'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns
abc7news.comSetting aside the national security question, more broadly it's pretty insane that the USA lets companies hide who owns/controls them. When you decide to hang out your shingle and profit at the expense of the general public, I would say the general public has a genuine right to know who you are.
Reminds me of how Disney used aliases and codenames and shell companies and secretive ownership structures to buy up all the land for Disney World in Florida[1], so that sellers didn't know who was behind it. This should be illegal.
1: https://www.wesh.com/article/disney-world-beginnings/3780786...
My uncle was driving from Miami to Pennsylvania and saw the building activity. He thought it was more NASA building and put together a syndicate to buy as much land as possible. Disney bought his first plot and he turned around and bought the more as close as possible. He didn't need to know what was going.
The USA was founded on the use of capital and I'm always shocked how deep it runs including this anonymity.
found this article
That article is more or less accurate but I have to add this story about him from a funeral late in life.
Standing around not knowing what to talk about he looked down at his tie. He started talking about how much the tie cost. This launched a story about the first time he had to buy an expensive tie when he was young to make an impression. He reflected on the luxury he currently enjoyed of not having to buy an expensive tie.
I am also an advocate for transparency of ownership of companies, but that Disney example seems like more of a case against transparency than for it?
Why should Disney be price gouged in that circumstance?
By your logic, insider trading would be just fine.
For a market to function properly, information pertinent to traded value has to flow freely. The more you stifle that, the more rigged the market. Essentially, you sustain a monopoly that way.
Of course, people in possession of such "insider information" believe themselves in the right to profit from it. But that perspective is obviously biased and reveals a fundamental conflict between public good and private ownership. From the public perspective, the market works best when monopolies are dissolved quickly.
Land is a tough one though because the information that person x is buying it to amalgamate the land for some purpose lets the remaining land holders abuse the market power of being the hold outs for further gain. The problem is the piecemeal nature of accumulating the land for a project means you have market power abuse issues on both sides and secrecy alleviates some of that from the buyer side.
In the US (but not necessarily other jurisdictions), insider trading laws are not there to protect the broader market, but to protect other shareholders.
There is no assumption that you can’t trade on knowledge unavailable to the rest of the market just not information that should be available to other shareholders but isn’t.
It’s not about a working market it’s about preventing you from stealing from other people.
Lots of economists think insider trading should be legal, precisely because it would make the market more transparent, not less.
Lots of economists are clearly wrong, as mutually excluding statements cannot be simultaneously true. To find out which side is which, you can employ simple logic.
If you sustain a profitable information imbalance, you prevent the market from reaching a more efficient state. You steal from everybody else that way. And incur opportunity costs that will dwarf any profits made. Not necessarily on a short-term personal level, certainly on a societal one in the long run.
People have surprising difficulties understanding, they are that society.
> Lots of economists are clearly wrong, as mutually excluding statements cannot be simultaneously true. To find out which side is which, you can employ simple logic
The world isn't black and white, and nearly zero things as complex as pros and cons of allowing insider trading can be reduced to naive boolean logic.
It is a fact for a long time a lot of economists, perhaps even a majority, are for insider trading because it provides signal to markets and pricing quicker than only allowing investors to discover problems on a quarterly clock-tick, which results in a lot more damage from asset floodgates instead of smoother transitions.
Ever read any published paper on the topic? Use Google scholar, you'll find useful knowledge there.
The whole premise of price discovery is that participants in the market profit from information imbalances. The profit motive is the incentive for people to expend effort to generate and then, through price signals, disseminate information.
No it isn't. In neoclassical economics there are no information imbalances. Everyone has access to perfect information and yet prices are formed and updated anyway.
Insider Trading is just fine.
No, it's really not.
If it were, shell games would be great as well? One like the other is simply fraud. You exploit others' lack of insight.
Doing so is unethical due to the implications it would have on a societal level if it were condoned. In particular, you likely imagine yourself regularly ending up on the better end of the bargain. You are wildly mistaken.
Insider Trading is just fine because it allows the market to function.
If you don't want to participate in it you don't have to, but why should other suffer because of your moral hangups about other people making money?
Why should Disney be price gouged in that circumstance?
Because they have money and they're trying to buy out the whole market. This reads like a billionaire sobbing about not having access to a senior discount at the thrift store.
That place was absolutely nothing before Disney developed it. The land was worth exactly what Disney paid for it. And there was no guarantee that it would turn into what it is now. We reward business for taking risks with their money. Disney took an immense amount of it, an absolutely outlandish amount of it. They poured money into that swamp. All on the bet that people would pay through the nose to see Mickey.
I'm not complaining about Disney making money off their investment. I'm saying that if a large company wants to make such an investment, it shouldn't dissemble by hiding behind front companies.
They wouldn't have gotten a fair price otherwise.
Sure they would. Fair isn't some objective measure, it's what the market decides. If multiple market participants see that one player is trying to corner the market, raising their price is fair. It can equally be argued that those swampland owners bought the land in the first place because they had a vision that it could one day host a unique commercial enterprise.
If your business strategy depends on deceiving people, what does that make you?
> It can equally be argued that those swampland owners bought the land in the first place because they had a vision that it could one day host a unique commercial enterprise.
Heh. On swampland? The amount of money you need to do anything with it is just huge. They bought the land for exactly what others were willing to sell it for. Nothing more, nothing less. If they thought it was worth more, they would have held out for more.
And they made a huge commercial success out of it, as you originally pointed out. None of which is responsive the point that one should not engage in misrepresentation and deception, which undermine the competitive function of markets.
They would have realised it was worth more if the true demand wasn’t obfuscated.
