HESPERIA, CA—Say hello to the thing that could save our gas-guzzlin’ suburban lifestyle: affordable residential solar power that’s within reach of the most cash-strapped America consumer. This breakthrough is not a result of technological innovation, but a new financing scheme cooked up on Wall Street called a “residential solar lease,” a no-money-down, low-monthly plan that has made solar electricity cheaper than the stuff we get by wire. It’s an old approach to a new source of energy, and it is taking California by storm. (more…)
The problem with the water debate, to the extent there is one, is the way it’s spun. Long dominated by eco-warrior do-gooders, the fight for water has been framed as boringly and abstractly as possible. How is the “environment” supposed to register in our primitive brains when 1 out of 5 Americans still think the sun revolves around the earth? In fact, it’s pretty simple what the big struggle for water is all about: the rich fleecing the rest of the country. Fact is, they’ve been treating our water wealth like one giant personal trust fund. And it seems they’ve been hitting up the ATM so often that even NASA’s satellites can see the withdrawals all the way from space: (more…)
In recent days, students have been rallying and barricading themselves inside buildings on University of California campuses to protest a 32 percent hike in tuition fees. Last Wednesday and Thursday, scuffles broke out between police and student protesters on UC campuses around the state, with dozens of students arrested and a few roughed up by eager cops. The protesters’ mood was combative, and they were boiling with anger that three days of protests had had little visible impact. But the students would be even angrier if they knew that the tuition increase, instead of funding essential services, was going toward securing cushy pensions for baby boomer university employees to the tune of $340 million a year. (more…)
How about this for a plan for sprucing up our nation’s crumbling housing projects: ship lazy black folks out to the subprime suburbs, privatize their apartment buildings and hand them over to real estate developers. That’s what T.A. Frank, a New America Foundation think tank shill, thinks Los Angeles needs to do with Jordan Downs, a notoriously dilapidated and crime-wracked project in Watts: (more…)
Ames emailed me a New York Times blog post from last February by one Casey B. Mulligan–which may sound like a fictional baseball player’s name, but no, he’s real all right, just another in a long line of insane econ professors from the University of Chicago. In the blog post, Mulligan cheerfully announced that when it comes to commercial real estate, we’ve got nothing at all to worry about. There’s no danger of a CRE crash, like the one we’ve experienced in the residential market, so we can all go back to being happy free market beneficiaries.
No CRE crash? Ha-ha! I just love these Chicago School alchemy frauds! It is truly a joy to see them make such fools of themselves on the permanent public record. And not surprisingly, although Mulligan struck out, he’s still at the plate, batting out barely comprehensible economic fatwahs for the New York Times like nothing ever happened—that’s the kind of free market a real Chicago School economist likes. (more…)
Someone on Jon Stewart’s staff molested me this past Tuesday. He or she plagiarized my Fresno/Hannity story, which Alternet ran Monday, and the Daily Showaired Tuesday, much to my horror. It was as though someone—say, a writer/producer—fondled my funny-taint, and now it’s bleeding. Well, I am not pressing charges, yet, but I am attaching an Invoice. (more…)
News Flash! Five months after Yasha Levine and I broke the story linking the rightwing billionaire-PR nexus between FreedomWorks, the Koch family, CNBC, Eric Odom and the Tea Party movement, the Washington Post finally caught up with us. In an article in today’s Sunday edition, the WaPo repeats our allegation that billionaires are posing as “grassroots” groups to oppose anything that isn’t in the billionaires’ interests, including health care reform and mortgage relief for homeowners: (more…)
The richness of Victorville’s fossil record never fails to surprise an amateur scam-historian like myself. See, all this time I thought I had been living in a brand new tract home development built on the virgin sands of the Mojave Desert, when in reality my McMansion has been sitting on a sacred Reaganomics burial ground, atop an older civilization, a failed scam-settlement established at the very tail end of the S&L-fueled real estate boom that swept over the nation in the 1980s. (more…)
A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail wrote about a low-ranking British diplomat named James Hudson who was caught on hidden camera by the FSB (formerly the KGB, formerlier the MVD, formerlierer the NKVD, formerliest the Cheka) getting it on with two Russian hookers in a Yekaterinburg brothel. The paper published a couple of frame grabs from the video, but I wanted to check out the raw footage for myself. It looked like one of those classic sex scandals set up to blackmail someone into cooperation, and there’s nothing cooler than being able to watch real spy games in action. So I headed straight for kompromat.ru, Russia’s biggest muckraking/political scandal news site. (more…)
It’s 5 AM in Victorville, California, and I haven’t slept in 48 hours. Outside my second-story window, the sun is rising up over the jagged mountains across the desert. In the three months I’ve lived here, I’ve seen more sunrises than I have in my 28 years. There is something about living in a barren house in a half-empty suburb out in the middle of a sun-baked nowhere that brings out the tweaker in me—and judging by daily news reports, most of my neighbors, too.
