The Grift

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We have spent the better part of the last decade debating about Trump and his coterie of Grifters that define both his business, Trump Enterprises (whatever those were) that included Real Estate, Casinos, Clothing Lines, Wine, Classes/Seminars, Steak, and other labeled brands that extended to other members of the Family that shared the name of Trump. From the seat in the White House he managed to further extend that brand to the point it drew attention from the State of New York which prosecuted members of his corporation, his personal Attorney and finally Trump himself for acts of duplicity and fraud regarding his real estate “empire.” That led to a massive penalty which he will not or will pay and this will go on perhaps for years more. There are other debts, trials and tribulations that seem to never have an end game in sight and that is what falls into that classification of the “Long Con.” A long con is one that takes place over a much longer time frame, I feel the story on John Oliver’s show regarding Pig Butchering is a great example of one of the current crops of long con. Bitcoin is a fabulous example of how that also plays into this story. A great long con if ever there was one, with the nefarious invisible “Banksy” who created all this but no one really knows who he is, where he is and what is this about? But even Kara Swisher in her new Memoir writes of another in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg, who may be perhaps the best at this new type of Grift. Social Media is one long con.

This article in the New York Times discusses the growth of the Grift. And where I found this definition which I have paraphrased and added my own comments.

The difference between a Grifter and “Grafter” are often tied together. “Grift” evokes not so much specific criminal acts as a broad, opportunistic racket, executed with a bit of cunning and panache; Grafters are stolid and conventional, lining their pockets and then quietly retreating to one of their several homes. A Grifters has both flair and ambition, who seem to delight in the con itself — the cleverness of the scheme, the smooth ease with which the marks were gulled. So while Trump is a classic grifter take a look at many who attach themselves to his varying schemes and plans. Many worked for him during his Administration quickly extricating themselves post January 6th but would happily Vote and/or work for him again if the opportunity arose. A Grifter loves a Grafter as they give them legitimacy. I prefer the term “Enablers” which is another way of allowing or permitting if not encouraging the behavior, a person usually associated with Addiction and there is no greater addiction than money. All of Venture Capitalists are some type of Enabler. Without them or the banks would Sam Bankerman Fried or Bernie Madoff made as far and in his case as long without them?

Now we are all being grifted or are grafters at some point. We take an opportunity and we work it to our advantage. I like to think of Real Estate Agents as the lowest on the professional totem pole who play the role of Counselor, Financial Advisor and Best Friend as you try to buy or sell a home. They dip their wick in both pots often coming out well ahead of the game when you are working with one and this adds to the price of housing and why many cannot afford to as they work in tangent with another Grafter, the Mortgage Broker/Agent. Banks are not the only one who writes these loans and they too have a massive interest in making money, yours. The process of this led to a massive financial crisis in 2008 and yet not one saw a trial or a penalty in the process for this and many banks were bailed out and rescued from their misdeeds. But without the Agents and these secondary lenders, few would have made it to sign the papers and make the sales of a product they could not afford. Used Car Salesman get a bad rap, add Real Estate Agents to the list. There are many many more stories about Real Estate Agents and their acts of fraud and duplicity, and by far more costly. Just Google “Real Estate Fraud” to see the list of crimes they have committed.

This week a neighbor and her husband moved out of my building. He is a Surgeon and she is a “Model”/ Real Estate Agent. I did not like nor dislike them I simply lived down the hall from them and kept it at that. Upon their final move out our Refuse room was full of their rejects, disgusting broken furniture, filthy smelling couch cushions, and largely junky items that seemed to be from a college dorm than an adult professionals home. Their move out was done in a small order Uhaul truck with two hired hands who packed what they took with them to relocate to Pittsburgh. To say crap in both quality and design is to be polite. I had to remind myself that this Man was a fucking Surgeon and this filthy shit is his? His wife the model did not adorn herself with the quality of designer goods but they did have three vehicles, two Porches and Volvo. Well priorities. And while living in a building that is largely filled with Asian families and Students who live very cheaply I did laugh as it explains why the fascination with my decorated digs is a source of discussion. And for the record many many folks who rent now are taking it upon themselves to decorate and design living spaces that reflect their taste. And yes folks what comes up can come down and if you are responsible you restore, replace all what you did back to the shit the building gave you. Or you can be like the Doctor and his wife, leave it there and pay for that via forfeit of the damage deposit. Clearly he has the cash. But man would I want that Man operating on me? NO! Again, this is a choice and it takes a weekly wander outside any apartment building at end of month to see the treasures and trash left behind.