As if any negotiating business isn’t “deceitful”.
You’re basically arguing for discrimination to be legal.
It isn't. I can ask for what I want in a negotiation and accept or reject counter-offers, as can my counterparty. I've never set out to deceive someone in such a situation. I don't know why you're trying to equate Disney with some downtrodden minority, but it's not very persuasive.
The laws are in place in part because of discrimination. It happens to be Disney in this case.
You confirmed that you’re dishonest by omission in your example. The fact that a counteroffer exists shows that it’s not implied you were forthwith with the price/value. Making/receiving a counteroffer implies that there was deceit, it’s just culturally acceptable deceit. If negotiations were completely honest, there would never be a counteroffer. Some Native American tribes were known for this sort of negotiation where the bottom line is stated and then accepted or rejected. They were often offended, by the implied dishonesty, by European’s counteroffers.
Extended to this situation, hiding an identity because it affects the business decisions of the other party is no different. (And I won’t continue the discussion if you want to defend your assertion that Disney is morally wrong here for being dishonest by omission.)
Logic is not your strong point.
I only engaged you out of an interest in opening and expanding my viewpoint. (Just stating my perspective with no intention of offending:) I went into this under the assumption that you are jealous of rich folk and have a misplaced sense of entitlement. You’ve failed to change my mind. I’m not saying that’s necessarily true, please don’t be offended; you’ve just done nothing to convince me otherwise and’ve left me with a stronger sense that I’m correct. Consider that, from the standpoint of opposing your argument, I have no reason to believe otherwise.
That being said, my views aren’t your problem. I’m asking for help understanding an alternative look on things and giving you the benefit of the doubt that you aren’t immature.
You’ve done nothing to back up your stance. By all means, feel free to provide a breakdown of your argument in the context of my point regarding deceit. I’m genuinely interested. The discrimination aspect of the discussion could use some research and, ultimately, is only a sideshow to the concept of dishonesty in business (and can be disregarded). As far as the logic of the “deceit” portion, there is a leap of faith in extending the deceit of basic haggling/negotiation to hiding one’s identity. As I said before, if we differ in this belief, there’s no reconciling. Otherwise, my logic is rock solid.
To clarify my point with anecdote: I recently negotiated the purchase of a car; at no point did I practice deceit. I simply stated the price I was looking for and then negotiated to lower the price by pitting sellers against each other. Regarding deceit, I’m referring to what is more along the lines of “haggling” — an attempt is made to get a better deal on a purchase/sale than the bottom line of what you are willing to offer. This haggling would be present in Disney’s purchase of the land where there are no other current buyers for the seller to pit against Disney.
I just have to point out Disney was paying top dollar for swamp land. The whole deal worked because Florida and Disney invented a public private partnership based on Reedy Creek.
I’m not 100% sure but I believe the model is what birthed HOA and Gated communities.
Permitting certain freedoms made swamp land more valuable.
If a company, not just Disney, is buying large swaths of land specifically to develop it, that makes the land more valuable.
If a company is going to great lengths to trick sellers into thinking it’s not being bought up for development, that’s deceit and a de facto admission you know the land is more valuable because of the comps you are engaging in
Price gouged? Don't you mean, fair market value? Price is always contingent based on the information shared between the buyer and seller.
No one would call selling a rare misprint 1978 US Quarter to a collector for $45,000 instead of 25 cents price gouging. (Maybe you would, I don't know what the going rate is. But this is literally an eBay auction price from a google search just now, so let's just say that it's not an exorbitant price.)
> Price gouged? Don't you mean, fair market value? Price is always contingent based on the information shared between the buyer and seller.
Since when? Buying and selling anything is always a game of imperfect information.
There’s nothing special about the buyer being a large corporation or the item being land.
And shouldn't you support having as much information be available as possible, or do you want people to play games and try to hide info to raise prices on people?
You've got a parcel of land. You are farming on it or renting it or doing something which generates income. Because of that, you discount your future cashflows and determine it is worth X. Disney comes along and estimates that with what they are going to do the land is worth Y, which is significantly higher than X.
If the land trades for any value between X and Y, you are both made better off by the trade.
There is nothing wrong with you trying to capture as much of Y-X as you can, similarly there is nothing wrong with Disney trying to capture as much as they can. Neither of you are "owed" the money and there is no such thing as an objectively "fair" price.
> And shouldn't you support having as much information be available as possible,
Nope. And arbitrary or subjective standards like that are impossible to enforce anyway.
> or do you want people to play games and try to hide info to raise prices on people?
The example cited is the reverse with the price being lower than would be demanded if the seller knew the buyer had fat pockets.
In either case, caveat emptor[1] (or in this case, caveat venditor).
Caveat emptor is a pretty terrible way to run a society. I'd argue if you deliberately misrepresent something as basic as who you are in a transaction in order to deceive your counterparty, that should be fraud.
Discrimination is also a a pretty terrible way to run a society.
It's not something that needs a uniform solution. Every buyer and seller can decide how much information they want and the price they want.
Why are you encouraging imperfect information? Aren't you a fan of efficient market based solutions?
Why should the sellers be shortchanged?
If the increase in value of the sellers' land is wholly due to Disney's development of its land nearby, the sellers would simply be benefiting from a positive externality created by Disney. Thus it would be Disney being shortchanged if it was unable to capture the value of that externality.
From an efficiency standpoint it is also preferable for the developer to capture the value, as naturally that increases incentives for development.
Is it okay for the buyer to lie, but not okay for the seller to ask for the truth and adjust their price accordingly? This 'anything goes' market ideology is the same framework that leads us to deceptive subscription systems, anti patterns etc. Deceiving people to make a buck is shitty behavior.
