And Trump's plan to build a skyscraper on Australia's Gold Coast was nixed a month or two ago because his partner on it bailed because of its "toxic associations".
I simply don’t understand how American voters are fine with being robbed blind.
Many countries have far more corrupt administrations than the current U.S. one, but even in the most degenerate ones none of them are as open about it.
And it’s not just a political thing.
Consider how the Chinese owned Smithfield’s is polluting lakes and land all over the Midwest with their highly intensive (and incredibly cruel) pig farming that is causing high cancer and mortality rates for the people living there, and yet the locals tend to support whatever Smithfield wants.
Half of Albania is butchered like this, beaches and green being destroyed to make resorts for the tourists to come. Go see Dermi or Vuno and then go see Borsh how clean it is, with no excavations at all or resorts being build.
> Don't forget that resorts et al typically belong to international capital. What does the local economy get out of it?
Same goes for any natural resource. Oil, precious metals, water, etc. Globalization feeds this behavior, but that’s a conversation people don’t usually want to have
Most resorts secure favorable tax deals directly from the central governments before they invest, accompanied by public announcements in the media about success of government in attracting international investments.
So no tax the locals. During the construction phase there is some legitimate economy uplift (similar to datacenters). But after that nothing.
I challenge you to find a single example anywhere on earth where redistribution of foreign tax revenue significantly improved the economic standing of the existing general population.
"Big money" tends to extort the same sort of tax deals that American sports stadiums get: they get huge tax breaks and while the registers at the stadium look like they're charging sales tax, that money goes directly to the stadium owners, not the government. Sometimes these deals are called "special economic zone".
Tax revenue, local jobs, and the possiblity for entrepreneurs to build businesses around that possibility of tourists leaving the premise.
With all that being said, I still think that overreliance on tourism is bad for a place in principle. Those places fossilize, the wealth of tourists overwhelmes local culture, it will create wrong incentives, draw in junk vendors, pick-pocketers, and AirBnB vultures making life more miserable for the locals. One can also be certain that the local hospitality operators will try to pass the least possible amount to locals by finding even cheaper employees from god knows where.
such a stark contrast with all the hysteria over foreign tourists avoiding the US due to Trump that was posted here a few days ago. "Oh noes Trump is destroying the tourist economy!!!" vs. "only a few maids salary to clean up the tourist's shit"
We happened to be in Borsh beach around a week or so ago, and that will be a tourist wreck in 2 years. Multiple working sites, 70% of the beach already claimed by beds.
Quite laid-back in May / start of June, but I do not want to be there in the high season.
Every time you hear about some corpo or another getting to "play a role in the development of $nation" it's pretty much always going to be some kind of bullshit that will employ a lot of locals for shit wages to provide a product or service to residents of the Global North.
There are exceptions of course but the vast, vast, vast majority are tourist trapping and wealth extraction.
The resort would destroy lots and lots of species and nature:
"Conservationists describe the wider zone, the Pishe Poro-Narta protected landscape, as one of the Mediterranean's last largely intact coastal wetlands, home to flamingos, more than 200 migratory bird species, Mediterranean monk seals and nesting loggerhead sea turtles."
Protected environmental zone != normal tourist area. Crazy to post Fox News though, it is legally entertainment so has no obligation to report the facts.
> What is wrong with building a resort in Albania? OP's link is down but it looks like they're building a pretty normal resort in a normal tourist area. This is a very boring story
I'm not sure if you are trolling.
From the article:
> Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of Albania Land Development, the company that bought beachfront plots for a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, as national protests against the project entered their seventh consecutive day. The preventive seizure was ordered by SPAK, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, as part of a property-fraud investigation into how land titles in a protected coastal wetland were acquired and how the area was stripped of its protected status.
Furthermore.
> In 2024, the Albanian Parliament passed special legislation reclassifying Sazan and the Pishe Poro-Narta area to permit large-scale development, the move that made the strategic investor designation possible; opposition parties and environmental groups argued the changes were written to accommodate Kushner-linked investors. One administrator of Albania Land Development, Redi Struga, has reportedly been subject to searches.
