‘Gun-Free’ London’s Murder Rate Surpasses New York As STABBINGS SURGE

In a nation that’s a gigantic gun-free zone, stabbings have surged to the point that the capital has surpassed the murder rate of New York City.  The British city’s surge in violent stabbings has seen the murder rate also spike as citizens have been denied the right to defend themselves from attacks.

A massive decline in crime has helped to transform New York City, where London is facing the opposite effect. The total number of murders in London has fluctuated over the years, but it’s risen by 38 percent since 2014. And now, deadly stabbings in England and Wales are now at their highest levels since 2011, rising by 12 percent in the year ending December 2017.

In 1990, of 2,245 people were murdered. Last year, however, that number dropped nearly 90 percent to 290 murders. The Sunday Times reported 15 people were murdered in London in February while 14 were murdered in New York City. Both cities are very diverse with large populations. London has over 8.7 million residents and New York City has about 8.5 million.

But the surge in stabbings hasn’t stopped in London. The numbers for March have come in, and they also show London as surpassing New York in murders. In March, according to the British publication, there had been 22 killings in London versus 21 in New York.

According to Fox News, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said websites and mobile phone applications such as YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram were partially to blame for the increased bloodshed. However,  The Evening Standard reported that London’s murder rate has grown by nearly 40 percent in just three years, NOT including deaths caused by terrorist attacks. 

“What’s scary about London is the randomness of the crime,” said Jacob Whittingham, charity head of programs for Fight for Peace. “With young people in London, you have no idea if and when you may be the victim of a violent crime — that’s why they feel the need to carry weapons.”  

Not to mention self-defense is a basic human right. Those who understand self-preservation want the best and most effective tool at hand to save their life. and those in the UK are being denied that fundamental right by the very law the government promised would protect them.

New York Sues Big Pharma ‘To Make Them Pay’ for Deliberately Fueling Opioid Epidemic

Mayor Bill de Blasio said he supports the lawsuit because it is "time for Big Pharma to pay for what they’ve done. It’s time that they are held accountable.”

Is Amazon Killing NYC Retailers Or Is The "Rent Just Too Damn High?"

A few weeks ago, the office of Council Member Helen Rosenthal of New York"s 6th District published the results of a business survey conducted on the Upper West Side that showed, among other things, that some 12% of retail store fronts lay vacant. 

Of the 1,332 storefronts that we surveyed, we identified 1,170 active businesses -- 88%.

 

Twelve percent of storefronts (161) were unoccupied. Please note that "unoccupied" includes recently closed businesses, as well as new spaces that were not yet leased.

 

Of the major commercial streets, Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue had the highest percentage of empty storefronts. Broadway had the largest number of empty storefronts (57), followed by Amsterdam Avenue (44) and Columbus Avenue (32).

What"s worse, the survey results revealed that retail vacancies in certain areas of the Upper West Side have nearly doubled over the past 10 years.

Of course, the fact that bricks-and-mortar retailers are struggling is hardly a new phenomenon...here are just a couple of our recent posts on the topic:

• A Look At America"s Retail Apocalypse In Charts


• 2017 Will Be The Worst Year For US Retail In History


• Toys "R" Us Shocker: Bankrupt Toy Retailer To Close Up To 200 Stores Amid Collapsing Sales

The question is whether New York City retailers, who have direct access to the wealthiest, and most densely populated, shoppers in the world, are simply succumbing to the "Amazon Effect" like the rest of the country or whether Manhattan landlords are contributing to their own demise by continuously hiking rents while ignoring softening demand in hopes that it goes away?  According to Rosenthal"s office, the "blissful ignorance of landlords" theory should not be underestimated.

There are many reasons why businesses open and close in our community — major rent increases being a central one. A recent report from the office of State Senator Brad Hoylman cites two separate studies, one estimating that the average commercial rent in Manhattan increased by 34% from 2004 to 2014; and another showing that rents jumped by 42% in Manhattan from 2012 to 2015.

 

Our office is also aware of instances where building owners have plans to re-develop their properties and are not interested in renting to commercial tenants in the short term.

 

An added challenge throughout our city is the fact that a significant number of family-owned businesses do not have a successor ready to take over when the owner is ready to retire. Earlier this year, the New York City Public Advocate released a policy brief which reported that an estimated 3,700 businesses across the state close each year due to an owner"s retirement --leading to the loss of over 13,000 jobs annually.

 

Commercial vacancies are an issue throughout Manhattan. The New York limes reported this summer that sections of Broadway in SoHo had vacancy rates as high as 20%.

But, as The Guardian points out, the key to understanding New York"s soaring retail vacancies might lie in the changing make-up of the city"s landlords.  Unlike prior decades in which more buildings were owned by mom-and-pop operations, today"s Manhattan landlords are more likely to be large institutional investors and/or hedge funds that are unwilling to drop rents to match retail conditions and are more eager to get a markup on their portfolio by leasing to a large, recognizable, luxury tenant.

“It’s not Amazon, it’s rent,” says Jeremiah Moss, author of the website and book Vanishing New York. “Over the decades, small businesses weathered the New York of the 70s with it near-bankruptcy and high crime. Businesses could survive the internet, but they need a reasonable rent to do that.”

 

“They are running small businesses out of the city and replacing them with chain stores and temporary luxury businesses,” says Moss.