I’m pretty shocked by the whole “profiting from a deceptive transaction is ok if the counterparty believes you” attitude here. I guess I expected more out of HN. I feel like I’d have to keep my hand on my wallet and my eyes over my shoulder if I ever visited any of these guys’ businesses.
HN has for a long time (longer than I've been here) had a strong libertarian streak, and like all libertarians they always seem to believe they're the ones who would come out on top in anarchy despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
From an efficiency standpoint it is preferable for a Land Value Tax to incentivize selling to whoever will put the property to best use.
> If the increase in value of the sellers' land is wholly due to Disney's development of its land nearby, the sellers would simply be benefiting from a positive externality created by Disney
Isn't that true of any price increase due to increased demand? It seems like you're saying a seller shouldn't be allowed to raise their prices as demand increases, because they'd simply be benefiting from a positive externality created by the buyer.
Nobody was short changed. The fair price is what a buyer and seller agreed to unless someone provided false information.
The word "no" is a complete answer to a request for more information.
That’s true only if both parties have perfect information, which is of course why Disney went to great lengths to prevent that.
There would be no such thing as fraud if “accepted transaction == definitionally fair.”
Perfect information has nothing to do with fair
There's a difference between false information and no information.
False information like
Q: Who is buying this land?
A: XYZ Shell Corp (no connection to who is actually effectively buying and coming into control of this land)?
Obviously your argument will be "it's not false that XYZ Shell Corp is buying it," and sure, but it's obviously misleading in a way that affects the transaction, as it is specifically designed to do.
I don't even think it's misleading. You don't know what XYZ show Corp does or will do with the land. It's a mystery not a deception.
On the other hand, if the buyer is called XYZ Fun Center and tells you that they're going to put in a nonprofit for Orphans, that would be deception.
It all comes back to the idea that saying I won't tell you what I'm going to do with the purchase is not a lie. It's perfectly honest
I'd say the primary concern is not with the purchasing party exercising their right not to disclose their intent post-sale. It's that they're intentionally masking their identity to prevent unwelcome influence on the transaction (i.e. If you know I'm rich, you're going to jack up the price.)
I think the argument is really over whether parties on either side are entitled to privacy/anonymity. The answer seems to be 'yes' in the form of typically legal shell corps, anonymous LLCs, and the like.
I agree that the heart it's about privacy, and what compelling reason we would have as a society that would supersede privacy.
I don't think the idea that benefiting one party's negotiation is such a compelling interest. In the case of Disney, it sounds good because it benefits the perceived Underdog, but It can just as easily cut the other way, especially if you extended to how bad you want something as some people in the thread advocate.
Maybe you want to buy a specific house cuz it's next to the Medical Center where you get treatment. That would probably influence how much you're willing to pay.
It's not about fairness, it's about letting markets work properly, reaching a market-clearing price that maximizes total welfare.
It has everything to do with price, however — and, therefore, "fair price".
Define fair price?
Fair prices when a buyer and seller agreed to as long as no one's lying. The fair price has nothing to do with how much money the buyer or seller make more lose.
When I read your comment above, I wondered if you'd gotten here by defining "fair" circularly.
And... yep.
Nothing circular. It's just a definition.
I think consent and honesty make something Fair. Nobody has refuted this and The only other counter argument I've seen is that full disclosure would mean the seller gets more money. What is getting more money have to do with fair.?
You're taking the very much not-universally-shared position that concealing something you know would make a big difference counts as "honest".
[EDIT] I retract the "circular" claim—you're right that it's not that, it's the definitions of "lying" and "honest" that are making the difference.
I think you succinctly summed up the Crux of it. The kind of begs the question of what information is relevant. When I apply for a job, I certainly don't tell the recruiter the minimum salary I would accept. When I negotiate for a house, I don't tell them my maximum theoretical offer. These information asymmetries obviously benefit me at their expense.
When I buy a 20 cent bolt for my car, I don't tell them that it's worth $20,000 to me because my car won't run without it
Free market?
> it's pretty insane that the USA lets companies hide who owns/controls them.
There's sadly been a move also in Europe to make it impossible for the public to learn who really owns a company[1]
Same in the Uk. Anyone can set up a company for pennies. So many expensive homes in London owned by shell companies. The government tried to introduce a law to make the ownership more transparent. Didn’t really work.
> The government tried to introduce a law to make the ownership more transparent. Didn’t really work.
I mean, it's not like they were going to expose their own nefarious dealings...
> When you decide to hang out your shingle and profit at the expense of the general public
Whoa whoa whoa, you can't just assume that profits come at the expense of the public! There are plenty of businesses that provide valuable goods and services for which I am happy to pay their profit margin, because the value they are providing to me is at least that amount. There are entire companies that spend their entire day coordinating shipments of food for me, including out-of-season fruit and fruits and vegetables unavailable in my location. There are companies that have invested in hideously expensive fabs and detailed technical knowledge to bring my inexpensive microchips that make my first computer look glacially slow. I happily pay Apple's profit margin because I get great hardware that looks elegant and has an operating system that is both Unix and doesn't require me to futz with it. The list goes on. This Marxist idea that companies are inherently exploitative is just incorrect and unhelpful. (That doesn't mean that everything is necessarily great, though, just that it does not take into account the other, very real side. It's not like a society built on companies = exploitative has ever worked in the real world.)
>Over a veto of President Trump, on January 1, 2021, the Corporate Transparency Act (“CTA”) went into effect as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (“NDAA”). The CTA, many years in the making, introduces major changes to transparency requirements of entities registered in the United States. No longer can anonymous shell companies, limited liability companies, and the like hide the identities of their owners.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/02/04/the-end-of-the-an...
