- The Untold Lives Of The Saudi Royal Family
Saudi Arabia is a controversial region of the world thanks to its royal family known as the House of Saud.
They have dealt with turmoil within the ranks and have wreaked havoc on those who disobeyed them…
- Red Flag Gun Laws: Yet Another Government Weapon For Compliance And Control
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana
We never learn.
In the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.
Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.
Mark my words: red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, will only add to the government’s power.
These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, are yet another Trojan Horse, a stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.
Thirteen states now have red flag laws on their books. That number is growing.
As The Washington Post reports, these laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
In the midst of what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings, these gun confiscation laws—extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws—may appease the fears of those who believe that fewer guns in the hands of the general populace will make our society safer.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way.
Anything—knives, vehicles, planes, pressure cookers—can become a weapon when wielded with deadly intentions.
With these red flag gun laws, the intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.
“We need to stop dangerous people before they act”: that’s the rationale behind the NRA’s support of these red flag laws, and at first glance, it appears to be perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others.
Where the problem arises, of course, is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
We’ve been down this road before.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
Let that sink in a moment.
Now consider what happened in Maryland after a police officer attempted to “enforce” the state’s new red flag law, which went into effect on Oct. 1.
At 5 am on a Monday, two police officers showed up at 61-year-old Gary Willis’ house to serve him with a court order requiring that he surrender his guns. Willis answered the door holding a gun.
Mind you, in some states, merely answering the door holding a gun is enough to get you killed by police who have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
Willis initially set his gun aside while he spoke with the police. However, when the police attempted to serve him with the gun confiscation order, Willis reportedly became “irate” and picked up his gun again. At that point, a struggle ensued, causing the gun to go off. Although no one was harmed, one of the cops shot and killed Willis.
According to the Anne Arundel County police chief, the shooting was a sign that the red flag law is needed.
What the police can’t say with any certainty is what they prevented by shooting and killing Willis.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally.
This is the world that science fiction author Philip K. Dick envisioned for Minority Report in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
In Dick’s dystopian police state, the police combine widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining and precognitive technology to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage: precrime.
In Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg, the technology that John Anderton, Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in Washington, DC, relies on for his predictive policing proves to be fallible, identifying him as the next would-be criminal and targeting him for preemptive measures. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.
With every passing day, the American police state moves that much closer to mirroring the fictional pre-crime prevention world of Minority Report.
For instance, police in major American cities have been testing a tool that allows them to identify individuals—or groups of individuals—most likely to commit a crime in a given community. Those individuals are then put on notice that their movements and activities will be closely monitored and any criminal activity (by them or their associates) will result in harsh penalties.
In other words, the burden of proof is reversed: you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Dig beneath the surface of this kind of surveillance/police state, however, and you will find that the real purpose of pre-crime is not safety but control.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.
In much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program renders otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom, or generally live in the United States.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
If you’re not scared yet, you should be.
Connect the dots.
Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.
To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that will soon blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata.
This brings me back to those red flag gun laws.
In the short term, these gun confiscation laws may serve to temporarily delay or discourage those wishing to inflict violence on others, but it will not resolve whatever madness or hate or instability therein that causes someone to pull a trigger or launch a bomb or unleash violence on another.
Nor will these laws save us from government-instigated and directed violence at the hands of the American police state or the blowback from the war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex, both of which remain largely overlooked and underestimated pieces of the discussion on gun violence in America.
In the long term, all these gun confiscation laws will do is ensure that when the police state finally cracks down, “we the people” are defenseless in the face of the government’s arsenal of weapons.
After all, the most important and most consistent theme throughout the Constitution, including the Second Amendment, is the fact that it is not merely an enumeration of our rights but was intended to be a clear shackle on the government’s powers.
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas understood this tension well. “The Constitution is not neutral,” he remarked. “It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.”
In this way, the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights in their entirety stand as a bulwark against a police state. To our detriment, these rights have been steadily weakened, eroded and undermined in recent years.