And of course the old beaten down excuse.
> Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families, claimed the anti-corruption and land defence campaign was being pushed by opponents of Donald Trump.
The only people this is relevant to are Albanians. I don't expect an Albanian to know about data centers being built in Texas. Hell, I don't expect Michiganders to know about them.
I hate these rich motherfuckers so much. They are openly corrupt, and move through the world with impunity on a magic carpet of wealth. Not only must the individuals be stopped, but the systems that allow nonstate actors to wield effectively unlimited funds must be rebuilt.
The rich are getting too openly greedy and complacent again, they're slowly forgetting about history, can't wait to see how it pans out in the next decades.
Real estate, Crypto and AI make up the 3 legged stool of US investment (from my perspective).
In my area which is over 1/3 retired people this is where the majority of their investments seem to lie. Those who are simply relying on 401k or other investments are also at risk due to the lack of diversification. Since their investments are tied to those 3 things.
If any of the legs of the stool go out...the whole thing goes down.
All the great art should teach us that we can't take reaches to the grave, it's too bad that this is being forgotten.
Then again, may be they already figured out how to make their lives meaningfully longer. I often think what drives 80 year old Bidens and Trumps to live the stressful POTUS life.
And I can think of only one incentive. Weird thoughts, but otherwise the dots just don't connect.
Different people are driven by different things. Some people genuinely want to serve their nation and being a president is a huge honor to the family. You become part of history.
Others may be serving their own interests as it gives them access to all information.
This led to the greatest trolling of an individual ever when they deliberately stuck a windfarm directly off the coast of his new golf course. He's spent a couple of decades spending countless millions in losing a bunch of court cases, and of course, to this day, constantly moans to anyone who will list about "windmills".
As far as trolling goes, it's one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind.
unfortunately this trolling has caused trump to try to halt all large offshore wind projects in the United States in federal land grants. it's terrible.
> Scottish people formed a Tripping Up Trump Campaign to make it more difficult to transfer the title to the land, and hundreds of people bought small interests in Forbes' property and became co-owners.
Continued in another article[1]:
> When it emerged at the end of January 2011 that Queen guitarist Brian May had agreed to the use of the band's song "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a film highlighting the plight of the families, Trump appeared to deny in a media statement that there had ever been an eviction threat, declaring "we have no interest in compulsory purchase and have never applied for it."
The T family acts as everyone expected and warned, they are not stopping, and they are even accelerating. I'm not sure what is the conclusion from this.
This island was a Russian naval base in the cold war with hundreds of underground nuclear bunkers.
Kushner apparently wants to build a billionaire resort with the protections required to insulate billionaires from their actions. Maybe UAE is too dangerous now.
Here is another article. Try not to be put off by the Rothchild connections, they are mostly irrelevant and based on Kushner's own statements:
If things ever get bad enough that the wealthy need underground nuclear bunkers, the underground nuclear bunkers aren't going to be enough to protect them. The ordinary people who did the electrical, plumbing, security, etc. know where you are, and no level of security will protect you from an angry mob with nothing to lose.
> The ordinary people who did the electrical, plumbing, security, etc. know where you are, and no level of security will protect you from an angry mob with nothing to lose.
Governments around the world already keep many locations/facilities secret and hidden from the public.
They will simply arrest you, or worse, just kill you.
> Governments around the world already keep many locations/facilities secret and hidden from the public.
Those cold war bunkers only had one purpose: to keep high ranking government and military peeps alive just long enough (up to 2 weeks or so) to make sure that mutual destruction is actually 'assured'. They were not meant as some sort of cradle of a new civilization or as a safe haven to survive a nuclear war (because there would be no place to return to anyway).
The evidence so far hints more at Albania’s weak rule of law/property/environmental governance and ugly conflict-of-interest more than Kushner being part of some evil conspiracy.
There are 2 projects here. And there is a lot of missing details from both.
But what has happened before is that:
The government gives free/cheap/exclusive public land to someone to build apartments/villas. They sell these to whoever wants to buy before starting construction. At the end of construction, with the profits, they build nice hotels at the frontline and keep for themselves without investing any of their own money in anything.