And that too is another kind of Grift, the tip. There is now an industry tied to the Tipping Economy. The complaints about the added “service fee” and the mandatory tip on screens when at the Bakery or Butcher even have made one wonder what is appropriate and how much also has become an insidious way of doing business. Living in already overpriced multi family housing means Tips at the Holiday time are mandated if not expected. For many the strain of tipping a building with often dozens of staff, many invisible can be an expensive proposition. To give you an idea, we have in our Building we have Six Front Desk Staff, some whom work Graveyard and often have limited Tenant contact but no less an important job in which to provide security and maintain package inventory and distribution for those who do collect them at odd times. The cleaning and maintenance staff are (often at times) 10 in number and do most of the heavy lifting; Add to that the Superintendent who oversees that crew and lastly the Manager and when we have one, an Assistant. (And for the record the Manager has massive problems holding staff so the turnover is high and often overtly dramatic adding to buildings toxic demeanor) So, at one point we have over 18 people we have to pay at some point, and how much and do all of them get it? I mean the fat fuck who is the Gossip troll deserves the most as that way you won’t be gossiped about right? He should get the most too as he is fat, old, barely walks and is a troll right? Over the young girl who works her ass off. But how about the former Lead who used her position as “helping people” by enabling those with Dogs and Kids to be largely ignored when the kids were running wild in the gym unsupervised or the Dogs shit everywhere or the ones that killed a dog and another attacking a woman, but they were “good” Tenants as they tipped more and more often. So that is hierarchy in Apartment living, who tips, how often and how much matters. And there are a lot of holidays and dates of import. Valentines Day, Lunar New Year, Holi, their birthdays, your birthday all are on the calendar and have cards ready in which to shove in that obligatory payment.

We think of Grift as something associated with Politicians and there is no greater profession guilty of it, but it is everywhere. It is the way we assert our control and and influence even in the most benign of situations. And with that we are not exempt from the fraud, the duplicity and the guilt associated with our role as Grifter or Grafter. The recent story about the New York Times Reporter who handed over 50K in cash to a recent scam, but the Bank who willingly handed over 50K in cash is the same banker who is supposed to notify the IRS if you have deposited more than 10K in your account to notify them as earnings. Or the payment apps if you have transfers exceeding 300 dollars. The Police who will take any amount a cash during a traffic stop legally as a it too is suspect under the guise of Civil Forfeiture. So that Estate Sale, Car Sale, or some transaction is all watched or monitored or taken as it is all seen as gotten gains. But taking it out and in cash to pay an extortion not a problem in the least.

Grift or Graft, the Con, the Long Con and we are all players or victims in the game. This article from Psychology Today explain who is more likely to be a victim, but in reality we all are at some point players in this game. It is just how much you lose what matters. We are all pigs waiting to be butchered.

The Art of the Con and Why People Fall for It

How the con is pulled off, why fraudsters are successful, and how to spot them.

Posted September 26, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

By definition, a con artist is a manipulator who cheats, or tricks, others through persuading them to believe something that is not true. Through deception, they fool people into believing they can make easy money when, in fact, it is the con artist who ends up taking the victim’s money. The criminal and legal consequences of such indiscretions can be insignificant or great, depending on the circumstances and the laws of the land. In the course of co-authoring The Crime Book, which covered more than 100 crimes, I researched and wrote a chapter about con artists. Their crimes are varied, as are their behaviors. But the one thing they each have in common is the power of persuasion to take advantage of unsuspecting people.

Name of the Game

The confidence game, as scam artistry is called, is one of the oldest tricks in the trade. It exploits people’s trust. Human nature is on the side of these masters of fraud when it comes to defrauding their marks, or victims, and contributes to the con’s enduring success. Perpetrators have been referred to everything from flimflam operators, hustlers, grifters, and tricksters. The victims have been called marks, suckers, and gulls. And while media publicity has further romanticized cons and put their crimes in the public eye, their actions are anything but glamorous.

