New York’s luxury real-estate market has been in freefall for years, and now the city’s super-luxe buildings are sitting empty — even as property prices in the city remain stubbornly high, prompting 300 New Yorkers to move out of the city every day, and filling the homeless shelters to capacity and beyond.
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Tag: oligarchy
Welcome to 2020 and your annual State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling, Jon Lebkowsky and The WELL
Every year (20190, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2007, 2005) Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky conduct a public salon with the users of The WELL on the “State of the World.” It’s always one of the highlights of the new year for me, and this year (which Sterling calls the first year in his life when it’s “hard to find any genuine technical novelty”) is off to an especially chewy and interesting start.
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The New Deal was partly motivated by a desire to kill the fake news epidemic of the Gilded Age
100 years ago, wealthy people bought up newspapers as fast as they could, then used them to smear progressive reformers, inventing lies (“Congressmen don’t pay taxes!”) to discredit the entire project of dismantling American oligarchy.
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Everything you wanted to know about money-laundering but were afraid to ask
“If we were serious about crime, we’d take most of the cops off the streets and replace them with accountants”: this, from the introduction to CZ Edwards’ amazing Twitter thread about the nuts-and-bolts of money-laundering and how it applies to modern geopolitics, including Trump’s assassination of an Iranian government official and the role that Trump’s real-estate, failed businesses and casinos played in the global money-laundry, without which most serious crime would collapse.
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The 2010s were the decade of Citizens United
Slate has dubbed the 2010s as the decade of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that paved the way for unlimited, anonymous corporate election spending. In 2010, the year of Citizens United, the largest political donors were Robert and Doylene Perry ($7.5m for Republicans); in 2019, it was Sheldon and Miriam Adelson ($122m).
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The Oligarch Game: use coin-tosses to demonstrate “winner take all” and its power to warp perceptions
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle created The Game of Oligarchy, which “shows that the ‘free market’ leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.”
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Trump pledged that Amazon would be forced to pay its taxes; thanks to his #taxscam, their profits went up and their taxes stayed $0.00
Amazon’s tax bill in 2017 was $0. Trump was very vocal in his disgust at this situation and pledged he would make them pay their fair share. It’s been a year, and Amazon’s profits are way up ($11.2 billion!) but their tax bill remains precisely $0.00. Thank the #taxscam.
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Civil society groups protest the sale of .ORG to a private equity fund and a collection of Republican billionaires
Earlier this month, management of the .org top-level domain underwent a radical shift: first, ICANN dropped price-caps on .org domains, and then the Internet Societ (ISOC) flogged the registry off to Ethos Capital, a private equity fund, and a consortium of three families of Republican billionaires: the Perots, the Romneys, and the Johnsons.
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Terabytes of data leaked from an oligarch-friendly offshore bank
The Distributed Denial of Secrets Twitter account has published links to terabytes of data identified as raw data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust; Phineas Fisher (previously), the public-interest hacker(s) behind the Hacking Team breach, is credited with the leak.
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Trump’s signature tax break for poor people went to subsidize a superyacht marina in Florida
Trump’s 2017 #taxscam transferred more than a trillion dollars to the richest people in America, but when Trump talks about it, he likes to tout the bill’s “opportunity zone” provisions that provided massive tax breaks to investors who put money into places that would supposedly create jobs and housing for poor Americans.
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