Yet without any one of them, including the Second Amendment right to own and bear arms, we are that much more vulnerable to the vagaries of out-of-control policemen, benevolent dictators, genuflecting politicians, and overly ambitious bureaucrats.
You can eliminate all of guns, but it will not necessarily eliminate violence. Those same individuals sick enough to walk into an elementary school or a movie theater and open fire using a gun can and do wreak just as much havoc with homemade bombs made out of pressure cookers and a handful of knives.
It’s also not even a question of whether Americans need weapons to defend themselves against any overt threats to their safety or well-being, although a study by a Quinnipiac University economist indicates that less restrictive concealed gun-carry laws save lives, while gun control can endanger lives. In fact, journalist Kevin Carson, writing for CounterPunch, suggests that prohibiting Americans from owning weapons would be as dangerously ineffective as Prohibition and the War on the Drugs:
[W]hat strict gun laws will do is take the level of police statism, lawlessness and general social pathology up a notch in the same way Prohibition and the Drug War have done. I’d expect a War on Guns to expand the volume of organized crime, and to empower criminal gangs fighting over control over the black market, in exactly the same way Prohibition did in the 1920s and strict drug laws have done since the 1980s. I’d expect it to lead to further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, further militarization of local police via SWAT teams, and further expansion of the squalid empire of civil forfeiture, perjured jailhouse snitch testimony, entrapment, planted evidence, and plea deal blackmail.
Truly, the debate over gun ownership in America is really a debate over who gets to call the shots and control the game. In other words, it’s that same tug-of-war that keeps getting played out in every confrontation between the government and the citizenry over who gets to be the master and who is relegated to the part of the servant.
The Constitution is clear on this particular point, with its multitude of prohibitions on government overreach. As author Edmund A. Opitz observed in 1964:
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
In a nutshell, then, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms reflects not only a concern for one’s personal defense but serves as a check on the political power of the ruling authorities. It represents an implicit warning against governmental encroachments on one’s freedoms, the warning shot over the bow to discourage any unlawful violations of our persons or property. As such, it reinforces that necessary balance in the citizen-state relationship.
Certainly, dictators in past regimes have understood this principle only too well. As Adolf Hitler noted, “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that starting in December 1935, Jews in Germany were prevented from obtaining shooting licenses, because authorities believed that to allow them to do so would “endanger the German population.”
In late 1938, special orders were delivered barring Jews from owning firearms, with the punishment for arms possession being twenty years in a concentration camp.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it is a history that we should be wary of repeating.
- Kyle Bass Doubles-Down On Yuan Short, Calls For "China Reset"
Nearly 18 months after Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass declared that he intended to stand by his massive offshore yuan short even as his fund moved deep into the red (unlike all of those other “tourist China bears” who had jumped ship at the first stirrings of dollar weakness), the Dallas hedge fund manager revealed that he had finally broken even after his fund sunk 20% last year, according to Reuters.
Which means now is the perfect time to double down…
Bass, who has long argued that the yuan will slide 30% against the dollar as the country’s credit bubble bursts, told his audience that he has added to his currency short as the currency hovers just above the big round 7-to-the-dollar level. He also praised President Trump’s trade policies, which he said would be “100% healthy for the next 10 years”, though he clarified that he was “not a Trump voter” and that he would jump at the opportunity to throw his support behind Michael Bloomberg.
“Tariffs come and go,” Bass said.
“But how do you negotiate with someone…with the hopes that they would liberalize their economy and do the things they said they would do, and especially don’t do the things they said they wouldn’t do, and yet they’ve done everything exactly as they always have?”
Trump’s shortcomings, Bass said, include his tweeting and other means by which he communicates his message.
“‘Trade wars are good,’ that was an insane comment to say,” Bass said of Trump. “What he should have said is, ‘We’re going to reciprocate with China, where they’re going to let us into their markets, we’re going to let them into ours…’ His actions were proper, but his comments were improper.”