Even further, the cost of the capers to victims may run anywhere from a couple hundred to a few million dollars, with some victims learning the hard way, using their own free will, that when an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission reported that people lost $1.48 billion to fraud in 2018, an increase of 38 percent in 2017.

It Can Happen to You

How do unsuspecting people get duped to begin with? After all, even the most rational people have proven susceptible to crimes of trickery. That’s because con artists often prey on people’s trust and their propensity for believing what they wish was true—especially with get-rich-quick schemes and individual’s desire for a quick buck. They let their guard down and buy into what con artists feed them—all in the belief of the scammer and a high rate of return in exchange for a small investment, albeit a shady deal. But the convincing scammer skews the victim into thinking the payoff will come true and the scheme is legitimate.

Some famous con artists were at the top of their game—until they ultimately got caught. With impersonator Frank Abagnale and international career jewel thief Doris Payne, they are the epitome of the swindling game. By their own rights, they became experts at the art of the con and successfully evaded law enforcement for years. Two centuries earlier, Jeanne de la Motte, a cunning Frenchwoman, orchestrated a diamond necklace affair, which was one of several scandals that led to the French Revolution and helped destroy a monarchy.

Other significant confidence criminals, from forged artwork to fake manuscripts—Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born forger of Picassos and Matisses, who sold more than a thousand pieces to art galleries worldwide, and novelist Clifford Irving, who wrote a fabricated autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. These stories break down how grifters pass off their own works as those of masters and literary greats—but eventually they too were caught.

A con artist can execute remarkable expertise in their trickery, as with Czechoslovakian Victor Lustig, who in an underhanded plot sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal—not once, but twice.

Psychology of the Con

Each of these con artists have one thing in common: the power of persuasion to swindle their victims. The successful ones exhibit three similar characteristics—psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism—which have been referred to by psychologists as “dark” personality traits.

Those characteristics allow con artists to swindle people out of their money without feeling any remorse or guilt. Another thing most chiselers have in common are their egos. These extortion sales people boost the psyche of the perpetrators and make them feel even more confident, thus the description of the con has been termed as a confidence game.

Because cons often change their identities as part of their game, it can be pesky for law enforcement to catch them. Also, police may not even go after them when the crime has to do with bilking property and even money from their marks. That’s because the law can consider the loss a civil issue and not a legal one, unless it’s a corporate white-collar crime, such as those committed by Bernie Madoff, a former stockbroker, financier, and operator of a massive pyramid scheme that perpetrated the largest financial fraud in recent US history. Going after grifters is often of low status, more difficult to prove, and less likely to be prosecuted, with violent crimes and terrorist acts of higher priority.

That happenstance leads to a message for everyday people: Buyer beware.

Con Me Up

After reading Rattner’s op ed piece condemning the utter bullshit JOBS Act bill designed to turn Silicon Valley as the Wall Street of the West I found this article and immediately smelled the fresh smell of napalm in the morning.

A Sneaky Way to Deregulate
By STEVEN RATTNER

SLAPPING a catchy acronym like the JOBS Act on a piece of legislation makes it more difficult for politicians to oppose it — and indeed that’s what happened with the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act.

Unveiled a year ago by House Republican leaders, the proposal was rushed into law with large majorities just two months later; its provisions are gradually taking effect.

Its enticing acronym notwithstanding, the JOBS Act has little to do with employment; it’s a hodgepodge of provisions that together constitute the greatest loosening of securities regulation in modern history.

Most troublesome is the legalization of “crowd funding,” the ability of start-up companies to raise capital from small investors on the Internet. While such lightly regulated capital raising has existed for years, until now, “investors” could receive only trinkets and other items of small value, similar to the way public television raises funds. As soon as regulations required to implement the new rules are completed, people who invest money in start-ups through sites similar to Kickstarter will be able to receive a financial interest in the soliciting company, much like buying shares on the stock exchange. But the enterprises soliciting these funds will hardly be big corporations like Wal-Mart or Exxon; they will be small start-ups with no track records.

