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from AlterNet Website
We finally have the answer, and you're not going to like it:
The super-wealthy are already building their first floating castle, a billion-dollar-plus luxury liner that offers permanent multimillion-dollar housing with the best protection of all:
The first such floating castle has been christened the "Utopia" - the South Korean firm Samsung has been contracted to build the $1.1 billion ship, due to be launched in 2013.
Already orders are coming in to buy one of the Utopia's 200 or so mansions for sale - which range in price from about $4 million for the smallest condos to over $26 million for 6,600 square-foot "estates."
The largest mansion is a whopping 40,000 square
feet, and sells for $160 million.
At nearly 1,000 feet, the Utopia is almost as
long as a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
Since they’ve grown so rich off of America, they have enough spare change to fund projects like the Seasteading Institute, run by Milton Friedman's grandson, Patri Friedman, and financed by the bizarre right-wing PayPal founder, Peter Thiel.
It couldn't have come a moment sooner for Milton Friedman's grandson, who was best known until recently for running a grotesque advice blog for married swingers, PUA4LTR (Pick Up Advice For Long-Term Relationships).
Actually, Patri Friedman ran that pick-up advice blog with his wife - the two of them are apparent big-time cyber-swingers, apparently - posting blog entries saying things like,
Both Thiel and Milton Friedman's grandson see democracy as the enemy - last year, Thiel wrote,
Both published their anti-democracy proclamations in the same billionaire-Koch-family-funded outlet, Cato Unbound, one of the oldest billionaire-fed libertarian welfare dispensaries.
Friedman's answer for Thiel's democracy problem is to build offshore libertarian pod-fortresses where the libertarian way rules.
It's probably better for everyone if Milton
Friedman's grandson and Peter Thiel leave us forever for their libertarian
ocean lair - Thiel believes that America went down the tubes ever since it
gave women the right to vote, and he was
ousted as the sponsor of accused felon
James O'Keefe's smear videos that brought
ACORN to ruin.
Frontier Group, was founded by some of
the same big names from the notorious Carlyle Group - the private equity
firm that brought together right-wing oligarchs like
George H. W. Bush and other top American officials
with their billionaire pals in Saudi Arabia like the Bin Laden family,
who together raked in enormous profits thanks to the
War
on Terror that their kids Dubya and Osama launched.
Carlucci ran the Carlyle Group as its chairman from 1989 through 2005, right around the time that the wars started going undeniably bad, and floating castles started to look like a viable plan.
But Carlucci's past is much weirder and scarier than most of us care to know:
***
I'll get into Carlucci's partners in the Frontier Group in a moment, but first, let's reacquaint ourselves with Frank Carlucci.
From an early age, Carlucci learned the importance of getting to know the right people in the right places. He studied at Princeton in the mid-1950s, where as luck should have it, Carlucci roomed with Donald Rumsfeld.
Both Carlucci and Rumsfeld shared a passion for Greco-Roman wrestling at Princeton, and both went on to serve in the Navy after Princeton.
Their paths would split and merge several times
over the next few decades, even as they remained close personal friends
throughout their lives. In the late 1950s, Carlucci briefly served as an
executive at a lingerie manufacturer, Jantzen (the Victoria's Secret
of its day), but quickly left to join the State Department.
Of all the European colonies in Africa, Congo suffered perhaps the worst, at least that we know about:
All of this was done in order to strip the Congo
of its lucrative rubber, ivory, and later, precious metals, as quickly as
possible, and send the riches back to Belgium.
Unfortunately for the Congo, America didn't like way they voted - so two months after Patrice Lumumba was elected president, he was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup, taken out into the jungle, murdered, chopped into little pieces with a hacksaw, and then dissolved in sulfuric acid.
Carlucci has been accused of green-lighting
Lumumba's assassination by
multiple investigative reporters.
The first thing they did upon taking control of the OEO was conduct a purge of "subversives" firing up to a quarter of the staff.
In 1974, Carlucci was named ambassador to
Portugal just in time for the overthrow of the dictatorship -
Carlucci saw to it that the communists who led the overthrow were themselves
overthrown by IMF-friendly "moderate" socialists, and a few years later, he
was back in Washington serving as the number two man in the CIA under
Carter.
In 1981, Reagan named him deputy Defense Secretary; Carlucci left in 1983 to head up Sears World Trade, a trading company involved in shady arms deals that was once described by Fortune magazine as a front for US intelligence ops.
Once that
collapsed, Carlucci moved back to the Reagan Administration as National
Security Advisor and then Defense Secretary.
Carlucci may be the scariest of the Frontier Group bunch building the floating castles, but he's among his kind.
Other Carlyle Group directors who joined Carlucci at Frontier include:
Riggs Bank became one of those dark unsolved mysteries of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror.
After the attacks on 9/11, the FBI discovered that Saudi government officials used accounts at Riggs bank to wire funds to at least two known associates of the Saudi hijackers who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Riggs was also implicated in the Britain-Saudi $3 billion bribery scandal, in which British Aerospace bribes were wired through Riggs accounts to Saudi officials in return for lucrative contracts. One of Riggs bank's top executives was Jonathan Bush, the brother of George H. W. Bush, after Riggs bought out Jonathan Bush's bank in 1997, and appointed him as a director.
In 2005, with Riggs embroiled in
investigations and scandals - Riggs pled guilty to money laundering
Augusto Pinochet's stolen funds, and the funds of various Equatorial
Guinea officials - it was taken over by PNC bank, with the approval of
Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Even after the Washington Post revealed that
Riggs' billionaire chairman flew Greenspan's wife, MSNBC anchor Andrea
Mitchell, on the company jet.
Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pang embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from his private equity firm PEMGroup.
Pang claimed he was investing money in "Dead Peasants Insurance" (life insurance policies for people considered likely to die), but in secret, Pang confided to PEMGroup's ex-president that he ran it as a Ponzi scheme.
That sparked a fresh FBI investigation into Danny Pang's crimes - which led back to the unsolved murder of his wife, Janie Louise Pang, a 33-year-old ex-stripper who was shot to death execution style in their Irvine, California home in 1997, the same year Pang was accused of embezzling three million dollars from another fund he worked at.
There was plenty of reason to suspect Danny Pang of murdering his wife:
She'd had him tailed by a private detective who discovered Danny holding hands with another woman shortly before she was murdered.
Danny had known ties to the Taiwanese Triad
mob, he took the fifth and refused to cooperate in the murder trial, and
reportedly threatened Janie's friends after her murder, demanding to know
what Janie told them about his business activities.
Somehow, the trial ended with a hung jury, and Danny Pang went on to join Frank Carlucci and the Boy Scouts presidents to start building the world's first billion-dollar floating castle to spirit away all that stolen money in luxury.
But Pang was apparently too careless for them.
He was ousted last spring in the Wall Street Journal, and in
September 2009, Danny Pang was found dead of unknown causes in his
Newport Beach home.
Meanwhile, plans to launch the Utopia are moving ahead on schedule.
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