 

In Vanishing New York, Moss writes of the toll the evisceration of distinct neighborhoods through real estate over-pricing has on the city. “It’s homogenizing and changing the character of the city,” he says. Even where landlords are offering competitive leases, they are often for two or five years, not the customary 10.

 

“We’re seeing more stores front emptying, and we’re seeing a lot of turnover where you see spaces fill temporarily and then empty. And it’s continuing to get worse,” he says.

New York retail property agent Robin Zendell also says it"s just too simple to blame Amazon. “When you see [that] every corner has a bank or a pharmacy, and there is a gym on the second floor, there’s a simple reason for that: people can’t afford the rent. Why did restaurants go to Brooklyn? Because it’s cool? No, because it was cheap, and [because] restaurateurs were sick of giving investors’ money away so they could pay thir rent.”

Of course, while "greedy" NY landlords are always a convenient scapegoat, we"re going to go out on a limb and suggest that a tripling of online sales as a percent of overall retail over the past 10 years may have something to do with Manhattan"s increasingly vacant store fronts...

41 Million Americans Are Living In Poverty This Christmas

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Even though the stock market continues to set new record high after new record high, poverty is exploding all over America. 

It is being reported that 41 million people are living in poverty at this moment, and 9 million of them do not receive a single penny of income from anyone.  Once you have been unemployed for long enough, you don’t qualify for unemployment payments any longer, and once you are on the street there is nowhere for other governments programs to send a check to.  I have previously discussed the rising epidemic of homelessness in our nation, but most people don’t want to think about that sort of a thing these days.  Even though New York City has the most homeless since the Great Depression, and even though homelessness in Los Angeles is at an all-time record high, most people want to pretend that everything is just fine.

Well, the truth is that everything is not just fine.

A reporter from the Guardian recently traveled with a special UN envoy to some of the most impoverished areas of the United States.  His report is extremely eye-opening, and I wanted to share a short excerpt from his story.  This portion of his article is about a 41-year-old woman named Ressy Finley who is desperately trying to stay alive on the mean streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles…

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

 

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

 

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.

Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is rising so rapidly, and so have nine other cities along the west coast.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “As America Gives Thanks, Homelessness Continues To Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation”.

The sad thing is that there are more than a million homes sitting empty in America right now.  As economic opportunities have dried up, many communities in the middle part of the nation are becoming “ghost towns”, and it is getting worse with each passing day…

There are nearly 1.4 million vacant residential properties across the country — abandoned, not for sale, mostly unoccupied homes. With vacant properties comprising as much as 30% of residential properties, some neighborhoods are starting to feel like ghost towns.

Many believe that the answer to the decline of the middle class and the growth of poverty is even more socialism.

But if you want to see where that road leads, just look at what is happening in Venezuela.  People are eating cats and dogs, and just today there were a whole bunch of mainstream news articles about how children are literally starving to death.

No, the real answer is to do what made our economy so great in the first place.  Between 1872 and 1913, we didn’t have an income tax or a central bank, and it was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

What we have today is not free market capitalism.  We have gone very far down the road toward government-controlled socialism, and it has created a giant mess.

If we want to have a healthy middle class again, we need to have a society that promotes entrepreneurs and the creation of small businesses.  Today we are literally choking the financial life out of entrepreneurs and small businesses, and when I am elected to Congress I am going to fight as hard as I can to change that.

*  *  *

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Holiday Spending Set To Hit 12-Year High Thanks To...Debt

Even though consumer confidence cooled for a second straight month in November, CNBC is reporting that holiday spending for the average American household is on track to be the highest in 12 years.

Amazingly, the CNBC All-America Survey found that the average family will spend $900 for the first time in the 12-year history of the poll, eclipsing last year"s estimate of $702 by a wide margin.

Furthermore, the survey of 800 American households - which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points - found a surge in the percentage of Americans planning to spend more than $1,000. The number climbed to 29%, up from 24% last year.

But before economists and retail analysts begin recalibrating their expectations, it’s worth noting that much of this spending will be funded by debt. Another study by RentCafe which examined spending habits of American renters discovered that, in the 50 largest US metropolitan areas, the average renting family will go into debt due to holiday-related expenses, debt that must be paid off in the opening months of the following year.

Here’s what an analysis of the average renter’s household budget for November and December looks like. As the chart shows, the average American family of four can spend $5,865 during that period without dipping into savings or going into debt.

The numbers are based on the median renter household income according to the U. S. Census Bureau, November’s average rent according to Yardi Matrix, average cost of living data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a survey conducted for the National Retail Federation that reveals how much American consumers plan to spend on average this holiday season.

Based on this data, RentCafe concluded that the average American family of four spends about 2.8% of their annual income on winter expenses. (See more details in the methodology).

RentCafe then broke the data down for each of the 50 largest cities in the US. They found 24 areas where the average family finishes the holiday season with a positive balance...

...they are...

Then, RentCafe tabulated which cities were the most expensive for the average family. Expenses factored in the estimated costs of gifts and holiday-related dinners.

Unsurprisingly, New York City tops the list, followed by Boston and San Francisco.

Trying to figure out where you fit in on this spectrum? RentCafe has a tool on their website for readers to calculate how they will finish the year after holiday spending.

Circling back to the CNBC data, experts pointed at the stock market - the so-called wealth effect - as one factor that might inspire people to spend more this holiday. Because, in the eyes of many Americans, the market is the economy - a fact that President Donald Trump seems to have latched on to.

