On April 7th, 2017, a group of Trump advisors and co-conspirators converged on Mar-a-Lago (one of Trump's properties) for a night of drinking and dining, while Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping were having dinner in a separate room at the hotel. In attendance were Steve Bannon, Joe Hagin (then Trump's deputy chief-of-staff) and others.
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The Property of the People transparency group (previously) has published another damning US intelligence file, this one a report circulated by the Regional Organized Crime Information Center (RICOC, a joint state/federal intelligence body), revealing how the US intelligence bodies advised local law enforcement after the Charlottesville white supremacist march.
Read the rest When Steve Bannon & co spent $1,000 on booze at Mar-a-Lago, taxpayers picked up the tab
Internal files reveal how US law enforcement classes anti-fascists as fascists, and actual fascists as "anti-anti-fascists"
China's real-estate bubble is the largest in human history, and despite years of warning signs, it has grown and grown, spilling over into the rest of the world. Read the rest
Following protests against a neo-Nazi rally, the FBI opened a terrorism investigation into By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a civil rights group, conducting surveillance and citing the fact that a BAMN member had been stabbed by a neo-Nazi to justify it. Read the rest
Anti-abortion extremists are among the most violent domestic terrorists in America, having murdered and attempted to murder dozens of people using firearms, firebombs and traditional explosives. Read the rest
After Property of the People (previously) used clever Freedom of Information Act requests to learn that the FBI classed the Proud Boys as 'an Extremist Group with Ties to White Nationalism', the organization's founder, Gavin McInnis (the Canadian who co-founded Vice Magazine) resigned from the organization he founded. Read the rest
The FBI describes the group Proud Boys as an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism” in a document provided to reporters by law enforcement in the state of Washington. Read the rest
Property of the People and Propublica used the Trumptown database of Trump's political appointees and the Freedom of Information Act to pull the appointees' resumes (chock full o' data that doesn't appear on their financial disclosure forms) and put them in a searchable database. Read the rest
The Daily Beast and Property of the People used the Freedom of Information Act to force the National Labor Relations Board to release the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas employee handbook, which was introduced into evidence during a 2015 lawsuit over union busting. Read the rest
A new Florida law redefines the reach of beachfront property owners' claims to "the land above the mean high-tide level." This seemingly innocuous change means that private property owners -- and their patrolling rent-a-cops -- will have vastly expanded powers to kick members of the public off of public beaches. Read the rest
In 2016, the watchdog group Property of the People discovered a secret FBI spying program called Gravestone, a mention of which slipped into the metadata of a document on the DoJ's website. Read the rest
The DC-based transparency group Property of the People successfully sued the White House to force it to disclose its visitor logs; now, in collaboration with Propublica, those logs are online as a free, searchable database. Read the rest
Construction is near to completion on Apple's $5B campus in Cupertino, and the project has included many odd notes, like the insistence on not having thresholds on the floor of the doorways lest daydreaming engineers trip over them, and some weird ideas about where the bathrooms should go. Read the rest
Who are the wealthy Russian citizens who've invested a total of almost $100 million worth of properties owned by U.S. President Donald J. Trump? An investigative report by Reuters digs into that question. Read the rest
The Resolution Foundation's Living Standards 2017 is an eye-opening look at the current state of the British experiment in allowing wealth inequality to expand without any check, to use a combination of austerity, the elimination of protection for tenants, reckless lending, offshore money-laundering and public subsidies for speculators to turn the human necessity of shelter into the nation's leading asset-class. Read the rest
In the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, much ink was spilled on the reliance of the predominantly black city on fines from its residents to pay its bills -- and on the use of what amounted to debtors' prisons that locked up those who wouldn't or couldn't pay the constant stream of fines and scared the rest into begging and borrowing to pay their own fines. Read the rest
Crooked cops and prosecutors in Nebraska are gnashing their teeth today. The state has taken away their license to steal cash and property from innocent people and use the proceeds to fatten their bloated budgets.
In some states where civil forfeiture is still allowed, high ranking police officers drive in luxury sports cars taken from owners who were never arrested for a crime. Read the rest