As corporate defaults soar, Bass believes that China is headed for a “reset” that he expects to arrive during “the next couple of years.”
He projected that China could lose more than $2.5 trillion of equity, more than triple the size of the U.S bank bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, and would have to print more than $25 trillion of renmimbi to counteract the impact of slowing economic growth and declining credit on its banks.
“It’s insane how levered this market has become,” Bass said.
“You’re starting to see bankruptcies across the board in China that are hard to hide, if you look at the corporate default rate, the bankruptcy rate, M1 and M2 (money supply), the slowest money growth in over four decades.”
“We’ll have a reset in China, and I think it will happen in the next couple of years,” Bass concluded.
Chinese companies are already feeling the impact of its slowing credit impulse…
…As defaults soar…
…And small- and medium-sized companies resort to ‘imaginative’ strategies for paying down their debt – including striking an agreement with creditors for a ‘payment in kind’ of ham.
- Democrats Begin "Massive Grass-Roots" Campaign Pushing Medicare-For-All
Authored by Ryan Martines via PlanetFreeWill.com,
Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic Congresswoman from Washington, indicated on Tuesday that the time has come to begin laying the groundwork to vote on a Medicare-for-All bill once Democrats take control of the House in January 2019.
“We are going to be pushing for it to get a hearing … to have this debate on the floor,” Jayapal told National Nurses United union members during a conference call, reports The Hill.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal speaking at a ‘Hands Off’ rally to voice opinions about Trump’s budget proposal – May 2017
Organizers from liberal groups, led by National Nurses United, said on the call that they are going to be organizing grassroots support, including phone calls especially targeting the 13 House Democrats on the key committees of Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce who they said have not signed onto the Medicare for All bill yet.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the idea’s leading champion, also joined the call and called for “massive grass-roots support” to push for Medicare for all.
Jayapal, co-chairman of the House’s Medicare for All caucus, is likely to face headwinds regarding the potential legislation as Party leadership has yet to sign on to a bill or shown any interest in bringing such a measure to vote.
In a recent interview with The Hill, Jayapal said the Medicare for All caucus is hard at work crafting a “revised version” of the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act, and aims to introduce it during Congress’ upcoming sessions.
Hefty Costs For Those Who’ve Tried
California pondered the idea of a single-payer health care system until they realized it would cost about $400 billion a year—more than twice the state’s annual budget.
A single-payer bill passed by New York’s state assembly would cost $173 billion annually (the state generates about $71 billion a year in revenue).
Vermont had to scrap their plans for a single payer system after realizing it would cost an extra $2.5 billion annually, almost double the state’s current budget, and would have required an 11.5 percent payroll tax increase and a 9 percent income tax increase.
Nationwide “Medicare for all” could cost more than $32 trillion over its first decade, and other experts that may be a conservative number. Even if the U.S. were to double federal income and corporate taxes they would still not have enough to pay for this program.
Cost Is Not The Only Issue.
In Great Britain, 4.2 million patients were on England’s National Health Service waiting lists.
In Canada, the median wait time between seeing a general practitioner and following up with a specialist is almost 3 months.
The wait between seeing a doctor and beginning treatment is five months. According to a Fraser Institute study, the average Canadian waits 3 to 5 months to see an ophthalmologist, orthopedist and neurosurgeon.
However, this has not done anything to stop the promoters of Medicare for All. Our healthcare was already expensive and Obamacare made it worse. Instead of practical ideas like rolling back the tax burden on insurance companies (caused by Obamacare); lowering regulations on health plans; not forcing consumers to buy coverage they do not need or want; and allowing the free market to create competition and provide quality care at a better cost.
The best our politicians can do is promise “Medicare for All”?
Sadly, promising the masses free anything usually prevents rational people from asking questions such as, “How will this be paid for?” or “Forget the intention of the program … what is the effect?”.