"The holiday spending outlook is stronger than it has been in over decade," said Micah Roberts from Public Opinion Strategies, the Republican pollster for the survey. "People are more comfortable with where the economy is and where it"s heading, prompting them to spend money this holiday season and help boost the economy as well." Jay Campbell of Hart Research served as the Democratic pollster.

Considering Faking Your Own Death? Then The Philippines Is The Place For You

The technical term is pseudocide - a fancy word that means, essentially, “faking your own death."

Hundreds of thousands of Americans - some struggling with seemingly insurmountable debt burdens or are being hounded by the IRS after stiffing the tax man - have probably fantasized about faking their own deaths. But few understand just how easy it is to - um - execute such an ambitious, if legally precarious, plan.

That’s where purveyors of so-called “death kits” come in. Few westerners are aware of its existence, but there’s actually a thriving cottage industry based in the Philippines, where investors can purchase all the tools they need to fake their own deaths for the surprisingly low price of about 350 pounds (about $500).

Of course, the scheme has several macabre elements. The process involves buying an unclaimed corpse from one of the many morgues in the Philippines where the bodies of John and Jane Does are stored.

According to the Telegraph, many customers who choose this route are desperate Wall Street bankers seeking to escape debt, and men having affairs who want to leave their families.

The Philippines has long been cited in official statistics as the foreign location with the highest number of American tourist deaths. But many of these fatalities are actually fraudulent, the result of desperate westerners faking their own deaths.

Take Elizabeth Greenwood, who “died” as a tourist in the Philippines in 2013. Multiple spectators witnessed her crash her rental car into another vehicle on a busy road in Manila, and doctors at the local hospital pronounced Greenwood dead on arrival - or so her death certificate would have you believe...

Greenwood, who was inspired to fake her own death by her ballooning student debt, is now working as a journalist in New York City after deciding at the last minute that she didn’t want to go through with the scheme.

She first stumbled upon the idea during lunch with a friend who joked about it after she finished ranting about the colossal size of her student debt. But the joke got her thinking. So she started Googling.

“I began poking around online and discovered that death fraud truly is an industry with a whole host of experts and consultants to help you go through with it, and that there are far more people than you might imagine who had done it themselves, with varying degrees of success,” Greenwood explains.

She eventually stumbled on a Wall Street Journal article from the 1980s that referenced “a southeast Asian country” where morgues pick up the bodies of derelicts and freeze them to help customers commit death fraud for insurance purposes.

Greenwood then discovered two elite private investigators, Steven Rambam and Richard Marquez, who consult for life insurance companies seeking to stamp out death fraud.

“Again and again, they named the Philippines as a hotbed for the kind of theatrical death fraud that involves false corpses,” she adds. “They sniff out life insurance fraud all over the globe - it is attempted everywhere - but they told me some memorable stories about cases they’d worked on in the Philippines, so I wanted to check it out myself."

The cost of death fraud can vary widely. A fake death certificate from the Philippines generally costs anywhere in the region of £100 to £350. Some will pay upwards of £20,000 to hire a professional fixer who will help them scratch their trail as they move forward with a new identity.

During a week-long stay in the Philippines, Greenwood found a pair of locals there who obtained a fake death certificate for her from a mole working inside a government agency. All the witness accounts were fake, and there was never a fatal traffic accident as outlined on the papers.

She never crossed the line and actually filed the documents with the US embassy.

“My death certificate sits encased in a plastic sheath at the bottom of my filing cabinet,” Greenwood states.

The difficulty of feigning one’s death depends on the purpose of the fraud. If one is trying to cash in a life insurance policy, then the fraud will require a body and an accomplice, since, without a body, most insurers will wait seven years before paying out a claim. This is why the cottage industry of fake morgues has sprung up.

Some fraudsters might go to the lengths of staging a funeral for their dummy corpse and filming it to submit to the insurance company, she adds, but in most cases, this is an unnecessary flourish.

If insurance fraud isn’t your ultimate aim, then the process of faking your death will be exponentially easier.

“If you’re not committing life insurance fraud, you needn’t go to all the extra trouble,” Greenwood told the Telegraph. “Staging a more open-ended, elegant escape, like disappearing while on a hike, usually looks more believable to investigators."

While insurance companies typically hire private investigators to sniff out death fraud, few cases are ever prosecuted, particularly if they were committed on foreign soil. Often, the only punishment for death fraudsters is their insurance claim being denied.

Greenwood cites one example of a German woman who faked her death and whose fraud remained undiscovered for two decades.

When German authorities discovered she was alive in 2015, after being presumed dead since 1985, the only penalty she shouldered was the trouble of filling out the paperwork necessary to declare herself still alive.

Death fraud happens “constantly”, Greenwood said adding that she detected a spike in cases around the financial crisis.

But while faking one’s death on foreign soil is easier than many believe, the reasons people get caught are also simpler than many might assume.

Particularly if an accomplice is battling it out with an insurance company, fraudsters are typically caught when they try to reach out to loved ones or their parents.

As it turns out, even if they’re dead on paper, many people just can’t cut the ties to their old lives.
 

Chicago Commissioner Pleads With UN To Deploy Foreign Troops On US Soil

Under the guise of stopping violent crime, a County Commissioner in Cook County, Illinois, went to New York City late last week to request that the United Nations deploy foreign troops in Chicago to tackle the city’s “quiet genocide.”