Picking winners among the many young companies seeking money is a tough business, even for the most sophisticated investors. Indeed, most professionally run venture funds lose money. For individuals, it’s pure folly. Buy a lottery ticket instead. Your chance of winning is likely to be higher.

Supporters say the amounts that can be lost will be limited. But an American earning $40,000 can still risk $2,000 per year.

Other major provisions of the JOBS Act are less terrifying but still problematic.

For the first time, private equity and hedge funds will be able to advertise — and thereby separate inexpert individuals from their savings. Putting money in these alternatives is yet another type of investing that Americans shouldn’t try at home. Until now, only a small percentage of Americans who qualified to invest this way (the law requires they have an income of $200,000 per year for an individual or a net worth of $1 million) did so. The possibility that advertising will lure more people to participate does no one any favors. Besides, these days, the most successful private equity and hedge funds can already raise all the capital they can efficiently manage without advertising.

So I’ll wager that most of this new advertising will come from firms that sophisticated institutional investors wouldn’t consider investing in. No wonder that the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose former chairwoman Mary Schapiro opposed the legislation, has been taking its time writing the regulations to implement these provisions.

At the least, the S.E.C. should insist on standardized disclosure for these funds, particularly of performance and fees, similar to what is required of mutual funds.

Already in effect is the section of the act that makes it easier for small companies (defined as less than $1 billion in annual revenues) to go public. For example, these companies no longer have to file as much financial information as their larger brethren. By some estimates, that could have benefited as many as 90 percent of recent I.P.O.’s, including such prominent names as LinkedIn, Zynga and Pandora Media.

More recently, companies as diverse as the Manchester United soccer team (founded in 1878) and dodgy Chinese businesses have taken advantage of the provisions.

To be sure, the Sarbanes-Oxley securities regulation law, passed in the wake of the dot-com meltdown and the Enron fraud, has overly burdened public companies and deterred initial public offerings.

But the JOBS Act’s update for “emerging growth companies” goes too far, particularly in relaxing the prohibition on research analysts to recommend stocks while their firms are underwriting them.

Although 25 Democratic senators and one independent, Bernie Sanders, opposed the legislation, it had broad support from business groups and from some research organizations like the Kauffman Foundation. The Obama administration signed on, convinced that the need to encourage start-up capital was great and that the legislation’s shortcomings could be fixed during the implementation phase.

The largest number of jobs likely to be created by the JOBS Act will be for lawyers needed to clean up the mess that it will create.

This Crowdfunding is  what Rattner warned about, the idea the small investors would be able to invest in start ups without proper vetting and regulation and in turn protection for the investor.   While Solyndra is held up as the model of poor Government vetting and funding well apply that logic to this idiots notion and realize that your nest egg went directly into the elites pockets sparing that middle man, aka Uncle Sam.

The writer of this piece is the Charlatan who finds the marks and then in this case instead of promising money he appeals to the do gooder while swindling you out of your money. Its an old con and frankly Silicon Valley has mastered  the Grifter act well under their guise of “saving the world.”  Utter garbage and farce. 

Honestly we need to move into Clean Energy and here is a notion the BILLIONS that American Corporations are stashing overseas and investing in high risk stock options versus actually hiring people, innovating with real businesses and raising workers salaries invest in these industries! Wow and then when they take off they can go through conventional means to IPO and in turn prove their longevity and net worth.  Sounds good to me.

This is more snake oil covered in the illusion of doing good.  Here is the way you can directly do so. Check the box on the utility bill to raise your rates so that they can invest and grow into alternative energy and let them build the grids and take the risks and you can still do good.