> it's pretty insane that the USA lets companies hide who owns/controls them
1. Anonymous LLCs and Trusts are how many people protect their privacy. Not just Disney, but regular people. The only things "insane" here are those who want to strip away that option.
2. If you break the law, your anonymity can and will be stripped. There are processes for this.
3. There is a zero percent chance that the NSA doesn't have access to these records, if "national security" is a concern.
Are there any other concerns, other than your stanch belief that your nose has an absolute God-given right to be in everyone else's business?
> the general public has a genuine right to know who you are
Why? If there are legitimate issues, you can always be dragged into court, or at least your business can be boycotted and suffer bad PR etc.
Being forced to put your home address just so every whacko with internet access can threaten your children, who had no choice in your business decisions, sounds like just a terrible idea.
Try making a false claim against yourself on r/RBI with dox and report back.
> Why? If there are legitimate issues, you can always be dragged into court,
One of the major reasons for concealing who the real owner is of, well, anything is to conceal legitimate issues.
> or at least your business can be boycotted and suffer bad PR etc.
Not if you are concealing ownership to separate an act from the business entity that you would be concerned with retaliation against.
What kind of retaliation do you want? I'm saying the company can suffer or go bust, and civil and criminal proceedings can be enacted that can pierce the veil.
I'm saying the privacy measures are to protect against extralegal vigilante retaliation.
There are cases where I think corporate anonymity protects people. If you start a business in something that is targeted for harassment, I think you should be able to protect your identity. The downside of this is the risk of national security threats. But I feel strongly for people who don't want to be targeted for abuse.
Why does "the general public" (whatever that means) have the right to the identity of land buyers?
They don't let you hide it from the IRS, only the general public.
https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/201905210181 says a guy named Thomas Mather was a director. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/centralvalley/board_decisions... is some government application by Flannery that also has his name on it. Looks like this was covered in 2019: https://www.thereporter.com/2019/07/05/large-rural-land-purc...
If Mather is not the true owner, it would take the government five seconds to figure out who actually owned it by just finding out who's paying their lawyers (Skadden!) in the current litigation they are involved in.
Lawyers aren't allowed to identify their clients if the identities of their clients are unknown. It's part of attorney-client privilege.
Skadden has made use of in the past to hide their work for Putin affiliates. It's the reason that Skadden is the largest firm by revenue despite the lackluster quality of their work. (For an example of how bad Skadden is at the practice of law, see the clusterfuck that is the Twitter termination litigation.)
Mere identity is not usually covered under attorney-client privilege, I’m not sure why you think it would be.
Here’s a semi-recent analysis of the situation.
https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2020/05/fifth...
I’m not sure why you think it would be.
Probably because it is confidential and most people, and many attorneys, don’t understand that privilege and confidentiality are terms of art with distinct meanings.
You’re confusing privilege with confidentiality.
From YKW, and squares with my very foggy recollection from PR.
—
Sure, I'll outline some key differences and similarities between privilege and confidentiality in the context of legal practice, specifically regarding client identification.
*Privilege*
1. Privilege is a legal concept that protects certain communications between an attorney and their client from being disclosed in legal proceedings.
2. It can be waived by the client, and there are certain exceptions to privilege, such as the crime-fraud exception.
3. However, the scope of privilege is generally limited to the content of communications themselves and doesn't typically extend to information about the client's identity, except in rare circumstances where the disclosure of the client's identity would reveal the substance of a confidential communication.
*Confidentiality*
1. Confidentiality, on the other hand, is a professional ethical obligation that requires lawyers to keep information related to the representation of a client secret, unless the client gives informed consent or the disclosure is impliedly authorized to carry out the representation.
2. This duty of confidentiality is broader than privilege and may cover information the lawyer learned from any source about the client, including the client's identity in many circumstances.
3. Unlike privilege, a breach of confidentiality can lead to professional sanctions for the lawyer, but it may not provide the same protections from disclosure in legal proceedings.
*Comparison and Contrast*
1. Both privilege and confidentiality are essential to ensure the free flow of information between a lawyer and their client, fostering trust in the lawyer-client relationship. They both serve to protect the client's interests.
2. However, privilege is a legal concept subject to legal exceptions and waivers, and it protects from forced disclosure in court, while confidentiality is a broader ethical duty that extends beyond the courtroom.
3. In most cases, the identity of a client isn't protected by privilege, but it may be covered by the duty of confidentiality depending on the context. If revealing the client's identity could harm the client or betray a confidence, then the lawyer has a duty to keep that information confidential.
This is a simplified summary and these concepts can get complicated in real-life situations. Always consider local and jurisdiction-specific rules and case law when dealing with privilege and confidentiality.
Yeah, I actually meant confidentiality. I typed that out too quickly and never came back to update the comment.
Presumably the company pays the lawyers?
This is an incredibly silly story. Everything about this ownership is in public records. Flannery Assoc. has been openly buying land in this are for over 5 years and have spent over a billion dollars and sued dozens of parties. Everyone knows what they are doing. They want to lease the land for energy infrastructure.
You got to wonder if this is the PR component of a campaign to stop new energy development in the US. Another component is the political theater. Some municipalities are passing ordinances preventing Solar, for example, Eloy AZ would remove water rights to farmers who install solar on their property [1].
[1] https://www.pinalcentral.com/eloy_enterprise/commentary-tell...
Is this all part of the current "culture war" or why would you shoot yourself in the foot like this?
who is the ‘you’ in your question?