Perhaps, the geopolitical instability on the Korean Penisula and in the Middle East is just one giant distraction. The real action is currently unfolding in America’s out of control inner cities, such as Chicago. There is a pattern emerging across the United States, where inner cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Oakland, Mephesis, and St. Louis are experiencing out of control violent crime with local officials paralyzed.

Earlier this year, President Trump threatened Chicago with sending in the Feds, after crime statistics warned of an alarming surge in violent crime.

If Chicago doesn"t fix the horrible "carnage" going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017

Some politicians in Chicago have recommended deploying the National Guard to aid in combating gun violence, but Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin went straight to the United Nations last week and pleaded with Oscar Fernandez-Taranco of Argentina, the U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for deployement of foreign troops on United States soil. Boykin is seeking international assistance with “horrific levels of shootings” and violent crime mainly on the West Side and South Side communities.

 

Boykin said at O’Hare International Airport on Thursday, “I’m hoping to appeal to the U.N. to actually come to Chicago and meet with victims of violence, and maybe even possibly help out in terms of peacekeeping efforts, because I think it’s so critical for us to make sure that these neighborhoods are safe.”

Boykin told Inc. before his meeting, “the United Nations has a track record of protecting minority populations. There was tribal warfare between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Africa, and they deployed peacekeeping troops there to help save those populations and reduce the bloodshed.”

“We have to do something — black people in Chicago make up 30 percent of the population but 80 percent of those who are killed by gun violence,” he added.

Throughout 2017, President Trump has been fairly vocal about the carnage in Chicago. Last week, he addressed FBI grads in Quantico, Virginia, and asked one simple question: “What The Hell Is Going On In Chicago?” (See: “What The Hell Is Going On In Chicago” And Other Highlights From Trump’s Speech To FBI Grads)

Trump on the rise in violent crime: "What the hell is going on in Chicago, what the hell is happening there?" pic.twitter.com/mGrSGbHudo

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 15, 2017

Courtesy of stats from HeyJackAss!, here’s a quick recap of “what the hell is going on in Chicago.”  In aggregate, 3,451 people have been shot so far in 2017, or roughly 1 person every 2.4 hours, and 651 have died from there injuries.

Per the chart below, the violent crime is a persistent cloud over the city of Chicago with shootings and murders happening on a daily occurrence.

Meanwhile, this long-term chart shows why Boykin has met with the United States for the assistance of foreign troops to occupy Chicago. It’s the sheer velocity in homicides in recent years which has local officials frightened.

And lastly, “we can’t wait until the mayor comes up with another 1,000 police to try to make the streets safer. Quite frankly, the people want to be safe right now in their homes and their neighborhoods, and we want to make sure that they’re safe,” Boykin said.

* * *

Meanwhile in Maryland, just outside the hellhole which is known as Baltimore, an entire unit of heavily armed United Nations vehicles sits behind a mysterious Kellogg Cereal Plant (as of September 2017).

Will Your Taxes Go Up? Find Out With These 8 Scenarios

With Republicans having inexplicably sacrificed a crucial Senate seat last night by choosing to support a candidate accused of multiple counts of pedophilia, it"s unclear whether tax reform is even a remote possibility at this point.  Certainly, the challenge of forming a consensus among the GOP was difficult enough when they held a 2-seat advantage in the Senate so we can only assume it will be next to impossible now that that lead has been cut in half. 

Of course, Republicans seem to have every intent of passing a tax bill before Doug Jones gets seated in January...but, then again, they"ve missed almost every deadline they"ve set for themselves since Trump moved into the White House nearly a full year ago.

Be that as it may, just in case a bill gets passed at some point before winter break, Bloomberg, along with a little help from Baird Private Wealth Management, has put together a series of 8 tables which help to quantify exactly how you may be impacted by tax reform whether you"re a "millionaire, billionaire, private jet owner" living in Manhattan or an "average Joe" making $40k a year and renting an apartment in Milwaukee.  Here they are:

Scenario 1 - Manhattan Millionaires: These Manhattan residents have a jumbo mortgage (at an assumed 4 percent interest rate) and take a $40,000 deduction on mortgage interest; pay property taxes of $96,250 and state income tax of $135,360; and make annual charitable contributions totaling $100,000.

Unfortunately, contrary to what you might hear from Nancy Pelosi, these folks take a hit under both the House and Senate tax bill primarily due to the loss of the SALT deductions.

Scenario 2 - Malibu Millionaires:  A married couple has a primary residence in Malibu, California, and a second home in Lake Tahoe. The property tax on the Malibu home is $15,860, and $4,896 on their second home; they deduct $40,000 total in mortgage interest for the two homes; and give $50,000 to charity.

Scenario 3 - Small Business Owner:  This married couple with a small manufacturing business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has $300,000 in pass-through business income. Their deductible mortgage interest adds up to $6,000; their property tax is $8,600; and they give 5 percent of their income to charity.

Scenario 4 - Suburban Family:  A married couple in a New York City suburb has estimated state income tax of $17,290; their annual mortgage interest deduction is $14,000; and they pay property tax of $13,750 -- about the same amount they donate to charity.

Scenario 5 - Single Secretary In Manhattan: This New York City renter pays estimated state income tax of $8,148 and gives about $6,500 to charity.