So they will most likely build apartments in Narta, sell them to the populace, and keep Sazan for themselves as luxury resort.
Something worse than this has started happening for high rises too, where they start selling before getting the permit even. So they don't invest their own money even to get the initial permit to start building.
"Wetlands" is poorly understood by commenters in places like USA because there it's largely used as a bad-faith disingenuous prop by development prohibition interests or those seeking to use regulatory capture against smaller business / small land owners.
Very hard for the general public to gain things though.
It's too luxury, most likely will pay no taxes for years, you can import workers from elsewhere, etc etc.
It's not the first time this kind of thing happens in Albania and we've already seen results.
Normal people will just never be able to go there again. People in power will either get millions or 1+ free apartment/villa, or heavily discounted price (depends on how much power you have).
I was literally kitesurfing when they came and added fences to the road to block access to the beach.
The USA is currently run by oligarchs. They try to buy their way
into other countries via corruption. How much kickback did the
government of Albania get already? It is highly suspicious how
supportive they are of Trump.
Incompetent oligarchs. If you can't even successfully bribe the Albanian or Serbian government, you are just really bad at corruption. Those are (sadly) among the most corrupt countries in the world.
edit: the governments appear to be supportive, but obviously aren't as supportive as they could be. Probably taking the bribe and not doing as much as they could.
Unlike most places in Europe, America has never had a revolution where they deposed the ruling class and those with political power. Americans tell themselves they live in a free country with a government run by the people. It is increasingly obvious that that is a lie.
we regularly depose those with political power. In elections.
And the wealthy die or stop participating within around 30 yrs of becoming wealthy normally. And compete themselves across idiology. Soros, Koch, Musk and Moskowitz all have very different packages of political beliefs they advocate vs each other
I always point this out too. They had a war of independence, the main goal of which was so the elite slave owning class wouldn't have to pay tax. Yet they call it a revolution.
They have never had an actual revolution akin to French revolution and the July revolution.
except the courts are somewhat functional, and the law has a lot of pro-privacy and pro-consumer basis. It is not so simple as "lie" but, the clay feet of the idol are showing today.
YES! More of this. Such places and people are not for sale. What kind of sickos think they can just see a place and say "I've got money, these know-nothing-barefoot-fools will take our money and let us rape their lands!"?
And on top of that it's Trump kids, yeet them into the sea.
Mostly anti parasitic, all shared common traits between all the sociopaths in charge of big companies/institutions not my problem, it's a good line of defense I admit, but I fear it works less and less since people see through the bs more easily these days.
You may want to pick a broader range of samples for your examples then, since both Zuck and Kushner being Jewish and you choosing those two names specifically...
I think parent poster is implying that the language is directed at or about Kushner's Jewish ethnicity.
Which I don't think is the intent of anybody in this thread. We're just talking about them being privileged and rich.
I do think it's important to avoid accidental or deliberate anti-Semitism when talking here though. Epstein and Kushner being Jewish has zero to do with their vileness, but for a segment of the population it's all too easy to unconsciously (or worse, consciously) make a linkage between old vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Rothschilds or whatever.
Criticise a jewish person for something completely unrelated: infinite amount of green accounts created on the spot come in and start vaguely referencing "ThE DaRkEsT TiMe In HiStOrY".
It would indeed be surprising to hear people say this if you completely ignore the words and actions of the Epstein class and the overwhelming amount of pain and suffering they afflict on everyone else.
Out of curiosity, do you have a similar example of a Democrat doing something like this?
Most left leaning people I know aren’t exactly happy with Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading activities and are in full support of outlawing Congress from actively trading and are willing to hold Dems accountable for other unscrupulous actions.
This is off topic and I understand we’re not supposed to comment on such things, but was anyone else mystified by the decisions that went into the scroll progress bar up top (on mobile)? It seems to be two part, where part of it would accurately reflect your scroll state, while the other had some weird latency associated with it. And then it ended up hidden behind the top of page blur unless you scrolled very aggressively, to the point where the blur could not keep up.
