Pearls To Swine

San Francisco split by Silicon Valley’s wealth

"Heated bidding wars — especially in a half-mile radius of shuttle bus stops — have broken out, causing rents to soar, even double in some cases. Along shuttle routes, trendy new restaurants that serve high-end food and spirits have taken the place of corner stores and mom-and-pop businesses. Anti-Google graffiti has turned up here, and activists recently held a small anti-gentrification rally at which they smashed a Google bus piñata. Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, said he fears that the techies are permanently inheriting the city and won't pack up and leave as they did after the 2000 dot-com crash." Continue reading →

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Fordlandia: Henry Ford’s Amazon Dystopia

"In 1927, the American industrialist Henry Ford began building a private city—Fordlandia—in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon forest. His company had won title to nearly 2.5 million acres of land—over 3,800 square miles—for a planned rubber plantation and company town. Ford spent over $20 million (about $300 million in today’s dollars) putting in roads, water and power systems, rail lines, factories, offices, medical facilities, homes, schools, and stores. Thousands of workers and their families flocked to Fordlandia. Soon, however, waves of rioting, looting, and burning roiled the city. Ford abandoned his namesake in 1945, leaving it to rot in the jungle." Continue reading →

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Craigslist mob steals nearly everything from foreclosed family’s home

"A mob of people showed up at a home in Woodstock, Georgia on Wednesday, responding to a Craigslist ad that promised free items in the home's small driveway. But when the man who posted the ad arrived at the sale, he discovered that the mob had barged inside the home and was taking everything the family owned. Michael Vercher, whose family lived there for 20 years before recently losing the home to foreclosure, looked like he hardly knew what hit him. 'They came in and just tore the place up. Everyone was inside the house; they were taking out items. There were cars around the block. It was like ants in and out of the house.'" Continue reading →

Continue ReadingCraigslist mob steals nearly everything from foreclosed family’s home