Scenario 6 - Married Family In Austin:  This young couple rents and has income of $100,000. They give $5,000 a year to charity.

Scenario 7 - Median Income Couple In Portland:  This Portland, Oregon, couple earns close to the median household income for the U.S. Their property tax bill is $1,688; their deductible mortgage interest is $3,000; and estimated state income tax is $4,744.

Scenario 8 - Median Income Family In Milwaukee:  This married couple rents and has an estimated 2017 state income tax bill of $2,104.

Of course, this will all change when/if the GOP submits a final tax bill for consideration...but, like Obamacare, you may only find out how it truly impacts you after it has already been passed.

New York City Developers Are Relying On A Shrinking Pool Of Buyers

Most of New York City’s largest developers are probably optimistic about the near future now that one of their own is occupying the most powerful office in the world. Bu, this very specific group of taxpayers stands to benefit immensely from several of the provisions that have appeared in the Senate or House plans: Repealing the AMT and estate taxes would allow them (and their heirs) to shave a pile of percentage points off their tax bills. And those are just two examples.

To be sure, the tax plan’s passage isn’t assured – now that Alabama Democrat Doug Jones has defeated Republican Roy Moore. With Jones expected to be seated some time after New Year’s, the time pressure facing Republicans has intensified. Because at the start of the next Congress, their already precarious two-vote majority will shrink to one. Beyond this, Republicans haven’t agreed on a final version of the bill yet, and existing differences between moderates, deficit hawks and conservatives within the party could prove insurmountable.

But regardless of what happens with the tax plan, there’s a much more pressing problem facing developers in the Big Apple: A glut of “luxury” apartments priced in the low-seven or high-six figure range is coinciding with a precipitous drop in sales volume, according to Reuters.

While prices have been steady in recent years, sales volume for condos in Manhattan are still 30% below their pre-crisis peak.

In other words, the market’s dependence on a small, well-heeled pool of buyers – a pool that is shrinking as prices rise to unsustainable levels and wealth in the US becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest – could be a major vulnerability in the coming years.

In the past five years, however, Manhattan has seen a different kind of development boom. Prices for these units are higher than they ever were before but the number of units built and sold is way off levels achieved a decade ago, Warshawer said.

 

“As prices have risen, less of the market share is comprised of cheaper units,” she said.

 

In 2013, 7,787 units were sold for under $1 million for a total $4.7 billion in sales. This year is projected to end with 5,040 units sold at under $1 million for $3.4 billion in sales.

Indeed, apartments priced in the seven-figures are increasingly going unsold – while affordable housing becomes increasingly harder to

The median sales price of high-end apartments edged higher in 2017, but the closely watched average square-foot price slid a bit for condos as prices leveled off after years of heady growth, the report said.

 

While the average and median sales price for all residential units has jumped since 2007 by 61 percent to $2.2 million and 44 percent to $1.2 million, respectively, transaction volume is off 30 percent from peak activity a decade ago, CityRealty said.

 

CityRealty examined sales registrations from the city’s Department of Finance. Much of Harlem and nearby areas were excluded because its market size.

Units sold at 432 Park Avenue, a 96-story tower marketed by developers as the tallest residential building in the Americas, garnered the most number of sales in a listing of the 25 highest-priced condos, CityRealty said. But elsewhere, the ultra-high-end market is suffering as nearly a third of the apartments in Manhattan’s recently developed “Billionaire’s Row” have gone unsold.

As we highlighted back in August during Starwood Property Trust’s Q2 earnings call, CEO Barry Sternlicht warned of a doomsday waiting at the end of New York"s "Billionaire"s Row", predicting an imminent "debacle." He mentioned the out-of-balance mezzanine loan at JDS Development and Property Markets Group’s 111 West 57th Street project and predicted more distress in the luxury residential market, including at 53 W 53, a supertall condo being developed next to the Museum of Modern Art by Hines, Pontiac Land Group and Goldman Sachs.

“We are beginning to see the cracks of the high-end residential market in Manhattan,” Sternlich warned.

Indeed, and while developers stand to benefit personally from the Republican plan, proposals to eliminate or reduce the mortgage deduction or deductions on state and local taxes could further damage their sales figures by favoring renters over buyers.

John Lennon Was Right: The Government Is Run By Maniacs For Maniacal Means

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

Not much has changed in the 37 years since John Lennon was gunned down by an assassin’s bullet.

All of the many complaints we have about government today - surveillance, corruption, harassment, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc. - were used against Lennon, who never refrained from speaking truth to power and calling for social justice, peace and a populist revolution.

Little wonder, then, that the U.S. government saw Lennon as enemy number one.

A prime example of the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority, Lennon was the subject of a four-year campaign of surveillance and harassment by the U.S. government (spearheaded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), in an attempt by President Richard Nixon to have him “neutralized” and deported. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose.”

Years after Lennon’s assassination, it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of surveillance files on him. As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”

Such government-directed harassment was nothing new.

The FBI has had a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures, including Martin Luther King Jr.

In Lennon’s case, the ex-Beatle saw that his music could mobilize the public and help to bring about change. Yet while Lennon believed in the power of the people, he also understood the danger of a power-hungry government. “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people,” observed Lennon. “It controls them.”

By March 1971, when his “Power to the People” single was released, it was clear that Lennon was ready to participate in political activism against the U. S. government, the “monster” that was financing the war in Vietnam.

