Month: January 2013

America Meet Your New Slumlord: Wall Street

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And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

– Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816

Well they aren’t really your “new” slumlord in the sense you have been debt slaves to the financials system for decades.  What I really mean is that it is now becoming overt and literal.  Literal because financiers are now the main players in the real estate market and are buying all the homes ordinary citizens were kicked out of over the past few years.  Yep, we bailed out the financial system so that financiers with access to cheap credit can buy up all of America’s real estate so that they can then rent it back to you later.

Of course, my opinion is that this will ultimately backfire on all the private equity buyers once they find out multiple generations will start living together and a weak economy will not provide the rental income they envision going forward.  Particularly once we have another severe slowdown…which always happens eventually.  Incredibly, Blackstone has spent $1.5 billion to buy homes in the last 2-3 months alone!

From Bloomberg:

Blackstone has spent more than more than $2.5 billion on 16,000 homes to manage as rentals, deploying capital from the $13.3 billion fund it raised last year, said Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate for the world’s largest private equity firm. That’s up from $1 billion of homes owned in October, when Blackstone Chairman Stephen Schwarzman said the company was spending $100 million a week on houses.

“The market is moving much faster than anybody thought possible,” Gray said during an interview in Blackstone’s New York headquarters. “Housing is much stronger than people anticipated.”

Of course the market is improving.  Not because citizens are buying, but because financiers with access to cheap credit are in a bidding war to become America’s slumlords.

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Google Trends: “Democide” Goes Parabolic

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No matter what you think of Alex Jones and his performance with Piers Morgan on CNN last night, the most important point is that he was invited on the show to begin with.  This is just further proof that the dinosaur mainstream media channels are dying and are being forced to invite alternative media personalities … Read more

In San Francisco, the DA Wants to Looks Through Your Twitter

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This article is a prime example of what law enforcement and intelligence agencies will do to you if they think they can get away with it.  This is precisely why we need to hold their feet to the fire every step of the way and defend the Bill of Rights at all costs.  The more you look under the surface, the more it becomes clear that our government considers anyone that protests the oligarchy to be their enemy.  This was made clear when we discovered that The FBI Classifies Peaceful American Protestors as “Terrorists.”

From the always excellent EFF:

Last month the San Francisco District Attorney’s office went on a fishing expedition.  After EFF and ACLU got involved, the DA wisely cut bait.

The fishing expedition cut short by the DA last week consisted of a pair of subpoenas issued to Twitter, seeking tweets, photos, and a trove of other information related to the accounts of two activists, Robert Donohoe and Lauren Smith, whom the SF DA has charged with a number of offenses stemming from a Columbus Day anti-capitalist protest.

Not only did the subpoenas to Twitter violate federal law (the Stored Communications Act makes clear that the government cannot use a subpoena to gain access to the content of communications), but they violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution as well.  Government surveillance of what we say—even in public—has a chilling effect on speech.  That is why courts have held that any effort to compel the disclosure of a person’s communications or associations must be narrowly tailored.

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Swedish Consumers Get Served Fake Beef

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This story fits in perfectly with my post yesterday Inflation Hits Coffee as Brewers Secretly Swap Robusta for Arabica, in the sense that as the cost of real food and quality items soars, the tendency will be to simply replace real goods with fake goods.  It’s one thing to buy a fake handbag, it’s quite another to discover your meat has been dyed pink to look like something it’s not.  “American as apple pie” is soon to be replaced with “American as biotech salmon.”  From UPI:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jan. 5 (UPI) — About 95.5 tons of pork cuts dyed to look like beef have been imported to Sweden, and about 70 ton of it have already been sold, official say.

The fake beef was imported into Sweden for two years and sold at grocery stores nationwide, The Local.se reported.

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Chart of the Day: Inflation Since the American Revolution

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As is clear by this chart, inflation was virtually unheard of until the Creature from Jekyll Island (the Federal Reserve) took over.  However, more importantly, things didn’t really start to get bad until the 1970’s right after Nixon took the nation off the gold standard in 1971.  Since that time, America has seen a period of … Read more

Alex Jones to Debate Piers Morgan Live Tonight!

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This is guaranteed to give Piers’ show its highest ratings ever.  Time to dust of the TV and watch some fireworks! [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6CBcWLnikQ&feature=player_embedded] In Liberty, Mike Like this post? Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G Follow me on Twitter.

The Guardian: Paul Krugman should be U.S. Treasury Secretary

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The friend who sent this article to me wrote:

Part of me actually hopes for this appointment because he will accelerate the collapse of the current psychotic Keynesian ideology and our unsustainable fiscal practices. The sooner it ends, the better…even if that end is painful.

I couldn’t agree more.  Now for some snippets from the latest Op Ed insanity from a major publication:

Not only is he the world’s best-known economist, Krugman has the intellect and integrity to resist Wall Street’s calls for austerity.

He could ignore what Wall Street and conservative media interests want and pick somebody who would represent what the electorate voted for. And not even just the people who voted for him: there are a lot of Republican voters out there who are also unemployed.

It didn’t take long for the author to expose his lack of understanding in the above paragraph, where he uses the same old false left-right divide to imply Wall Street is “conservative.”  They are the furthest thing from conservative, they are simply financial oligarchs that own both major parties and Paul Krugman would be an ideal tool for them as well.

Then again, he does make one point I agree with:

This was unprecedented and an historic change; Kim is practically the only World Bank president in 60 years who was not previously a banker or a war criminal.

However, he immediately reverts to nonsense very quickly when he states:

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Inflation Hits Coffee as Brewers Secretly Swap Robusta for Arabica

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This article hit close to home for me.  Literally.  It was just over the holiday season that I mentioned to my mom that her coffee doesn’t taste as good as it used to.  She insisted that she was buying the same blend as always and I insisted it didn’t taste as good.  The conversation ended there.

Then I came across the following article and everything started to make sense.  From the Daily Finance:

Reuters is reporting that many of America’s major brands have been quietly tweaking their coffee blends. While most coffee companies consider their blends trade secrets, and are loath to disclose exactly what goes into them, both circumstantial and direct evidence suggests they’re now substituting lower-grade Robusta beans for some of their pricier Arabica, and degrading the quality of our coffee.

Research out of agricultural bank Rabobank confirms that demand for Arabica beans among coffee buyers “has fallen 27% year-to-date, while Robusta [demand] is 25% higher.” This seems to confirm a widespread alteration of the bean mix.

Why the switcheroo? Prepare to not be shocked. The answer is: price.

Now here’s the kicker of the article.

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