“Subprime” Dan Gilbert

Dan Gilbert is evil personified. He made his fortune running a website where you can get instantly approved for a home loan with no money down. Applicants are encouraged to overstate their income, and the amount of the loan is based on a bogus estimate that might be three times the actual value of the property.

Once the loan is originated, it’s sold off to the kind of companies that were implicated in the 2008 global financial crisis, where it’s combined with other shitty loans and then sold as an investment product to the senile elderly and local governments in towns in Alabama where everyone’s related.

Gilbert takes the money he makes selling subprime loans and builds casinos and also bribes the government in desperate Midwestern cities like his native Detroit and now Cleveland to legalize gambling. His casinos prey on precisely the kind of people who don’t know any better than to take out a mortgage on a house via the Internets. Attempting to win enough money to avoid foreclosure, they hardly stand a chance — because it’s a damn casino. Even if they do win, they’re just gonna end up cutting a check to Quicken Loans. There’s no way Dan Gilbert can lose.

It’s even better if they lose, because not only does he get their money, they get kicked out of their houses, which drives down the property value. Dan Gilbert then buys that same property for pennies on the dollar. Dan Gilbert now owns over 8 million square feet of real estate in downtown Detroit alone. As a low IQ child with no sense of spatial relations, I didn’t even realize there was 8 million square feet of real estate in downtown Detroit. My house is in a shanty town is only 800 square feet — and this is not in Manhattan, where square footage is at a premium.

I’ve at least been able to keep the water turned on. Detroit, meanwhile? Not so much. The city is threatening to shut off water to as many as half of its residents if they don’t pay up on past due water bills. A deadline was set. It came and went without people actually paying, and the city didn’t follow through on its threat to shut off their water, suggesting to me that they were bluffing all along.

Girls in Detroit might have to start bathing with Axe body spray—or as they call it, Ask body spray

Similarly, a proposed plan to sell off upwards of $5 billion worth of fine art owned by the city and housed in the Detroit Institute of Art seemed to me like a PSYOP. They weren’t really planning to sell off one of the world’s most vast, most expensive art collections, nor do they actually know anyone looking to buy $5 billion worth of paintings in this day and age. Not even Dan Gilbert, who wouldn’t know from fine art.

The debate was intended to plant the idea in the mind of the Detroit’s citizens that there’s no way else the city can get money. Either they’re gonna have to sell literally everything they own to the Chinese, or someone’s mom might have to turn a few tricks. Meanwhile, one guy owns seemingly all of downtown, multiple casinos, the Cleveland Cavaliers and god knows what else. This just goes to show you how stupid people from Detroit are. No shots at people from Detroit. I don’t need someone backing a U-Haul truck up on my lawn. I’m just saying.

Dreaded n-words really would pack a U-Haul truck up

This is an especially big summer for Dan Gilbert. In addition to making such a large investment in Rap Genius, it was announced recently that Lebron James is returning to the Cleveland Cavaliers, after having spent the past few years in South Beach. This despite the angry letter Gilbert wrote when James defected to Miami, like a slave master upset that his prized buck somehow escaped to Missouri, and there was no way to bring him back citing the Dred Scott decision.

It was a magnanimous move, to say the least, calling to mind the time when Michael Jordan refused to endorse Harvey Gantt against virulently racist North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, because—as he famously said at the time—Republicans buy sneakers too, thus signaling that he was so firmly “with the program.” For this Lebron James was warmly embraced by the same media that took him to task three years ago when he declared that he was taking his proverbial talents to South Beach.

It’s likely that Lebron James’ submission to the will of the white corporate power structure will pay off handsomely in the long run. Not long before he announced that he was returning to Cleveland, it was announced that Michael Jordan became the first billionaire NBA player, according to an esitimate by Forbes magazine, after increasing his ownership stake in the Charlotte Hornets from 80% to just shy of 90%. Compare this to the one-fifteenth of one percent stake Jay-Z had in the Brooklyn Nets.

But Michael Jordan’s wealth still pales in comparison to Donald Sterling, who owned the LA Clippers outright and was forced to sell the team after being caught on tape telling his jumpoff that she wasn’t allowed to post pictures of herself with black men on Instagram or bring them to Clippers games.

Donald Sterling’s penis knows no color, and it is the bane of his existance

The Donald Sterling incident led to discussions of NBA owners’ attitudes towards their players and comparisons to the slave trade, aside from the fact that NBA players make tens of millions of dollars and slaves didn’t make anything at all. The NBA consists mostly of black guys, and the teams are mostly owned by white people. The Commissioner of the NBA, the guy in charge of the entire league, is Adam Silver, a white Jewish man, who recently replaced another white Jewish man, David Stern, by whom he was personally selected.

Michael Jordan is the rare exception, and he was only able to ascend to such status after selling some ridonkulous number of Air Jordan shoes for Nike over the course of the past 30 years. The average NBA player—even the most high-jumping, basketball dunking-est amongst them—could never hope to actually own a team.

The NBA keeps its players on a short leash, going so far as to tell them what clothes they’re allowed to wear en route to games. When members of the Portland Trailblazers kept having problems getting caught with weed, a meeting was held in which they were instructed to have members of their entourage take possession of the weed while they were in transit. This was the origin of the term weed carrier, now used to refer to a member of a rapper’s entourage who attempts to launch his own career via nepotism.

When Dwight Howard tweeted #FreePalestine, during “Operation Protective Edge,” he was forced to delete it and issue an apology. Whereas Michael Jordan personally chose not to endorse Harvey Gantt, viewing it as a savvy business move, Dwight Howard couldn’t express his support for Palestine if he wanted to. Either NBA players are no longer allowed to have their own political beliefs, or they’re not allowed to have an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—probably the latter.