The release of Lennon’s Sometime in New York City album, which contained a radical anti-government message in virtually every song, only fanned the flames of the government’s war on Lennon.

In 1972, Nixon had the ex-Beatle served with deportation orders “in an effort to silence him as a voice of the peace movement.” Despite the fact that Lennon was not plotting to bring down the Nixon Administration, as the government feared, the government persisted in its efforts to have him deported. Equally determined to resist, Lennon dug in and fought back. Finally, in 1976, Lennon won the battle to stay in the country. By 1980, the old radical was back and ready to cause trouble.

Unfortunately, Lennon’s time as a troublemaker was short-lived.

Mark David Chapman was waiting in the shadows on Dec. 8, 1980, just as Lennon was returning to his New York apartment building. As Lennon stepped outside the car to greet the fans congregating outside, Chapman dropped into a two-handed combat stance, emptied his .38-caliber pistol and pumped four hollow-point bullets into Lennon’s back and left arm.

John Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Much like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and others who have died attempting to challenge the powers-that-be, Lennon had finally been “neutralized.” 

Yet Lennon’s legacy lives on in his words, his music and his efforts to speak truth to power.

Even so, his work to change the world for the better is far from done.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, peace remains out of reach. Activists and whistleblowers continue to be prosecuted for challenging the government’s authority. Militarism is on the rise, all the while the governmental war machine continues to wreak havoc on innocent lives. And those who do dare to speak up are labeled dissidents, troublemakers, terrorists, lunatics, or mentally ill and tagged for surveillance, censorship or, worse, involuntary detention.

As Lennon shared in a 1968 interview:

I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives…

 

I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means.

 

If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government and the Russian… Chinese… what they are actually trying to do, and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing.

 

I think they’re all insane. But I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

So what’s the answer?

Lennon had a multitude of suggestions.

“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”

 

“Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders….You have to do it yourself.”

 

“Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.”

 

“War is over, if you want it.”

In other words, fighting the evil of the American police state can only come about by way of conscious thoughts that are put into action.

Do you want an end to war? Then stop supporting the government’s military campaigns. Do you want government violence against the citizenry to end? Then demand that your local police de-militarize. Do you want a restoration of your freedoms? You’ll have to get the government to recognize that “we the people” are the masters in this relationship and government employees are our public servants.

The choice is ours.

The power (if we want it), as Lennon recognized, is in our hands.

“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people,” concluded Lennon. “The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.”

For the moment, the choice is still ours: slavery or freedom, war or peace, death or life.

The point at which we have no choice is the point at which the monsters—the maniacs, the powers-that-be, the Deep State—win.

As Lennon warned, “You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.”

"They Called It "The Rape Room"" - 10 Women Share Chilling Details Of Ken Friedman"s Sexual Abuse

In a bombshell report that has rattled the food world, several former employees of restaurant impresario Ken Friedman shared chilling details of the sexual harassment and abuse they suffered at Friedman’s hands with the New York Times, describing the omerta that existed among staffers at his restaurant, who inevitably accepted the harassment as part of a job that offered many perks, including great pay and bonuses in the form of concert tickets and other in-demand items.

In addition to Friedman, the story also includes many lewd anecdotes of the egregiously inappropriate sexual misconduct perpetrated by renowned chef Mario Batali, who yesterday admitted that salacious depictions of his past behavior were accurate.

Together, the two men are possibly the most high-profile restaurateurs to be tarnished by the national reckoning with sexual harassment in the workplace that has effectively led many famous and powerful men in a range of industries to be expelled from polite society.

Ken Friedman

But of the many reports that have surfaced so far – and there have been many – some of the details from the Times piece almost beggar belief. In anecdotes from former staffers at the Spotted Pig, one of New York City’s hottest restaurants, the depictions of Friedman’s behavior push way past inappropriate: In many cases, he appeared callous and cruel, such as when he fired one of his managers shortly after she informed one of his staff that she was pregnant.

Ten women said that Mr. Friedman, 56, had subjected them to unwanted sexual advances: Groping them in public, demanding sex or making text requests for nude pictures or group sex. Many others also said that working or him required tolerating daily kisses and touches, pulling all-night shifts at private parties that included public sex and nudity, and enduring cat calls and gropes from guests who are Mr. Friedman’s friends.

 

The Spotted Pig has been a regular late-night stop for Mr. Batali, who this week said he was stepping away from day-to-day operations at his own restaurants and other businesses amid reports of inappropriate sexual behavior.

 

Employees of the Spotted Pig said they regularly witnessed sexual aggression by Mr. Batali, often with Mr. Friedman’s knowledge.

Like Matt Lauer, Al Franken and many of the other powerful men who’ve been forced to withdraw from polite society following accusations of sexual misconduct, Friedman admitted only that there was some truth to the allegations, but disputed the details. “Some incidents were not as described, but context and content are not today’s discussion."

“I apologize now publicly for my actions."

Interestingly, Friedman’s wife was once a server at the Spotted Pig. Like Batali, Friedman also announced that he has decided to take an indefinite leave of absence from the management of his restaurants.
Carla Betts, who was formerly the wine director at the Spotted Pig, the Breslin and the John Dory - three of the restaurants Freidman runs with partner and chef April Bloomfield - from 2009 to 2013 said she persistent sexual harassment at the hands of Friedman was one of her reasons for leaving her job at his restaurants.

