Of all the industries to subsidize, real estate developers should be somewhere near the bottom of the list, next to the owners of gambling websites and vape shops.
When I was a kid, the Bronx was burning. My dad was a fireman who happened to be an Ivy League graduate.
He told me it wasn’t the crackheads torching the city, whatever the news said. It was fraud.
Let me explain how it worked…. John Doe buys a rundown apartment building for $100k. He pockets the redevelopment tax break, then sells it to Joe Doe for $250k. Joe pockets the tax break, then sells it to Jerry Doe for $500k. Rinse and repeat until the building is worth $5 million.
The tax breaks are real. The money is not.
Because the buyers are all family, the cash flows out of Swiss bank account 27852 and right back into 27852 after every sale. There’s a transaction cost, sure, but the tax breaks more than cover it.
Then comes the payoff: they insure the building for $5 million and burn it down.
The name for this was “Jewish Lightning.” The phrase stuck around not because the landlords were all Jewish, but because the stereotype hit a nerve in a city run by Jewish mayors from 1974 to 1989, the peak of the burning. Fair or not, the term stuck.
So why was none of this investigated? NGO funding, of course.
The NYPD union was powerful, and NYC detectives had sweeping investigative authority over almost everything. Except arson. Arson belonged to FDNY detectives. NGOs, routing money through union donations, stoked the rivalry between cops and firemen.
Long story short, arson investigators got no funding and zero cooperation from the NYPD.
No money for investigations means no arrests.
Eventually the Bronx ran out of buildings to burn, and Giuliani drove the final nail into arson fraud’s coffin.
But the lesson survived, and it’s the foundation of today’s fraud. The lesson was this: the actual value of the asset doesn’t matter.
👉What matters is the movement of money.
Destruction is still very profitable. When the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the cleanup and rebuild were estimated at $1.7 billion, with the bridge reopening in 2028. The cost has since ballooned to $5.2 billion, and the wreckage still isn’t fully cleared.
Money pours into demolition,, engineering, environmental review, project management, waste removal.
But if the work doesn’t actually get done, the real expenses stay low. The money moves; the bridge doesn’t.
And here’s the leap: you don’t have to destroy anything at all. You just have to not build it.
Democrats allocate money to a government body, which hands it to a project manager, who hires consultants, who hire subcontractors, who hire more subcontractors, who funnel it back to Democrats, who allocate more money.
The fewer the actual costs (labor, materials, equipment) the more of the flow you can capture.
And if a taxpayer complains, you hire a PR firm and a few consultants to explain why costs keep exploding while nothing gets built. The easiest thing to blame is red tape.
So why does red tape exist?
Because destroying valuable property, while profitable, is too obviously unethical.
Burning buildings gets you arrested, eventually. Not building gets you a ribbon-cutting and a press release.
Here’s the deeper trap. Because our most valuable assets are fixed (houses, cars, index funds) we think of money as static. You have what you have. It grows over time, but it doesn’t flow.
That’s exactly where the fraud lives: in the flow.
The light bulb moment was realizing you don’t need to destroy physical property. You only need to destroy productivity.
If labor and materials are never purchased while money pours in, the fraud works.
You don’t have to build or destroy anything of value, just productivity. You just announce a project and start writing checks while throwing up enough red tape to block any real spending on labor and materials.
This is basically why Congress handed @PeteButtigieg $1.2 trillion and our roads and bridges still suck five years later. They put up signs, traffic cones, and red tape, and little else.
But there are a few residual problems. 1/2
Built in 1773.
No electricity.
No motor.
No batteries.
Yet, after more than 250 years, it still moves miraculously.
That is the Silver Swan – a mechanical masterpiece powered entirely by springs and intricate gears. A testament to the fact that ingenuity and masterful engineering reached their peak long before the electric age began.
//The Wire//2300Z June 19, 2026//
//ROUTINE//
//BLUF: WAR IN LEBANON INTENSIFIES OVERNIGHT, IRANIAN DELEGATION DEPARTS SWITZERLAND AS STATUS OF PEACE TALKS REMAINS UNCERTAIN. UNIDENTIFIED MAN THROWS CHILD IN CROCODILE PIT IN CAMBRIDGESHIRE BEFORE BEING IMMEDIATELY RELEASED BY POLICE.//
-----BEGIN TEARLINE-----
-International Events-
Middle East: After the ceasefire document was signed in Versailles yesterday, Israeli forces conducted large-scale bombing campaigns in Lebanon. Dozens of airstrikes were reported along the southern and eastern fronts as the cities of Maifadoun, Nabatieh, and Toul were heavily targeted this morning. The number of casualties remains unknown as most of the region surrounding this cluster of towns was destroyed by the bombing. At some point during the night, Hezbollah conducted an ATGM (Anti-Tank Guided Missile) attack on an IDF tank which killed four crewmembers. This prompted an even more substantial IDF response, which continued throughout the night. By morning, several reports of a ceasefire emerged between the IDF and Hezbollah, scheduled to take place at 4:00pm local time. However, as of this report several strikes have taken place after the ceasefire, and the status of the alleged halt to the fighting remains uncertain.