I mean jurisdictions that ban use of what could be considered "green" technology
Ah, well they do that because of dependence on or influence of some key politician or industry in my experience.
A county where all the jobs are based on Coal mining better have a pretty good and realistic plan (and good leadership) if they want to try to move away from Coal after all. And those are expensive and hard to find, even if it’s possible.
Easier to ban other options and hope it works out. Not that it usually does, but it’s the natural reaction in many cases. Denial is a natural protective response.
An almost billion dollar PR campaign?
If you stand to make several multiples of that, even over decades, it seems like a decent investment.
Seems like your comment could really benefit from some links to supporting information, since the very existence of this article is proof that not everyone knows what the company is doing.
flannery assoc is a shell company. who's providing the money for purchasing farmland at 5-10x its worth?
can you name a single officer of flannery assoc?
They will gladly name themselves when you ask them on which grounds they want to stop your heavy equipment messing around their properties. They will bring all necessary papers to you. I guess you won't leave until they'll make it absolutely clear that they have the right to demand you to leave.
Are you speaking from first-hand experience?
Doesn't it seem like a common sense? Can't government use this way to learn about the owners?
First page of google results:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-landowne...
“various energy and power entities had contracts or proposals to operate on Flannery-owned land”
Not knowing anything about the situation, I simply cannot imagine that the most powerful state in the world does not know (or could not find out) who is buying up gigantic swathes of land within its territory. And a separate article about a lawsuit by the company even has a quote from the company explaining the use for the land:
> In the lawsuit, Flannery said land it has acquired is used for interstate commerce. The company said various energy and power entities had contracts or proposals to operate on Flannery-owned land in the region.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-landowne...
"Flannery Associates LLC" is a name on a legal document. That name has zero bearing when you are looking for who actually owns and controls the land. Who are the people making decisions? Who pays them? Where is the money coming from? Is a foreign government involved?
They've apparently made many claims as to the use of the land from energy to building a city, to a deep port to farming.
Agreed. Though I think that legal entities like this need to have far far more public documentation of beneficial ownership, traceable all the way back to real people, be they US citizens or not.
This goes doubly so for any sort of land ownership. Nobody should be able to hide ownership of US land via shell games.
I'm fine with it as long as your standard also applies to family trusts. LLCs are relatively open compared to trusts. I also think people greatly overestimate the opacity of land ownership records. I just download all of the parcel maps, assessments, tax bills, and ownership data from my county assessor every year. Then people are amazed that I can answer easy question about who owns what. It seems simple to me.
Agreed on this too. A favorite hobby of mine is to look up the land ownership of people that speak at city meetings to oppose land use changes that would allow for more housing in an area.
A huge fraction of the people decrying new homes already own many parcels directly in their own name. And if the opponent is decrying "these apartments aren't affordable enough" you can be pretty sure to find a recent apartment ad renting a worse apartment at a higher price.
Which is funny, since using an LLC per parcel is probably a better strategy for the nasty landlord behavior.
why would then want to lease land for infrastructure right next to an air force base when there is lots of land further out?
Because it's windy AF and there are already large amounts of transmission lines. Look at all these windmills.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.141376,-121.8339739,17582m/d...
Also "near Travis AFB" is being used to mean that Travis is in Solano County and most of this property is also in Solano County.
https://app.regrid.com/us/94585#b=none&o=FLANNERY+ASSOCIATES...
Wouldn't those wind turbines partially blind AFB radars?
1. No, it's not silly.
2. No, the ownership is not in public records, as this story makes clear. Who precisely is behind this seems quite vague.
3. The fact this has been "openly" (whatever that means) happening for 5 years is irrelevant.
4. No, this is begging the question. "Everyone" clearly does not know, at all, what they (who is they?) are doing.
5. What kind of energy infrastructure, precisely?
6. What's the source of your intense desire to deflect on this topic?
If this land is so precious to our national defense, why wasn't the land already owned by the federal government? Eminent domain is the uno reverse card here.
I don't think it's that simple: The US Air Force doesn't give a damn if some farmer buys up nearby land and uses it for farming. They do care if it's a foreign entity trying to use bulk land purchases to spy on or otherwise harm the United States or its people.
The real problem here is the lack of transparency in ownership of corporations in the United States. If corporations weren't allowed to buy--then keep--other corporations (instead of just absorbing all their assets) this wouldn't be a problem.
Rant: I don't think corporations should be allowed to sell brands that don't include the name of the corporation clearly marked on the packaging. Walmart's Equate products all say they're manufactured by and for Walmart right on the bottle/box/whatever. Every product should be like that. Any and all corporations that own a brand should be on the label. From the bottom all the way to the top. The whole child-parent tree should be present.
So do what the Zuckerbergs did, and buy the 4 neighboring homes, and lease them back to the previous owners.
https://sfist.com/2013/10/11/mark_zuckerberg_buys_house_next...
US Air force should have protocols to assume that any would be farmer buying land near a base is in fact a spy and operate accordingly. This sort of spycraft happens all the time, with intelligence agencies buying property next to each other in effort to eavesdrop.
My grandma used to own a house near a naval air station in Virginia Beach. Eventually, the Navy bought the house and surrounding farmland just as what I understand to be a jet bailing area (somebody who lives closer to there can probably correct me on this). They actually offered a fair amount of cash and my grandparents were able to negotiate a little above and nothing had to be seized, thankfully. I'm sad to hear that the house was never torn down afterwards though and likely has squatters in it. I wish they would have done that for my grandparents.
But for the land around Travis Air Force Base... Just seize it. If you're going to buy land around a military base and obscure the owners, that's a fair action. 2-3 seizures like this and the land around military bases will be untouchable in the future.