It works for me. I didn't dismiss the first dickover, but did dismiss the second dickover. Scrolled all the way to the bottom smoothly (minus the pause for the second dickover).
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/17/serbia-trump...
Many countries have far more corrupt administrations than the current U.S. one, but even in the most degenerate ones none of them are as open about it.
And it’s not just a political thing.
Consider how the Chinese owned Smithfield’s is polluting lakes and land all over the Midwest with their highly intensive (and incredibly cruel) pig farming that is causing high cancer and mortality rates for the people living there, and yet the locals tend to support whatever Smithfield wants.
So what does the local economy get out of it? A few maids salary to clean up the tourist's shit?
Same goes for any natural resource. Oil, precious metals, water, etc. Globalization feeds this behavior, but that’s a conversation people don’t usually want to have
So no tax the locals. During the construction phase there is some legitimate economy uplift (similar to datacenters). But after that nothing.
With all that being said, I still think that overreliance on tourism is bad for a place in principle. Those places fossilize, the wealth of tourists overwhelmes local culture, it will create wrong incentives, draw in junk vendors, pick-pocketers, and AirBnB vultures making life more miserable for the locals. One can also be certain that the local hospitality operators will try to pass the least possible amount to locals by finding even cheaper employees from god knows where.
Quite laid-back in May / start of June, but I do not want to be there in the high season.
There are exceptions of course but the vast, vast, vast majority are tourist trapping and wealth extraction.
"Conservationists describe the wider zone, the Pishe Poro-Narta protected landscape, as one of the Mediterranean's last largely intact coastal wetlands, home to flamingos, more than 200 migratory bird species, Mediterranean monk seals and nesting loggerhead sea turtles."
I'm not sure if you are trolling.
From the article:
> Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of Albania Land Development, the company that bought beachfront plots for a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, as national protests against the project entered their seventh consecutive day. The preventive seizure was ordered by SPAK, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, as part of a property-fraud investigation into how land titles in a protected coastal wetland were acquired and how the area was stripped of its protected status.
Furthermore.
> In 2024, the Albanian Parliament passed special legislation reclassifying Sazan and the Pishe Poro-Narta area to permit large-scale development, the move that made the strategic investor designation possible; opposition parties and environmental groups argued the changes were written to accommodate Kushner-linked investors. One administrator of Albania Land Development, Redi Struga, has reportedly been subject to searches.
And of course the old beaten down excuse.
> Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families, claimed the anti-corruption and land defence campaign was being pushed by opponents of Donald Trump.
https://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article1196
Now her grandson is wrecking Europe.
https://www.npr.org/2018/05/04/560224531/trump-stories-kushn...
She was certainly a victim and a refugee, of which we have many today, most being denied admission to the US. Are those all legends too?
In my area which is over 1/3 retired people this is where the majority of their investments seem to lie. Those who are simply relying on 401k or other investments are also at risk due to the lack of diversification. Since their investments are tied to those 3 things.
If any of the legs of the stool go out...the whole thing goes down.
Then again, may be they already figured out how to make their lives meaningfully longer. I often think what drives 80 year old Bidens and Trumps to live the stressful POTUS life.
And I can think of only one incentive. Weird thoughts, but otherwise the dots just don't connect.
Others may be serving their own interests as it gives them access to all information.
Others may just want the power.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Forbes_(farmer)
As far as trolling goes, it's one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind.
1. Donald Trump's Ego Trip - lessons for the new Scotland (2011) https://andywightman.scot/docs/trumpreport_v1a.pdf
2. You've Been Trumped (2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr6efmndvps
> Scottish people formed a Tripping Up Trump Campaign to make it more difficult to transfer the title to the land, and hundreds of people bought small interests in Forbes' property and became co-owners.
Continued in another article[1]:
> When it emerged at the end of January 2011 that Queen guitarist Brian May had agreed to the use of the band's song "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a film highlighting the plight of the families, Trump appeared to deny in a media statement that there had ever been an eviction threat, declaring "we have no interest in compulsory purchase and have never applied for it."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Golf_Links...