Crowdfunding Clean Energy

By DAVID BORNSTEIN

 If you wanted to get large numbers of people actively engaged in helping to solve global warming, how might you go about it? For years, the main approach in the environmental movement has been to sound the alarm bell and implore people to consume less, switch to green products, recycle, and speak up to companies and politicians. It hasn’t always been an easy sell. However, if the approach of a promising Oakland-based start-up takes hold, there may be another line of action that could become available to ordinary people: directly financing renewable energy. In January, a company called Mosaic, made a splash in the renewable energy world when it introduced a crowd-funding platform that makes it possible for small, non-accredited investors to earn interest financing clean energy projects. When Mosaic posted its first four investments online – solar projects offering 4.5 percent returns to investors who could participate with loans as small as $25 — the company’s co-founder, Billy Parish, thought it would take a month to raise the $313,000 required. Within 24 hours, 435 people had invested and the projects were sold out. The company had spent just $1,000 on marketing. All told, Mosaic has raised $1.1 million for a dozen solar projects to date. Now it is connecting with other solar developers to identify new projects for financing. More than 10,000 people have already signed on and are standing by to invest.

Mosaic Investors and partners at the Youth Employment Partnership ribbon cutting ceremony on Dec. 11. 2012, in East Oakland.A generation and a half after the first Earth Day, we may be witnessing the coming of age of solar power. Last year, when Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company floated an $850 million bond offering for the Topaz Solar Farm, in California, it was the first time a public bond offering for a U.S. photovoltaic power project had been deemed “investment grade.” The offering was oversubscribed by more than $400 million and the company is now planning a second round to raise potentially $1.265 billion more. And last month, it was reported that First Solar, a manufacturer of solar panels, had signed an agreement with the El Paso Electric Company to sell its power for less than half the cost of power from typical coal plants. In 2011, almost half of the 208 gigawatts of electric capacity added globally came from renewable power, primarily wind and solar, and almost half of the additional power capacity in the European Union came from solar alone.

A big reason is cost. Over the past five years, the price of photovoltaic panels has declined by about 80 percent. We’re used to hearing about Moore’s Law, which refers to the steady and predictable increases in power and decline in cost of integrated circuits. Swanson’s Law holds that each time global manufacturing capacity of photovoltaic cells doubles, the costs fall by 20 percent.

Crowdfunding holds promise for the developing world, where financing for renewable energy is hard to come by

From 1977 to 2013, the price per watt of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells dropped from about $77 per watt to 74 cents per watt. Couple that with another innovation — the spread of companies that lease, rather than sell, solar power systems – add in some tax incentives — and decentralized solar has become a viable option for many homeowners and businesses. This is a far cry from the time when buying a solar system meant paying upfront for 25 or 30 years of power.

If it seems far-fetched to imagine millions of Americans becoming mini energy producers, just look at Germany, where 51 percent of the country’s clean energy production is owned by individuals or farmers, while major utilities control just 6.5 percent of it.

One of the Mosaic financed systems now sits atop a 26,000-square-foot building in Oakland’s San Antonio neighborhood owned by the nonprofit Youth Employment Partnership, which provides education and workforce skills training to a thousand teenagers each year. YEP’s system, which cost about $265,000, was financed by a combination of its own funds, government and private grants, and a crowdfunded loan. Its utility bills have dropped by 85 percent. Because of the grants, YEP is leasing its system for 10 years and will have the ability to purchase it for a low price after that period. (Without subsidies, the lease would likely run for 20 or 25 years.) YEP’s monthly utility and lease outlays are less than before. “By year 10 we can own the system outright and then most of our power will be free,” explained its executive director, Michele Clark. “But what really matters is that it frees up money that we can use for our case management and mental health work.”

If electricity costs continue to rise – they have tripled since 1980 – the economics will prove more favorable. “If you buy solar, you fix your energy costs for the next 25 years or longer,” explains Marco Krapels, executive vice president of Rabobank, a major solar financier, who is a member of Mosaic’s board of directors. “You can have power independence. And it happens to be clean.”
There is another benefit, added Clark. The system aligns with YEP’s educational mission. “We have this great little computer program that shows us the electricity we’re producing,” she said. “We look at it on sunny days and see it at the top of the chart and discuss it. Then we take our students on field trips to the roof.”