> I'm sad to hear that the house was never torn down afterwards though and likely has squatters in it. I wish they would have done that for my grandparents.
You’re sad that the government would not allow your grandparents to continue living in an area which is designated for plane crashes?
I lived in VB for over 20 years, family in the military and such. I’m very interested in where your grandparents house was. The house my parents bought in the early 90s would have the windows sounds like they were shattering when jets would break the sound barrier over the neighborhood. The sound of jets was almost consistent. It was a wild time. Over the years the jet noise has become less and less with the ever sprawling suburb of Virginia Beach (I don’t claim it to be a city because it doesn’t really have city vibes, it’s just one big suburb with lots of neighborhoods). There’s no more breaking of the sound barrier on a what seemed like a daily basis. The pilots have calmed down their maneuvers and changed locations to further out in the ocean.
North landing road. They had a blue vegetable stand outside, if you were familiar with the neighborhood.
I too remember covering my ears every time a jet flew overhead when I was a kid. They were loud!!
I'm more sad the navy didn't destroy the home after purchasing it because it's fallen into disrepair and there's nothing really keeping squatters out. The house and surrounding farm was designated for plane crashes many years after they purchased it.
I know exactly where you’re talking about. I agree, they should have torn it down. I apologize for my rude wording.
Also, if this is a genuine risk to be concerned about (as was the Cuban Missile Crisis), then why[1] are similar concerns out of Russia "not objective/logical/valid"?
[1] No "correct by definition" memes, please. Imagine that you are writing code and thus have to be logical, exhaustively if you want to achieve correctness.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of statecraft and adversarial relationships. The point is to gain and maintain a strategic advantage, not to be maximally fair. We want to have capabilities and exert a level of control and influence that Russia is not also able to exert. When we try to prevent China from controlling popular media narratives, it's not a gotcha to say "ha, but the US does that, too." Yes, that is the entire point. We're trying to win, not to play fair. Which is also what they're trying to do.
> I think you misunderstand the purpose of statecraft and adversarial relationships. The point is to gain and maintain a strategic advantage, not to be maximally fair.
Oh, I understand: it is that Westerners believe that what is mandatory for us is optional for others.
> We want to have capabilities and exert a level of control and influence that Russia is not also able to exert.
Right: regional security for us, but not for you.
> When we try to prevent China from controlling popular media narratives, it's not a gotcha to say "ha, but the US does that, too."
Yes it is, because it illustrates hypocrisy, thus is a gotcha.
> Yes, that is the entire point. We're trying to win, not to play fair. Which is also what they're trying to do.
Right, but our politicians and media lie about what is going on, and lots of people believe them so now we have a mess on our hands.
Maybe a bit off topic, but my first thought was wondering whether the OSINT community would get any further with figuring out who it was, but I then realised, the OSINT community often look successful because they publish, but we don't know if "closed source" intelligence knows the same things or is even more successful, but just doesn't publish.
Does anyone have any evidence one way or another? Are OSINT thinking outside the box and doing something materially different, or are they just visible? Are traditional intelligence communities still doing this but just being understandable secretive about methods?
This is not to down play the importance of the OSINT community in any way, I believe publishing does materially change things by increasing accountability to the public.
Judging by OSINT Twitter, the OSINT community is 100% confident in whatever the next day turns out to be the opposite of reality.
There's a lot of posers on OSINT twitter. You need to be a much more discerning on who you follow. As the meme goes, "I am tired of being an infectious disease expert. Today, I'm a military intelligence expert!"
Who are some "usually right" accounts to follow? Ideally ones that aren't plainly designed to spread propaganda of one sort or another.
I haven't been on twitter in months, and now you can't browse the site without logging in. My advice Read the bios. Is it from someone from a real org, or is it just someone with #OSINT in their bio and patreon.
Off the top of my head is HI Sutton. He's good for submarines. Rob Lee RALee85 is pretty good as well. Then there's the Jeffrey Lewis (ArmsControlWonk). Pay attention who those people follow. They do this for a living, and have been for decades.
Thanks for the vote of confidence in H I Sutton, I've recently been recommended his videos and wasn't quite sure how seriously to take them, even if they do appear well researched on the surface.
Did you know that all his sub cutaways are drawn in MS PAINT? It’s amazing to watch.
Anything that comes out of Bellingcat or those associated with it has been good in my experience, although that's from a layman's point of view. Their now-defunct podcast went into a lot of depth and talked about their methods and it all seems very good.
By "closed source," you mean government clandestine intelligence services? I used to work on ground processing software for the NRO and NSA, and yes, they know a lot more than the Internet, a lot more than law enforcement, and a lot more than they ever admit to knowing. Not revealing what you know is an intrinsic part of the spy game to prevent opponents from inferring your collection capabilities and current scope of assets. If your opponent knows what you can surveil, they just won't do that.
Yes I was looking for a better term but thought "closed source" fit in the context.
Thanks for the insight, I thought this would probably be the case.
Do you think traditional intelligence services have any blindspots that OSINT are managing to make headway? Even if overall the balance is far more in favour of traditional players?
Also, traditional intelligence services do a lot of OSINT (which is about source, not publishing).
“Open Source” in this context is about publicly available information — a source in the open.
Thanks, I was somewhat unknowingly conflating the openness of the data (I know a bit about how Bellingcat sources their data for example) and the public service nature of the open reporting. I get the impression that "OSINT" is typically used to mean both, even if it technically refers to the former (rather akin to software where it refers to both source availability and licencing, but in casual use often refers to the former).
I doubt very much that it’s actually a mystery to the US government.