- China Sends Trump Written Response To Trade Reform Demands, Offers Insufficient Concessions
Ahead of the much-anticipated meeting between presidents Trump and Xi on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Argentina at the end of November during which hopes run high for at least a modest de-escalation of trade tensions, on Wednesday China delivered a written response to U.S. demands for wide-ranging trade reforms, a move which according to Reuters could trigger negotiations to bring an end to a withering trade war between the world’s top economies.
Reuters’ sources said that China had sent a written response to Trump’s demands on intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, Chinese entry barriers to American businesses and the U.S. trade deficit with China, although it was unclear if the response contained concessions that would satisfy Trump’s demands for change.
For the actual contents of the letter, we have to go to Bloomberg which reports that the text “outlines a series of potential concessions to the Trump administration for the first time since the summer” as they continue to try to resolve a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
However, the commitments – for now – fall short of the type of major structural reforms that President Donald Trump has been demanding, “two of the sources said, cautioning that a long road lies ahead in negotiations. One person said that talks are continuing and constructive.”
Then again they can’t be that constructive because one of the sources said the letter “raised doubts” over how substantive a deal Trump could make with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping when the two leaders meet later this month.
Most of the document appeared to be a rehash of previous changes already made by Beijing, such as raising equity caps on foreign investment in certain industries, according to one person. It did not contain the sort of commitment to change industrial policies such as Xi’s “Made in China 2025” that Washington has been seeking, according to one person familiar with the discussions.
Two other people familiar with the talks also said the Chinese offer was a sign of what they characterized as constructive discussions between the two sides ahead of the planned G20 meeting between the two leaders.
Of course, if it was truly constructive, the Yuan would be surging, yet one look at the offshore currency, shows that the USDCNH has barely budged from its Tuesday closing price of 6.945, although it also remains well away from the key 7.00 level.
- Russia's Moon Base Plans Could Lead To Moscow Mining The Asteroid Belt
Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,
Head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said that “this is about creating a long-term base, naturally, not habitable, but visited. But basically, it is the transition to robotic systems, to avatars that will solve tasks on the Moon surface”, which shows that Moscow is moving ahead with a general proposal that was first made a few years ago.
It’s an open secret that the world is in the midst of a new space race between the US, Russia, China, and even a few other countries that are trying to enter the field, with this process unofficially started by America after Trump declared the creation of his country’s so-called “Space Force”. The US claims that it needs to act in order to thwart Russia and China’s militarization of this domain, while those two multipolar Great Powers have consistently accused the US of actually being the one to break international law by secretly doing this all along.
Moving beyond the controversial rhetoric and into objectively recognized reality, however, there’s apparently no stopping the process that the US has unleashed, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that every manifestation of this race will be inherently militarized.
Russia’s proud history of exploring space is universally acknowledged after it was the first country to send a satellite and a man into orbit, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it still longs to send a man to the moon after the US beat them to it back in 1969 during America’s first victory in this race. There are practical reasons for doing this other than prestige and the sake of science because a moon base is thought to be required for facilitating the future mining of mineral-rich asteroids, something that still remains in the realm of science fiction for now but shouldn’t be discounted as a promising industry of the future.
President Putin also famously said last year that “whoever becomes the leader in the sphere (of AI) will become the ruler of the world”, and he also emphasized his nation’s prioritization of this technology and other related ones during a keynote speech that he made earlier this year ahead of Russia’s presidential elections, so it’s logical that his government would seek to pair this with space exploration and the potential mining of asteroids that might eventually follow in order to become a global leader in this respect.
That’s why Russia’s plan to construct a robot-built moon base is more sensible of an investment than it might initially seem to those who hadn’t thought it through, though the country first has to prove that it has the technology to pull off this feat before it becomes something that the rest of the world can take seriously.