Analyst Comment: As the bombing in Lebanon has continued throughout this morning, limited reporting out of Switzerland suggests that the Iranian delegation has departed ahead of schedule, and peace talks have been halted. Some initial reports also circulated stating that the Strait of Hormuz had been re-closed as well, however as of this report this might have been a knee-jerk reaction that has been mitigated and merchant traffic has continued to increase throughout the Persian Gulf this afternoon.
United Kingdom: This morning an attack was reported at Johnsons of Old Hurst, a tourist farm/venue in Cambridgeshire. The incident involved a 30-year-old man (who was attended by two caregivers), snatching a 3-year-old child, and throwing him into the crocodile enclosure at the small zoo section of the farm. The zoo owner's wife jumped into the enclosure and rescued the boy, while visitors detained the man who conducted the attack.
Analyst Comment: The assailant had no connection with the victim, and the attack appears to be random. This case has added to the already-high levels of outrage as the suspect's name and appearance is being withheld...but he's already been released from police custody, as the police deemed him too mentally ill to even be interviewed. Instead, he was released from custody altogether. The boy who was thrown into the enclosure was bitten by a crocodile, and remains hospitalized undergoing treatment.
-----END TEARLINE-----
Analyst Comments: If the bombing in Lebanon carries on, the peace deal has little chance of lasting the weekend. In fact, it might already be too late if the Iranians decide that the United States is not capable of constraining the Israelis in Lebanon. The White House has attempted to tame the situation by reportedly assuring the Iranians that the targeting is over, however as this reporting hit social media, the Israeli's were still hitting Lebanon. Also, reports on the timing of last night's events vary somewhat. Some reports claim that the Israeli's were only responding to the targeting of the armored column, which prompted the bombing. However, the tank that was hit was advancing (not withdrawing) and at the time it was located about 6 miles into Lebanese territory on the northwest side of the Litani River. Also, some reports claim that the bombing campaign actually began before the tank was struck by Hezbollah, but these local reports are hard to verify.
In the context of the peace agreement that has found itself on rocky ground, the targeting efforts overnight were not a small engagement...this was a substantial bombing campaign that is probably the IDF's biggest push so far in Lebanon. Many locations were completely leveled and it's quite clear that the Israelis gave some cities throughout southern Lebanon a miniature version of the Gaza treatment last night. It is quite possible that this is the standard final punch below the belt after the bell, and it would have been extremely naive for either the United States or Iran to not assume that this would happen immediately upon a ceasefire agreement being signed. As a result, it's not certain as to if this will outright derail the deal; this may have been an assumption that was already baked in to what the U.S. and Iran agreed to behind closed doors. Nevertheless the main issue for the world, the Strait of Hormuz, remains the main point of leverage. If the Iranians want to press the issue by closing the Strait again, that's up to them and so far it's hard to say how they might handle the issue. Both sides can see the elephant in the room, and both sides know the difficulty in addressing it. The next big friction point will be in determining what this stunt has cost the American diplomatic team in terms of negotiating terms and getting the Iranians back to the table.
Analyst: S2A1
Research: https://t.co/S3Ktgax7Ng
Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.
//END REPORT//
"The whole fiasco just shows how impossible it is to get anything built in Canada. A few dozen people shouldn’t be able to add months of delay to an already massively delayed project like this, especially after it’s been given the supposedly safe go-ahead."
Qatari security forces were operating, in Canada, during Canada's first World Cup victory.
They operated, openly and in uniform.
Secret Chinese police stations, secret deals with Chinese police, Iranian Revolutionary Guard and armed Khalistanis all function within Canada.
Name the traitors.
Yesterday, Ottawa adopted a controversial reform to Canada's pesticide regulatory framework.
Under the new law, the federal government will have greater authority to intervene in certain pesticide decisions, including the ability for Cabinet to review or override regulatory decisions made through Health Canada's pesticide approval and review process under specific circumstances.
I'm concerned.
The debate is not really about whether pesticides are good or bad. It is about governance: how Canada balances scientific expertise, democratic accountability, food security, environmental protection, and agricultural competitiveness.
Canada's Defence Policy Architect Was Fired After Warning That Anti-American Rhetoric Serves Beijing. Her Lawyer Wants to Know Who Gave the Order. https://t.co/fY9nC7IkFV
@bruce_barrett It's not "retroactive". It's present day active because the content, while produced and published yesterday or ten years ago - is currently existing and "communicating" digitally in the public space.
The bill was crafted specifically for this purpose.
🚨🇨🇦 Why the Canadian dollar keeps falling. The actual reasons.
📌 Recession: only G20 nation in one
📌 Rate differential: Bank of Canada cutting, US holding
📌 Capital flight: $1 trillion out in a decade
📌 Trade risk: CUSMA uncertainty, China EV friction with Washington
📌 Productivity collapse: less machinery than a decade ago
📌 Energy handicapped: carbon tax kills competitiveness
📌 Debt expanding: $3.2B grocery announcements with no funding source
Currency markets don’t watch press conferences.
They watch fundamentals.
Every Canadian fundamental is pointing the wrong direction.
Your grocery bill isn’t just inflation.
It’s a falling dollar making every import more expensive permanently.
#CdnPoli #CAD #Recession #Carney
CEO @CanadaPostCorp discloses 2025 bonuses were paid even as post office ran $1.6B loss & required $2B fed bailout: "I understand the sensitivities to that."
https://t.co/5lOps4TqsM @AndrewLawton