Kushner apparently wants to build a billionaire resort with the protections required to insulate billionaires from their actions. Maybe UAE is too dangerous now.
Here is another article. Try not to be put off by the Rothchild connections, they are mostly irrelevant and based on Kushner's own statements:
https://tomselliott.substack.com/p/what-is-jared-kushner-act...
Governments around the world already keep many locations/facilities secret and hidden from the public.
They will simply arrest you, or worse, just kill you.
What’s your solution to that?
Those cold war bunkers only had one purpose: to keep high ranking government and military peeps alive just long enough (up to 2 weeks or so) to make sure that mutual destruction is actually 'assured'. They were not meant as some sort of cradle of a new civilization or as a safe haven to survive a nuclear war (because there would be no place to return to anyway).
Look at what happened to Ceaușescu for example. He went from being confident in his rule to dead 24 hours later.
For that matter, what did you think gun control was for, exactly?
Source: I live there. It's very easy to tell if you do.
But what has happened before is that:
The government gives free/cheap/exclusive public land to someone to build apartments/villas. They sell these to whoever wants to buy before starting construction. At the end of construction, with the profits, they build nice hotels at the frontline and keep for themselves without investing any of their own money in anything.
So they will most likely build apartments in Narta, sell them to the populace, and keep Sazan for themselves as luxury resort.
Something worse than this has started happening for high rises too, where they start selling before getting the permit even. So they don't invest their own money even to get the initial permit to start building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Albanian_civil_unrest
It's too luxury, most likely will pay no taxes for years, you can import workers from elsewhere, etc etc.
It's not the first time this kind of thing happens in Albania and we've already seen results.
Normal people will just never be able to go there again. People in power will either get millions or 1+ free apartment/villa, or heavily discounted price (depends on how much power you have).
I was literally kitesurfing when they came and added fences to the road to block access to the beach.
(Or if you prefer because you are unable to compute that, the price is upfront $70,000 trillion (2025 prices) - cash only)
What if we just made a strong middle class? Made sure they had a LOT more money? Then they could just buy more stuff and services.
In the past the wealthy families would fund building churches, hospitals, housing for poor.
Nowadays' oligarchs aren't that kind.
edit: the governments appear to be supportive, but obviously aren't as supportive as they could be. Probably taking the bribe and not doing as much as they could.
Which backfired after Trump won twice in US. But it's just business.
And the wealthy die or stop participating within around 30 yrs of becoming wealthy normally. And compete themselves across idiology. Soros, Koch, Musk and Moskowitz all have very different packages of political beliefs they advocate vs each other
They have never had an actual revolution akin to French revolution and the July revolution.
And on top of that it's Trump kids, yeet them into the sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_(KMFDM_album)
(Judging from the lyrics, there’s a reason they went with orange.)
Concerns can be raised.
I emphatically disagree.
However, there was widespread vilification of cephalopods on all sides of multiple wars during that time period:
https://neverwasmag.com/2017/08/the-octopus-in-political-car...
(To be clear, I don’t hate any sea creatures.)
Gee, I wonder what could be happening that's similar to that.
Which I don't think is the intent of anybody in this thread. We're just talking about them being privileged and rich.
I do think it's important to avoid accidental or deliberate anti-Semitism when talking here though. Epstein and Kushner being Jewish has zero to do with their vileness, but for a segment of the population it's all too easy to unconsciously (or worse, consciously) make a linkage between old vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Rothschilds or whatever.
Criticise a jewish person for something completely unrelated: infinite amount of green accounts created on the spot come in and start vaguely referencing "ThE DaRkEsT TiMe In HiStOrY".
Both sides SHOULD BE calling out those using the office to enrich themselves. Also, looking at their own party.
We cannot go forward as a nation when people rally up behind their party and only see the issues with the other party.
You have to be blind not to see the crypto grift from the current admin. No republican or democrat has ever done that before.
Most left leaning people I know aren’t exactly happy with Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading activities and are in full support of outlawing Congress from actively trading and are willing to hold Dems accountable for other unscrupulous actions.