A massive monkey wrench has been thrown into the field of real estate development with a 55 million dollar verdict against developers of a condo conversion project in South Carolina.
Developers are the people we homeowners all love to hate. They’re the bane of our existence. Their rotten reconstruction work has led to the financial ruin of hundreds of thousands, even millions of American homeowners. So we generally stand and cheer when a jury hands down a huge verdict against a developer.
Well, let’s stand back and give this one a little reflection.
There are about 200 residents of the East Bridge Town Lofts in Charleston, South Carolina. They all bought into the idea of buying an apartment that was converted to a condominium. Sloppy work. Unlicensed building inspector, all the usual jazz. But including all the legal costs, each of these property owners will theoretically get about 300 to 400 thousand dollars. So far, so good.
But…
…when the bankruptcy filings start filling the courts like an overflowing sugar bowl, where will those homeowners all be? When the delays and appeals to higher courts start piling up even higher costs, where will those homeowners be?
The American legal system was originally meant to provide justice for the injured. Sadly, that’s not the way things turned out. Oh, the lawyers on both sides will claim victory, of course. But the homeowners? The ones who’ve had to declare personal bankruptcy? The ones who’ve died or divorced or moved on to try to repair their lives elsewhere, what happens to them? Will they look back with great fondness on how the legal system treated them?
I swear, I’ve gotta quit doing stories about outrageous treatment of the American Flag, there are just too many of them. I could get stuck doing 12 or 15 stories a day. Still, I feel duty-bound to at least occasionally tell you when the latest cretin is pushing around his weight after having been given new power over other homeowners.
The latest victim of a flag outrage is a retired veteran named Larry Murphree of the Tides Condominium at Sweetwater, Jacksonville, Florida. It’s actually just a small flag that he placed in a flower pot on his porch. You can barely see it. It’s sticking in the flowerpot behind the right porch rail in the photo below. He’s been fined $8000 before and he got it settled in court.
After his court victory, Larry replaced the flag. And once again he’s being sued for $8000 and confiscation of his home. Here’s a very tight shot to show you a real good closeup of this tiny flag.
“It’s worth fighting for,” says Larry. “It’s a small flag but it stands for a big thank you and it shows the love and respect I have for my country.”
Larry, a little advice here from someone who knows. It’s not about the flag. It’s about a brain chemical called Oxytocin. If you don’t know about it look it up. When a chimpanzee of either sex is placed in a cage with a bunch of other chimps at the zoo, there’s an immediate disturbance. The new chimp races around the enclosure showing off his or her ‘equipment’, spraying the cage, making other chimps a little frightful of his or her prowess. Jane Goodall spent a lifetime studying this kind of behavior in all kinds of primates.
Larry, you’re being victimized by a new board member who thinks his or her virility is a little more chemically tinged than yours. Or maybe this board member wants you to think his or her influence among the weaker members of the tribe will carry more weight on the evolutionary scale. Whether you’re an evolutionist or not, you cannot deny that chimpanzees share approximately 96% percent of their DNA with humans. They (and orangutans) are our closest relatives. In so many ways, they’re a lot like us and we can learn from them. Your flag fight is not about patriotism. It’s about simianism. It’s about oxytocin. It’s about sex.
All science aside, there’s perhaps a bit of usable truth here. Spread this blog far and wide around the Tides At Sweetwater condominium complex. Without putting yourself in a slander trap, figure out which tiny dickensonian creature has been causing you all this misery. The good women of the Tides at Sweetwater know that as a veteran you probably came from good genetic stock. They’ll respect you. Then gather the whole community’s support as they publicly and visibly show this ‘little’ simian how ‘little’ they think your challenger’s virility really is. Each hour of each day when those community members greet that simian they should hold up their fingers about one inch apart. It’s just a guess. Just to show how much that person is regarded in the community.
Most journalists won’t tell you all of this. But since I know a little about science I will.
Yes, once again here’s the old bloviator talking about an impending crash in the housing market.
Economists have been predicting a mortgage and financial collapse many times greater than the nightmare of 2008-2009. The indicators are there. The national budget is raging out of control. Interest rates are far too low to sustain the banking industry. Investors are losing their shirts betting on the U.S. economy. China now owns a huge percentage of America’s debt. Mortgage companies at some point will have to massively raise the requirements on all new mortgages. If this happens the value of homes, starting with all those in Homeowners Associations, will crash.
In a recent blog I mentioned that this whole cascade of events will start with a minor story, a pebble being dislodged from an already unsteady dam.
The story linked below is more than a loose pebble. And it should be read and absorbed by absolutely every person with even a minor link to the Homeowners Association industry.
My Dear Friends, I’ve told you over and over that the absolute worst home investment you can make is in a Homeowners Association. Your Realtor buddy looks you warmly in the eye, puts his hand on your shoulder and says, “You know, of course, that HOAs were created to protect your investment?”
If you’ve read my book or follow this blog then you know what the truth is. HOAs were created to keep out Negroes, Orientals and Jews. The documentation goes back fifty years! In later years, HOA rules were used to keep out Hispanics, single moms, children with Down’s Syndrome and a fistful of other ‘unwashed and unwanted.’
The link below shows you another reason you’re legally and financially naked. Once again a rich investor is intentionally forcing a housing project into bankruptcy so he can scoop up the dregs and make a fortune all over again. This kind of scam is going on all over the country, wherever people were unwise enough to buy private government housing.
If you think it can’t happen to you, you’re fooling yourself. In 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court made the seizure of private homes for private development completely legal. The landmark Kelo Case turned the U.S. Constitution on its head.
In four decades of investigative reporting, what always burned my butt was the sweet sentences given to white collar criminals by Federal Judges. A little personal confession here, one I probably shouldn’t make, but once I became good friends with a major white collar criminal who should have been sentenced to ten years, not ten months! I like this guy. I like him a lot. I consider him a great friend. But he’s an admitted crook who’s made that same confession on national TV. And he knows he skated with only a fraction of the prison sentence he really deserved. He took great delight in talking about how easy his sentence was. He considered it a vacation, a temporary escape from a difficult domestic situation and had the benefit of an admiring Federal prison warden who occasionally took him to town on weekends to meet women! In fact, he says he got more straight sex as a federal prison inmate than he did as an outsider.
Cut to the current Federal Organized Crime Syndicate in Las Vegas which has raped and pillaged Homeowners Associations up and down the valley. 39 suspects, four of them dead in highly suspicious ‘suicides’. And the federal judge in the case is beginning to hand out what the crooks all call “pussy” jail sentences for their involvement in this hundred million dollar scam. The first prison sentences look like they’ll be about a year in federal prison. Easy duty. Over before you know it. And if you’re a good crook and keep your mouth shut about your confederates there’ll be a few handfuls of big bills to get your new life started on the other side.
This Organized Crime syndicate stole a hundred million dollars from Las Vegas homeowners. As a homeowner, all you have to do is look at the current value of your home to know how much money they stole. But even today, the powers that be who won’t be named are two of the most prominent political names, men who made millions and millions of dollars for ‘ignoring’ or even participating in this vicious scam.
Folks, just believe this crusty, hardened, wizened 40-year investigative reporter: some very big people are being overlooked in the Las Vegas RICO investigation. The Feebies (FBI) are intentionally hiding their eyes. There are at least two names who, if indicted, would be huge.
One or two of these names could actually change the political balance of an entire country!