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.
I may actually have to quit doing stories on HOAs that fine and foreclose on veterans who try to display the America flag on their homes. There are just too many of them. Despite my earlier promise to report on all these outrageous cases, I’d just end up doing several such stories a day and not much else.
So, I hereby reluctantly admit that the anti-American, anti-homeowner movement, CAI, Associa, American Bar Association, ACLU are too firmly rooted in our society to ever win back our right to display the flag on our homes. We might still be able to put flag decals on car bumpers, but that, too, is under attack.
Greed is a powerful taskmaster. When a lawyer knows he can automatically make a few thousand bucks every time he sues a flag-waving veteran like Larry McMurphree, when a morally corrupt HOA board knows it can put a few hundred extra bucks in the neighborhood kitty by fining any homeowner who even thinks displaying a flag is patriotic, then I guess that portion of our battle is lost.
The really weird thing is that if you displayed a Nazi Flag or the Rainbow Flag, or any of the flags representing the Islamic Revolution, you actually might have a stronger case in court.
The courts have long recognized that certain people groups have protected status under our Constitution and cannot be allowed to suffer the indignities sometimes shown to people of other belief systems. They’ll get free representation in court. The owner of a Stars and Stripes flag never will.
Stranger still, it’s absolutely OK to desecrate the flag, trample on it, burn it, those are all protected forms of speech according to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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