Last June, Bloomberg New Energy Finance published a report estimating that the expected continuing surge in demand for solar systems over the next nine years in the United States would require $62 billion in new financing. That’s a big gap. Even though more than half of American adults say they are “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming and about a quarter of the nation’s rooftops are suitable for solar power installations, including two thirds of those in New York , only a small number of U.S. banks are involved in financing solar projects. Many lack the expertise to evaluate the risks; others have little interest in modest power projects. “Solar is still by and large an asset class that’s not well understood,” said Krapels, of Rabobank.

But peer-to-peer lenders like Prosper.com and Lending Club – once considered improbable businesses — have revealed new possibilities. Combined, they have brokered over $1.8 billion in loans, offering lower interest rates and higher returns than borrowers or lenders could get from banks.

 At the same time, crowdfunders like Kickstarter, RocketHub, Seedmatch and the aptly named Crowdfunder, have helped groups raise hundreds of millions of dollars for a multitude of projects and business ventures. Kiva has built a bridge that has allowed individuals to lend over $400 million to microfinance institutions. Now, we’re seeing the early application of this idea to clean energy, with Mosaic and others, including SunFunder and Milaap.

How many people will want to participate? How quickly could the pipeline of investments grow? How will the investments perform? All these are open questions. But other crowdfunders have solved them. Currently, one bottleneck is the time and expense of due diligence for each deal. Mosaic is a founding member of a working group called TruSolar which is developing standards to streamline this process and ensure project quality. Mosaic is also drawing on the experience of online business lenders like On Deck Capital and Kabbage, which leverage large data sets to evaluate lending risks cost effectively. “We’re building a portal for solar developers to submit project information electronically in an efficient manner that automates initial credit screening and analysis,” says Parish. “This will make the loan process much simpler, faster and more transparent for borrowers — and improve project quality for our investors.”

Another concern is panel quality, explains Conrad Burke, global marketing director for DuPont Photovoltaic Solutions, which is also a TruSolar member. As costs have plummeted, solar module manufacturers have had to fight for survival. “In such an overcapacity situation, corners are being cut,” he said. Some manufacturers have compromised on the quality of things like panel backsheets, which protect solar cells. “We’ve seen panels which are less than 10 years old deteriorating or failing,” he added. “You have companies which are two or three years old warrantying products for 25 years. We have to raise awareness about this. The industry can ill afford a black eye.”

All power systems fail at times, but if solar modules are not highly reliable over their warranty periods, the economic argument for their use is much weaker.

Crowdfunding holds particular promise for the developing world, where financing for renewable energy is even harder to come by — and where distributed solar power is an urgent need, observes Justin Guay, of the Sierra Club’s international climate program. The irony is that very poor people in the developing world who lack electricity pay far more for kerosene and candles than they would for solar energy. Over a decade, a poor family may spend $1,800 on these energy sources, five or six times what it would take to install a home solar system that could power lights, cellphones, computers, television, and so forth.

Today, with NGO, businesses and microfinance networks reaching into villages and shantytowns around the world, an infrastructure exists to deploy solar systems using a sustainable leasing business model. Just replacing kerosene — a fire hazard and contributor to pulmonary disease – with solar would yield enormous health benefits, reduce greenhouse gases, improve quality of life and expand economic and educational opportunities.

But the money needs to be fronted. “Large international financial organizations like the World Bank are not structured to do it,” says Guay. “Their bread and butter is to push out a huge coal plant or a hydro dam. If we’re looking at a distributed renewals future, crowdfunding is an exciting approach, particularly if it is coupled with the ability to invest through mobile phones.”

The biggest levers remain government policies. Domestically, if the U.S. government changed regulations around Real Estate Investment Trusts and Master Limited Partnerships (a bill recently introduced by Senator Chris Coons aims to do the latter), it could open up billions for renewable energy investments. Internationally, governments and multilaterals could reduce the perceived risk of solar investments through loan guarantees and other incentives.

But all that takes political will. Which gets back to the crowdsourcing ethos: let everyone participate in the solution and they will get more engaged. “Even if people invest $25, it helps them to think about energy in a completely new way,” says Parish. “They can be an energy producer, not just an energy consumer, and it will help them understand how our energy system works.”
“If we are going to solve this problem,” he adds, “We need to build a propositional movement, not just an oppositional movement. We’ll need to tap into people’s enlightened self interest.”