I've probably just watched too much X-Files, but I had the thought that maybe it's actually military/defense/intelligence buying the land in the first place.
It kind of amazes me that our government can’t figure out who is behind this. Because it’s extremely hard to hide these kinds of things. When I last moved, there were a few toxic people in my life at the time and I didn’t want them to be able to find my new home. What I found is that it’s exceptionally difficult and expensive to keep this private. I looked at forming an LLC etc… The problem is that it eventually leaks out somehow.
I have a lawyer friend who confirmed this from their own experience. They told us about a sibling who is a high profile senior exec at well known public company. This person tried to hide their home purchase for privacy and safety reasons. They had the resources to do this, spent a ton of money, and ultimately failed. You can easily Google their address.
Some states make this easier than others. I don't remember specifics but from what I remember one major disadvantage to hiding ownership is that you either can't get certain tax deductions or you don't qualify for things like FHA loans (don't remember which).
> This person tried to hide their home purchase for privacy and safety reasons. They had the resources to do this, spent a ton of money, and ultimately failed. You can easily Google their address.
I assume they made the mistake of actually living at that address. You're outed to Equifax and others the second you sign up for utilities as yourself. On paper, you can only remain anonymous if you don't live there...
...but the shadiest people I know use grandmothers' foreign maiden names to sign up for services at properties they obfuscate ownership of. Their "deadname" is kept very much alive after marriage and naturalization if you do this regularly. It amounts to synthetic identity fraud so I doubt any attorney would give this sort of direction.
Towards the end of the article is this depressing nugget:
" Nearly one in five homes were purchased by investors in early 2023, including LLCs and other corporate entities, according to data compiled by real-estate firm Redfin of more than 40 of the largest U.S. metro areas. "
Nearly every time single old houses in in-demand areas are bought for renovation or redevelopment into denser duplexes, they're "bought by investors, including LLCs and other corporate entities." This doesn't mean 20% of housing stock is being bought and left fallow or anything – this is exactly how densification and redevelopment in response to demand happens. Many of those LLCs are even individuals.
About a quarter of all single-family homes in the US are owned by investors:
https://www.billtrack50.com/blog/investment-firms-and-home-b...
The percentage of investors that buy single-family homes in a given year may rise or fall but the long-term trend is clear: Investors are owning more and more of the total market over time. Actual single families are being priced out.
Some markets are worse than the national statistic and entire neighborhoods are being bought in order to turn every single home into rentals. The New York Times wrote about this last year:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...
It's a very real issue and a few simple changes to the laws in regards to how many single-family homes may be owned by corporations would make a huge impact.
> About a quarter of all single-family homes in the US are owned by investors:
I don't see that mentioned anywhere in the article.
I see "Last year, investor purchases accounted for 22% of American homes sold. This is significantly down from the 80% number in 2020-2021,"
Also, that "80%" number appears to be a mistake that doesn't match the cited source. https://www.redfin.com/news/investor-home-purchases-q3-2021/
It appears to me a misstatemenr of "investor purchasing of single-family homes increased over 80%." which is just silliness comparing the covid dip to the post-covid recovery back to normal.
The billtrack50 article is so incoherent and self-contradictory that it's not worth trying to make sense of it.
The implication is that the land is for housing? Notably, Irvine California successfully transitioned from being an Army Base town (very large military blimps, etc) to a thriving city. A jewel of southern california.
"Thriving" if one considers an Orwellian and totalitarian worldview similar to that of Singapore to be a viable and humane philosophy.
I have experience with the Irvine Company as well. There were decades where they were not in control of the city. Before Blizzard, before Google.
Could this be a stealth real estate investment? It seems to be one of the regions of farmland closest-ish to the urban Bay Area. That would parsimoniously explain why the LLC is paying multiples over market value, on what's currently zoned as mere agricultural land.
Three things the Bay Area has in plenty right right now: (0) people with too much money; (1) people looking to escape the Bay Area; (2) people spooked about macroeconomic conditions. The mystery LLC claims to be a "group of families... looking to diversify their portfolio from equities to real assets". Maybe that's simply what it is: a conspiracy of techies stashing their loot in real estate, with a very long-term horizon, betting on a Detroit-ization of the SFC area and a consequent real estate boom in the greater exurbs.
Why stealthy? To buy the land as cheap as possible. Maybe that's what those legal disputes are about: some landowners sussed out that the new buyers have a very high willingness-to-pay, and are trying aggressively to maximize their selling price.
It would be a wild long play, but this is how rail companies purchased land as well. I say it in past tense, but Bright Rail is currently using that playbook right now elsewhere.
Buy the land, build the train connections, develop the land, sell or rent the now hopefully prime real eatate.
It's taken 5 years after numerous land purchases and a giant $500m lawsuit against landowners for people to get suspicious? Doesn't that seem entirely backwards, that a "mysterious company" can own so much in such short time and that's perfectly legal no red flags? It's only a problem now because it's near a base which is pure absurdity, they would likely also buy the land the base is on and demolish it for their given reason "interstate commerce".
companies and people buy lots of things all over the place all the time. raising alarms about it gets ignored because of alarm fatigue, and because it rarely matters or can be stopped without grinding the economy to a halt. and someone will always be worried about literally anything and everything, even stuff that doesn’t exist or didn’t happen.
WSJ has a map (and more details)
- "“Nobody can figure out who they are,” said Ronald Kott, mayor of Rio Vista, Calif., which is now largely surrounded by Flannery-owned land."
This map makes it seems hysterical to me that people think it's being done as espionage and is a national security issue. The land is wide open and easily observed. In any actual conflict anyone operating in that area could easily be shut down. And just look at the map, it's an awful lot of land to just "spy" on a military base, a lot of the land is as far as 20-30 km away.
