published a post titled, Saudi Arabia Passes New Law that Declares Atheists “Terrorists.” In it, I highlighted an article from the UK Telegraph which noted:

In a string of royal decrees and an overarching new piece of legislation to deal with terrorism generally, the Saudi King Abdullah has clamped down on all forms of political dissent and protests that could “harm public order”.

The organization said the new “terrorism” provisions contain language that prosecutors and judges are already using to prosecute and convict independent activists and peaceful dissidents.

Concerns that this law would be used to silence dissent and crackdown on basic human rights were apparently well justified, as the Wall Street Journal reported today that a Saudi court has sentenced human rights lawyer and activist Waleed Abu Alkhair to 15 years in prison for “inciting public opinion,” i.e., effectively utilizing free speech. The WSJ reports that:

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Was the Department of Defense Behind Facebook’s Controversial Manipulation Study?

Screen Shot 2014-07-01 at 2.41.34 PMI’ve spent pretty much all day reading as much as possible about the extremely controversial Facebook “emotional contagion” study in which the company intentionally altered its news feed algorithm to see if it could manipulate its users’ emotions. In case you weren’t aware, Facebook is always altering your news feed under the assumption that there’s no way they could fill your feed with all of your “friends'” pointless, self-absorbed, dull updates (there’s just too much garbage).

As such, Facebook filters your news feed all the time, something which advertisers must find particularly convenient. In any event, the particular alteration under question occurred during one week in January 2012, and the company filled some people’s feeds with positive posts, while others were fed more negative posts.

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Coming to a Protest Near You…A Drone That Blasts Pepper Spray

Screen Shot 2014-06-18 at 12.38.44 PMWhat’s a crony status quo to do when it is ultimately confronted with an unruly mob of plebs frustrated with the fact median wages haven’t increased in forty five years, while the 0.01% has stolen everything in sight with the help of the Federal Reserve and corrupt Washington D.C. politicians?

Well, naturally you’d launch the South African made Skunk Riot Control Copter, fully equipped with a suite of high-definition and thermal imagine cameras, strobe lights, speakers and a pepper spray firing paint ball gun which can fire 80 shots per second!

We learn from The Verge that:

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The Department of Agriculture Launches Proposal to Purchase Submachine Guns

The following solicitation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture almost defies belief. We’ve seen this type of bizarre behavior before, but it has mostly originated from the American Gestapo, aka the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I highlighted this trend early last year in my post: Department of Homeland Security to Purchase 7,000 “Assault Weapons”. Here’s … Read more

How the Boston Police Were Too Busy Monitoring “Occupy Boston” to Notice Tamerlan

After reading the article below, it’s almost impossible to think that the never-ending “war on terror” has anything to do with foreign radicals that “hate us for our freedoms.”  As I and many others have noted for years, the surveillance state being put in place is intended to deal with domestic unrest.  Unrest the oligarchs know is coming as a result of their unprecedented reign of theft and corruption. So now we discover that the Boston Police counter-terror intelligence unit was too busy monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations to notice Tamerlan Tsarnaev right under their noses.  From NBC:

In the fall of 2011, a key Boston police counterterror intelligence unit — funded with millions of dollars in U.S. homeland security grants — was closely monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations, including tracking the Facebook pages and websites of the protesters and writing reports on the potential impact on “commercial and financial sector assets” in downtown areas, according to internal police documents.

The police monitoring of the activities of Occupy Boston — an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the country in 2011 — came during a period after the U.S. government received the second of two warnings from the Russian government about the radical Islamic ties of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

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