“There is a grab-ass, superfun late-night culture – I love that part of the industry. But there is a difference between fun and sexualized camaraderie and predation. When you are made to feel unsafe or dirty or embarrassed, that is a different thing."

Friedman frequently engaged in consensual sexual relationships with his employees and openly hired based on employees" physical appearance (an incredibly rare practice in the modern food-service industry, we imagine).

Former employees also claimed that Friedman was frequently intoxicated at work, and would pressure staff into taking drugs and drinking with him.

Echoing some of the allegations from the NYT’s takedown of disgraced studio head Harvey Weinstein, staffers said they feared Friedman because of his volatile temper and burly frame. Friedman also had a reputation for openly retaliating against employees who defied or disappointed him. In many cases, they were fired, blacklisted or harassed.

“We had to brace ourselves every time Ken arrived,” one former server said. “When he wasn’t coming on to us, he was screaming at us."

Some of the former employees who spoke with the NYT said they brought their concerns to April Bloomfield, Friedman’s business partner and the head chef at many of his restaurants.

Her response, the women said, was always the same: “That’s just the way he is. If you don’t like it, go work somewhere else."

One manager said she complained to Bloomfield that the sexually charged atmosphere fostered by Friedman was driving the huge turnover among her restaurant’s staff. “She really didn’t want the turnover to continue. But she totally backed off getting involved in the behavior."

Bloomfield denied this, saying she referred the two matters that were brought to her attention to her company’s labor representative.

While the company’s human resources department said that none of the women who spoke with the Times filed complaints about Friedman’s behavior with HR, one reason that many employees might’ve tolerated Friedman’s behavior was the exceptional compensation that servers at his restaurants could earn.

And the rewards of a job at a Friedman-Bloomfield restaurant can be ret. Servers at the top of their game can earn six figures in a year. Working with Ms. Blomfield confers prestige in restaurants around the world. Mr. Friedman has treated favored employees to after-work drinks, field trips to his beach house and top-tier concert tickets.

 

Ms. Rza Betts, the former wine director, said working at the Breslin while Ms. Bloomfield’s star was rising was so rewarding that she simply shrugged off his hugs that went on too long, and his occasional slaps on her buttocks.

Interestingly, the Times concedes that, in the food-service industry, flirting and playful, sexually charged banter are sometimes a part of the job that employees welcome. But Friedman “turned that formula up several notches."

Industry veterans say restaurants are especially accommodating of behavior that pushes the boundaries of sexuality in a work place. Experienced severs accept that flirting is sometimes a part of securing a good tip. Shifts are filled with sexual banter that many welcome as playful.

 

The Spotted Pig turned that behavior up several notches. In past interviews, Mr. Friedman – aa former manager of bands, including the Smiths – has said his goal was to ake a restaurant, with exceptional food, that was as sexy as any bar in town.

But perhaps the most startling detail from the New York Times story was the nickname that some of Friedman’s employees had bestowed upon the third floor of the Spotted Pig, a space where celebrities would congregate for exclusive after-hours parties.

They called it “the rape room."

But late night, after the first-floor dining room closed and the party moved upstairs, Mr. Friedman made it clear that normal restaurant rules did not apply, several employees said. In the frequently packed room, guests openly groped female servers, who said Mr. Friedman required them to work until parties ended, often after dawn.

 

Among employees and industry insiders, the third-floor space has earned a nickname: “the rape room."

Toward the end of the piece, the Times unfurls another stunning anecdote from an employee who was abruptly and inexplicably terminated shortly after becoming pregnant.

In 2015, soon after her marriage, she requested a meeting with Mr. Friedman and another manager ot discuss her compensation. A worried Mr. Friedman asked her if she was pregnant, she said. She told him she wasn’t.  “Could you at least schedule this kind of thing for the slow season?” she quoed him as sayig.

 

Later that year, Ms. Brown did become pregnant, and told a supervisor in confidence. Just over a week ater, she was terminated; managers told her it was because the organization was downsizing and her position was being eliminated."

The timing is curious – to say the least.

Friedman and Batali are probably the two most high-profile figures in the restaurant industry to be felled by the national reckoning with sexual harassment in the workplace that began with the New York Times November expose about disgraced studio executive Harvey Weinstein’s use of settlements and NDAs to silence his victims. Since then, media reports have asserted that Weinstein cultivated a network of enables by leveraging his influence, money and vicious temper.

Mario Batali

But, if there is humor to be found in situations like these, it certainly lies in the delicious hypocrisy as many men who professed to be “feminist allies” have been exposed for pathologically mistreating women.

Two months ago, Batali humble-bragged to the New York Post about how the kitchen staff at his newest and fanciest restaurant consisted exclusively of women.

“It’s not because they have a vagina,” he said. “It’s because they’re the smartest people for the job."

Whatever you say, Mario.
 

BREAKING: Anonymous Hacks ISIS Accounts Finds Attacks Planned for US, Bomb-Making Plans

Sources within the Anonymous hacking community have hacked multiple ISIS associated accounts and found damning information.