- Homesellers And Developers In NYC, Virginia Just Hit The "Amazon Lottery"
A recent Long Island City property seller had trouble finding a buyer… until Amazon announced that it was coming to the Queens neighborhood. At that point, she promptly refused to sign a contract with the buyer and is now holding out for a higher bid on the property. This is a microcosm of what happens across real estate markets anytime Amazon moves in next door, according to a fascinating new Bloomberg report.
When Amazon announced the location of its two new “HQ2” headquarters – one in Long Island City, New York and the other in Crystal City, Virginia – the housing markets in both areas lit up overnight, and it was immediately clear that resident, investors and speculators in these areas had just hit the “Amazon lottery”.
The online retailer announced that it would be bringing about 25,000 new employees to Crystal City and Long Island City. As we had documented, these communities had already seen their fair share of real estate speculators, getting in early and betting that these locations would wind up being home to Amazon. Amazon helped bolster home prices almost 80% over the last six years in Seattle, location of the company’s original headquarters. People, of course, noticed this and applied it as a way to make a buck.
Margaret O’Mara, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, suggested that upon building these two new properties, Amazon should now focus on preventing the loss of affordable housing and the rise in homelessness that came with the explosion of growth created in places like Washington. She claims that Amazon has an opportunity to set an example for how major corporations can expand into local communities and work on social challenges along side of helping create economic growth.
“Amazon has an opportunity to set a new example for how companies, and particularly tech companies, can not only engage locally and be good neighbors,” she told Bloomberg.
Places like Long Island City have already experienced solid real estate growth as younger generations are trying to find affordable housing near public transportation. Amazon has stated that it is committed to preserving affordable housing, but its effect of accelerating home prices to the point of unaffordability going forward is both inevitable and unavoidable.
Nina Janopaul, chief executive officer of the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing told Bloomberg: “We were already on a wave of gentrification. The younger generation is drawn to those transit-rich locations, which is great. It’s wonderful that they’re giving up the love affair with the automobile. But this is hard for people for whom it’s not a choice but a necessity.”
Grant Long, senior economist with StreetEasy, told Bloomberg: “Queens has been a really popular place for its relative affordability and I think we’re going to see that relative affordability start to erode. The big thing to watch is what happens to the surrounding areas: Astoria, Sunnyside, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights are all going to emerge as really attractive places in a way they weren’t two weeks ago.”
Hello, neighbor To be sure, even before Amazon’s announcement, Long Island City was already working on problems that come with quick population growth, such as parking complaints and complaints about blocked bike lanes.
The situation is similar in Virginia. Real estate broker Sue Rasoul was awakened by a slew of phone calls about a two bedroom condo that had been listed in Crystal City for $505,000 on the morning that Amazon announced that it was coming to town. The property was already under contract, but it had spent months on the market with little interest prior.
She told Bloomberg: “Over the last week I’ve received 50 inquiries on that one property — we hadn’t received 50 inquiries over the previous 100 days. There’s a difference in value between the idea that Amazon might come and the fact that it’s coming.”
Meanwhile, online searches for homes in these two locations has exploded. In the week ended November 11, views of homes for sale in Long Island City were up 1049% from the year prior. Listings in Crystal City were up 217% from the prior year. In Long Island City, open house attendance instantly doubled at two new projects and agents at a local brokerage had to call in reinforcements on a Sunday because they were so busy.
Eric Benaim, CEO of Modern Spaces, which markets new developments in Long Island City said: “I had to excuse myself from from my son’s birthday party, because agents were texting and calling me to say they were swamped.”
He expects developers to raise prices at condo towers that are already under construction and he’s already been fielding phone calls from people seeking employment his brokerage office. He stated that he’s going to hire as many as 30 new agents in the coming months.
“We won the real estate broker lotto,” he said.
The developers in Long Island City who were developing far ahead of demand also will greatly benefit from the move. Long Island City already has the largest number of apartments under construction in New York City and is ranked number one in newly authorized units. We discussed the building binge in LIC previously when addressing the tax breaks that would be offered to Amazon.