This land is all filling out a very good area for wind power generation, so I'm guessing they have plans for a lot of wind farms.
EDIT: If you go to https://globalwindatlas.info/en you'll have no trouble finding the area on a view of CA. It's one of the bright red areas between SAC and OAK and this land conveniently fills most of it.
"Mayor of Rio Vista unaware of California business entities database, according to Mayor of Rio Vista"
Does that say what billionaire is funding the purchases? I'm not familiar with that DB but the info for who is actually behind the company (vs just an agent of it or a lawyer or whatever) seems non-obvious
(edit: for reference, this is what I see https://ibb.co/M2dDBZ1. The address is just a mail forwarding service.)
I find it hard to believe if the Military was actually worried about this they would be going about it by having a House rep blast his mouth about it on local news.
You think the military controls every elected dope? What country do you think this is?
I don't, it was a sarcastic way of saying that this is probably just political noise making and not connected to a real missed security threat.
I'm unconcerned with the conspiracy theories. I'm concerned that it's a literal land grab by corporate profiteers to sink their ill-gotten gains into tangible assets including huge tracts of land blocking new developments. Cities, counties, and states must block these sort of extreme deals because they prevent expansion of direly needed housing and affordable housing.
yeah the CIA doesnt know who this is…ok mmm hmmm yeah…/s
> But after eight months of investigation, government officials have been unable to identify who's behind it nor rule out any threat to national security.
If nothing else this should be an indicator of how broken the land & real estate purchase system is in the US. We are literally the only country in the world that has no controls and no visibility over having large chunks of our territory bought out by a foreign resident, foreign business or even a foreign government.
The company is suing people for talking to each other about the company and demanding more money for their farms that the company is/was trying to buy. There is no legal justification for this lawsuit; it's a legal shakedown to try and drain their targets' resources so that they're compelled to sell below-market to avoid bankruptcy.
Also known as the modus operandi for Skadden Arps, the most morally bankrupt firm in the country. Skadden's "illustrious" client list includes Elmo (they advised him on the strategy of forcing terminated employees into arbitration and then refusing to pay arbitration fees), organized crime, and multiple individuals and entities known to be KGB affiliates and Putin allies (Skadden has paid hefty fines for illegal lobbying on behalf of the Putin regime...multiple times.)
> The attorney representing Flannery Associates sent a letter to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, one of several agencies investigating the matter, issuing a formal response.
> "No foreign person or group holds any significant interest or substantial control over Flannery, either now or at the time of any land purchase made by Flannery," the letter said.
"Person or group" doesn't include "government". This also doesn't mean the (supposedly domestic) owners won't lease the land to a foreign entity. Also, note the word "significant." And, "foreign" compared to what? If the owners are, say, Chinese, "no foreign" means no NON-Chinese.
Not trying to stoke paranoia, but just showing how statements like this are open to interpretation and should be taken with a grain of salt.
So US gov tripped up by their own secrecy laws?
Hard to have sympathy for their dilemma
The USA has kept the top spot for paranoia for 70 consecutive years.
It's not paranoia if they are really after you.
If you were spying, surely you wouldn't need that much area? And if you were doing something nefarious, wouldn't you use more than one company to make the purchases?
Yeah, right, it's not like they need to build a 20km long telescope. Plus there are hundreds of thousands of people living close by; this isn't Area 51.
Isn't Travis AFB for transport planes and tankers?
This isn't like someone is buying land beside Groom Lake or Skunkworks...
Yes, and it's also the home of E6-B Mercury "TACAMO" communications aircraft operated by the U.S. Navy:
https://www.dailyrepublic.com/all-dr-news/solano-news/milita...
This unit pretty much represents the last remaining Navy presence in the Bay Area. Ironic, given the history of the Navy there, beginning with the establishment of the shipyard on Mare Island before the Civil War, and the first Navy radio station on the West Coast in 1904:
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collec...
Interestingly, for my fellow aviation buffs, the Navy is considering replacing the E-6Bs (built upon old Boeing C-135s—military 707s) with new C-130J planes, with stretched fuselage and those cool scimitar propellers. They're more fuel-efficient, I suspect, and they can operate out of rough airstrips.
https://www.scramble.nl/military-news/breaking-c-130-tacamo-...
Interestingly the predecessors of the current E-6B TACAMO platform are C-130's also. These EC-130Q's were based on C-130H. Full circle again.
But they only have a small detachment there. The main E-6B/TACAMO stuff is at Tinker AFB Oklahoma
this sounds easy to figure, simply occupy the land,deny use or entry, watch who starts squirming.
ARMA game dev team?
Bill Gates. Not to worry.
skadden. hopefully capitalism will eat itself in our lifetime.
> Even after eight months of investigation, Garamendi says federal authorities are still struggling to get those answers.
What if somebody moves a few bulldozers to that land and start raising an obstacle which would be convenient to protect AFB from spying? I highly suspect somebody will show up and demand this to stop. That guy should be questioned - who he is and on what grounds he's managing the property. This will likely lead towards the owners.
Can the beneficiaries be contacted this way, if other ways fail for months?
Shell company lawyer can show up and demand the activity stop. Lawyer doesn’t have to disclose names, they are acting on behalf of the corporate entity.
They have to prove - at least in the court - that they own the property. So the documents are going to surface with the names of the owners.
Actually, I think the registrar of the property could be able to issue a request for documentation leading to the owners or beneficiaries. It's either a physical person - could be talked with - or an organization - which is registered somewhere, and can be similarly contacted.