Senate Tax Debacle: Certain Pass-Through Entities Face Marginal Tax Rates Over 100% Under Current Bill

As the House and Senate continue to try to reconcile their two versions of a tax plan, the taxing structure for pass-through entities (s-corps, LLC"s, etc.) continues to be somewhat controversial, if not completely nonsensical. As we pointed out last week, the Senate bill somewhat randomly chose to exclude pass-through entities organized as family trusts from tax cuts which would ultimately leave them on the hook for much larger tax bills due to the elimination of other deductions. It"s unclear whether this bizarre exclusion was just an oversight or an intentional political hit on an easy target that no one in Washington DC would dare defend publicly: rich families organized as trusts.

Now, a new note from the Tax Policy Center lays out some scenarios whereby the marginal tax rate for high-income pass-through entities could soar to over 100%.  Of course, while two rational people can debate the impact of a ~40% tax rate on a person"s desire to work, we"re almost certain that a taxing structure that takes more than 100% of your marginal income will be a slight disincentive.  Here"s an example of how it works from the Wall Street Journal:

Consider, for example, a married, self-employed New Jersey lawyer with three children and earnings of about $615,000. Getting $100 more in business income would force the lawyer to pay $105.45 in federal and state taxes, according to calculations by the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation. That is more than double the marginal tax rate that household faces today.

 

If the New Jersey lawyer’s stay-at-home spouse wanted a job, the first $100 of the spouse’s wages would require $107.79 in taxes. And the tax rates for similarly situated residents of California and New York City would be even higher, the Tax Foundation found. Analyses by the Tax Policy Center, which is run by a former Obama administration official, find similar results, with federal marginal rates as high as 85%, and those don’t include items such as state taxes, self-employment taxes or the phase-out of child tax credits.

As Joseph Rosenberg of the Tax Policy Center notes, the penalty is greatest for high-income pass-through entities in highly taxed states. 

Consider the example of a married couple whose entire income is “specified service” income generated by a pass-through entity and who claims the standard deduction. At an income of $524,000, the couple could take an $87,000 deduction (17.4% of the couple’s taxable income “without regard” to the deduction) that would reduce their taxes by $30,450 (since they are in the 35% tax bracket), but the deduction is entirely phased out at an income of $624,000. On average, that amounts to more than a 30% surtax on top of the 35% statutory tax rate over that range of income.

 

The actual phase-out is much more complicated, as the bill’s text released Monday night makes clear, because the deduction continues to apply even as its benefit is phased out. (If that sounds convoluted, it’s because it is.) The couple’s marginal income tax rate would jump to 61.375% at $528,541 of income. And it would rise to 73% until their income reaches $624,000 and the deduction is fully phased-out, at which point their marginal tax rate would return to the 35 percent ordinary income tax rate. (Note that these calculations do not include the additional 3.8 percent in self-employment payroll tax or the net investment income tax).

Here is how the overall tax rate schedule for pass-through income would look:

“This is a big concern,” said Scott Greenberg, a Tax Foundation analyst. “It would be unfortunate if Congress passed a tax bill that had the effect of making additional work and additional income not worthwhile for any subgroup of households.”

Of course, in the end, this type of taxing structure just raises the returns on "gaming" the tax system in every way possible.  “I would expect a huge tax-gaming response once people fully understand how it works,” said Mr. Gamage, a former Treasury Department official, who said business owners have an easier time engaging in such tax avoidance than salaried employees do. “The payoff for gaming is huge, within the set of people who both face these rates and have flexible enough business structures.”

Not surprisingly, lawmakers are looking at changes to prevent this debacle from happening as they attempt to reconcile Senate and House versions of the tax bill this week. The formal House-Senate conference committee will meet on Wednesday, and GOP lawmakers have said they may unveil an agreement by week’s end...though they seem to consistently miss their own self-imposed deadlines.

But you shouldn"t worry about these issues too much as a spokeswoman for the Senate Finance Committee assured the Journal that as "with any major reform, there will always be unusual hypotheticals delivering anomalous results...The goal of Congress’s tax overhaul has been to lower taxes on the American people and by and large, according to a variety of analyses, we’re achieving that."

[VIDEO] ISIS Attempts Manhattan Bombing!

New York City Police confirmed one male suspect was in custody following Monday’s explosion near the Port Authority Bus Station. The suspect, who has ties to ISIS was the only one with injuries, officials said.

Commuters were urged to avoid the area as authorities continue to investigate the bombing which luckily, wasn’t as horrific as it could have been. New reports said the suspect in Monday’s explosion in New York City was wearing the explosive device when it was detonated. It remained unclear whether it was a backpack or explosive vest of some sort, though it appeared it was not a pipe bomb as previously reported.

Eyewitness Francisco Ramirez told CNN that he heard two explosions as he was exiting a bus about 7:45 a.m. EST.

“From what I saw it sounded like it came from the subway, but I’m just guessing,” he said. “It was two distinct explosions seconds from each other. As I was making my way toward the outside, I kept getting shoved by cops and there were cops at every entrance blocking and there was police and SWAT everywhere.”

“It was scary. It was just a lot of chaos but I didn’t see any injuries,” he added.

BREAKING VIDEO: MOMENT OF EXPLOSION AT TIMES SQUARE SUBWAY STATION pic.twitter.com/bb6nEPwfqD

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 11, 2017

At least four people have also suffered non-life threatening and minor injuries such as ringing in ears, headaches, and scrapes according to police officials.

President Donald Trump has been briefed on the situation, according to Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Reports said that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has also been briefed on the incident.

Some reports are conflicting as this story continues to develop.