Those who invest in the area and hold their investments for 10 years can defer paying the entire capital gains on their appreciation. Real estate developers seek out these types of high growth areas where they can get the most bang for their tax-adjusted buck. Rules are still being finalized by the federal government about what types of development are allowed to occur in these areas, but both towering residential towers and light commercial offices and retail space are expected to qualify.
The incentives were a little-known provision of the Republican tax overhaul that President Donald Trump signed into law late last year. Since then, they’ve captured the attention of developers and government officials because they have the potential to make projects in long-neglected areas more enticing. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has estimated that $100 billion may eventually flow to the roughly 8,700 struggling communities scattered around the country that were selected by state governors and officials in U.S. territories.
This rounds out billions of dollars of investments that Long Island City has seen over the last couple of years, mostly due to its proximity to Manhattan. Just two weeks ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he would dump another $180 million into the neighborhood’s infrastructure, including upgrades to its sewer system and a new school.
Separately, Pennsylvania, which participated in the HQ2 “lottery” hoping Bezos would come to Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, offered $4.6 billion in financial assistance to the company according to the Pittsburgh Post, dwarfing the combined $2.5 billion that Long Island City and Crystal City offered.
But, as always with real estate, it was all about “location, location, location.”
- National Facial Recognition Database To Use Loyalty Rewards To Identify American Shoppers
For years, I have been warning people about facial recognition in retail stores, but this story might convince you to avoid retail stores altogether.
A recent article in Biometric Update. com (BU) reveals that retail stores have a master plan to convince Americans to accept facial biometrics.
BU interviewed four facial biometric company CEO’s and what they revealed is frightening.
The article starts off innocuously enough by telling us that U.S. retail biometrics is used primarily in loss-prevention but things quickly take a turn for the worse.
BU’s interview with FaceFirst CEO Peter Tripp is especially disconcerting, as he reveals how retailers plan to use a “facial recognition opt-in environment.”
“There is another step though that exists which has more to do with consumer loyalty, and consumer experience, that is not quite as expensive an endeavor, and I think there are lots of folks looking at ways of doing that in a friendly opt-in environment, where privacy is not the cornerstone issue, Tripp said.”
If any of this sounds familiar its because they are doing the exact same thing with digital drivers licenses.
Biometric companies are trying to convince Americans to accept digital drivers license by tying them to loyalty rewards programs. Last year the Lincoln Motor Company installed “complimentary” TSA PreCheck biometric scanners in all their new vehicles so customers can get through airport and sport stadium check-in lines quicker.
Corporate-run national biometric database
According to a recent ZDNet article a new partnership between SureID a biometric fingerprinting company and Robbie.AI a facial recognition company “could create a national biometric database.”
“Adding facial recognition from Robbie.AI gives the two firms the building blocks of a nationwide biometric database that could be used in a number of settings, from retail authentication and employment verification to more speculative applications like driver-identification for keyless self-driving cars or even user recognition in future robotic platforms.”
“As technology emerges and companies adopt more sophisticated forms of security, it will be crucial for safety and security to authenticate the real identity of technicians and consumers,” says Ned Hayes, General Manager at SureID.
BU’s article reveals how retailers plan to identify every customer.
Whoo.ai CEO Arturo Falck said, “Once companies are using this type of technology for crime prevention purposes, there’s no reason why they should not be using it for upselling their customers.”
SensibleVision CEO George Brostoff sees customer loyalty rewards as a logical next step in the U.S. And Goode Intelligence Founder Alan Goode, sees a huge potential for biometric customer loyalty programs. Goode also thinks retail facial recognition should be used for age verification in self-check out systems.
A company called BiteKiosk wants restaurants to use their self-service facial recognition kiosks to increase profits and offers customers food discounts as an incentive to use them.
Loyalty rewards used to create a national biometric database
Falck said, loyalty rewards could be used to convince the public that facial recognition is not that bad.
“It is a way for the businesses to turn what could potentially be bad public relations into engagement opportunities.”