Everything the real estate industry tells you is a hustle. No industry is more geared toward pumping up the positive and burying anything remotely negative, leaving you — and truth — out in the cold.
The crash has not made real estate agents any more honest, but at least the gap between the industry’s crazed optimism and stark reality has grown so obvious that even the real estate industry can’t hide it anymore.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Victorville, Calif., an exurb of Los Angeles situated in the high desert where housing bubbled up higher than just about anywhere at the peak of the subprime-lending craze and is still in free fall today. (more…)
We’ve been getting a lot of letters from our readers complaining to us about a case of journalistic theft: one after another, the liberal media is ripping off our 6-week-old scoop exposing the Tea Party-FreedomWorks AstroTurfing connections, and they’re not citing us as the source. Yes, even the crunchy do-gooders can behave like sleazy little vultures. We just want all our readers out there to know that we’re aware of the situation, we’re on top of it, our people have been debriefed, and we are taking appropriate measures that we cannot comment on at this time. Plagiarists and literary thieves should know that eXiled Online does not take your plagiarism and sleaze lightly. Ask the Guardian newspaper, which was forced to post this humiliating admission and apology at the TOP of an article that their correspondent stole from us; or ask James Frey, who was first outted by John Dolan as a fraud months before Frey was forced to apologize on Oprah. So, readers, we appreciate your letters, which we’re publishing below. Keep vigilant, kids! Like McGruff says, let’s take a bite out of journalistic slime! (more…)
This afternoon, groups of angry conservatives will gather on street corners and in parks across the country to protest.
They will carry signs and deliver speeches expressing outrage over the Democrats’ stimulus bill, over entitlements, over budget pork, over taxes. They will dump boxes of tea on the ground and wear three-cornered hats. The leading lights of the Republican Party will be on hand to cheer them on.
But as with so much on the right, these apparent displays of populist rage are not what they will seem.
Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an investigation exposing the nascent “Tea Party” protest movement for what it really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or “fake grassroots”) lobby campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core. (more…)
My name is Yasha and I live in a McMansion. As far as I can tell, I have three bedrooms and a master bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub, which I’m now filling up for a bubble bath. But life wasn’t always like this—I had a real struggling journalist’s life, once. No real job and lived in a cramped apartment with my friend and his girlfriend. Then one day my life took a turn for the best. I packed everything I own—a couple of couches, a desk, two guns, some books and a few garbage bags worth of clothes—into an orange U-haul truck and drove the rig at a top speed to a suburban blob called Victorville, in the middle of the desert 100 miles away from Los Angeles. And I stepped right into the American Dream. It wasn’t my dream; I’m here undercover.
Victorville is what they call an “exurb,” one of thousands of new sub-suburban sprawls all around the country built for poor Americans. To flocking homeowners, Victorville must have seemed like a glorious reaffirmation about everything good and right about American values, a place where the poor could finally afford a home of their own. Instead, it turned into just one more slaughtering ground in the the biggest scam of the century, a place where tens of thousands were lured to be ripped off and set adrift. (more…)
Thanks to the slam dunk investigative piece by your humble correspondents, Rick Santelli was forced to cancel his appearance on the Daily Show last night, leading to this massively-blogged segment ripping Santelli and CNBC a gigantic bleeding asshole. If words could be giant foam hands with pointing index fingers, then these words would be jabbing annoyingly into the ears of every Michelle Malkin/Freedomworks/rightwing tool who tried to cover up their half-baked “grassroots tea party” flop. As the stadiums of foam index finger-waggers chant, “You! You! You!” As in “the whole fucking country is laughing at you idiots!” Ah-ha-ha-hahahahahahaha!!! (more…)