BU admits that loyalty rewards are a scam.
“Companies participating in the scheme can offer app users incentives to opt-in, as well as loyalty rewards or discounts on particular items they may be interested in. The back-end uses an open REST API for companies to integrate it with their facial recognition systems.”
Goode admits that facial recognition is really about creating a national biometric database.
“China, India, Russia, parts of Latin America and Japan have been using centralized biometric databases for a long time.”
Oddly or perhaps by design their is no mention of retailers creating facial recognition watchlists.
So what is their master plan?
Tripp revealed that retailers are planning on a “gradual expansion of facial recognition.”
The BU article goes on to say that ‘retailers have been slowly installing facial recognition in back-of-house deployments which builds familiarity not only with retailers but with the staff as well.
The article ends on a disturbing quote, “the infrastructure in this case is people’s perspective. That can change quickly.”
Our perspectives had better change or corporate America will buy everyone’s identity using rewards programs and the ability to skip check-in lines.
- 5 US Tech Giants Just Spent $116 Billion Of Repatriated Cash On Buybacks
While many analysts wanted to attribute the divergence in US stocks during the first three months of this year to strong economic data, the fiscal stimulus unleashed by Trump or stronger-than-expected corporate earnings, as analysts at Nomura (including cross-asset strategist Charlie McElligot) and Deutsche Bank have argued, when it comes to factors undergirding the market rally, buybacks trump growth “divergence”.
And while equity-market performance in late September and October – when corporations entered a buyback “blackout” period – has largely vindicated their analysis, in case anyone still doubts the crucial role of the corporate bid, the Financial Times offered yet another piece of evidence in a story published in Tuesday’s paper when it revealed the full magnitude of tech company buybacks fueled by the Trump tax cuts during the first three quarters of 2018. Out of all the money repatriated by US companies thanks to the Trump tax cuts, US companies have spent a staggering sum on buybacks, and a comparatively paltry amount on boosting capex spending and reinvestment (the kind of corporate spending that helps drive economic growth).
Per the FT, the five US tech companies with the largest cash piles spent more than $115 billion on buybacks during the first three quarters of the year, nearly double what they spent during the entirety of last year. This is the latest sign that, while Trump sold his tax cuts as a boon for working Americans, investors have reaped most of the benefits to date (though to be fair, the companies did boost their capital spend by a combined $42 billion). The tech firms also spent some of the repatirated cash paying down debt, freeing up more money to spend on buybacks in the future.
“Most companies are using cash to buy back stock and make acquisitions, rather than invest in new facilities,” said Walter Price, a tech investment manager at Allianz. “I think this is good for shareholders and management.” Tech companies were also paying down debt they took on in previous years to buy back shares, he added.
These companies (Apple in particular) had been sitting on massive cash piles that had been stashed off-shore to avoid paying US taxes when the money was repatriated.
Take Apple, for example: While the tech giant spent $14.5 billion on capex during the first three quarters of 2018 (after promising to reinvest some $350 billion in tax-cut enabled repatriated cash within the US), its buyback spending soared to $62.6 billion – nearly three times the prior-year period. To be sure, some of the repatriated money has likely been earmarked for capital spending. However, this spending will likely take longer to plan and execute.
“There’s a strong correlation between tax reform and capital spending,” added Youssef Squali, an internet analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, pointing at Google and Facebook, which plan to spend a combined $37bn between them this year, up from just under $21bn in 2017.
Notably, the growth in buybacks hasn’t been confined to tech alone: US corporate buybacks rose 44% during the first nine months of 2018.
Meanwhile, share buybacks have risen 44 per cent so far this year, according to Goldman Sachs, which estimates that buybacks will climb another 22 per cent in 2019. Just 25 companies accounted for 99 per cent of the growth in buybacks this year, the bank found, underscoring the outsized influence of tech companies’ use of cash.
But while the buybacks led tech stocks to outperform on the way up, like the old saying goes: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
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