It is. This is not a popular thing to say in the more cynical and pessimistic corners of the internet, but it’s true.
I’m
not referring to anything “out there” or “spiritual” when I make this
assertion. I’m talking about a mundane reality that is easily verifiable
by casual observation, if you just look past all the headlines and
narrative chatter to see the big picture as a whole.
Humans are
becoming more and more aware of what’s going on, both in our world and
in ourselves, as our ability to network and share information with each
other becomes greater and greater. Because of the ubiquitousness of
smartphones and social media, things like police brutality and the abuse of Palestinians
are no longer regarded as mere verbal assertions made by their victims
but as concrete realities which must be addressed. The most viral posts
of the day on apps like Twitter, Reddit and TikTok are routinely just
people making relatable observations about their feelings and
psychological tendencies and what it’s like to be human.
These things matter. Seeing into each other and around our world all
the time like this, in a way we never could before the internet, can’t
help but change things. It’s a consistent rule throughout history that
every positive change in human behavior has been preceded by an
expansion of consciousness, whether it’s becoming collectively conscious
of the injustices of racial discrimination or individually conscious of
the motives and consequences of our self-destructive behavior.
Increasing consciousness is always a movement toward health.
And a
movement toward health absolutely is what’s been happening. The young
today are the kindest, most sensitive and most awake generation that has
ever lived, no matter what the bitter old farts say about them. My kids
are having conversations with their friends that are vastly deeper and
more tuned-in than I was having with my own friends at their age. The
independent content that people are creating without the authorization
of the cultural filters in New York and Hollywood can take your breath
away every single day if you know where to look, while the movies from
the eighties which once enthralled us are today virtually unwatchable
because of how shallow and artless they are compared to what we’re now
used to seeing.
It’s happening in a weird, sloppy, awkward way,
like an infant learning to walk, but it is clearly happening. It’s
happening through an internet whose origins are rooted firmly in the US war machine, it’s happening through billionaire-owned social media platforms with extensive ties to powerful governments,
it’s happening through technologies that are the fruits of all the most
exploitative tendencies of global capitalism, but it’s happening.
voxeu | Despite the tragic
deaths, suffering and sadness that it has caused, the pandemic could go
down in history as the event that rescued humanity. It has created a
once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset our lives and societies onto a
sustainable path (Schwab and Malleret 2020, Zakaria 2020). Global
surveys and protests have demonstrated the appetite for fresh thinking
and a desire not to return to the pre-pandemic world.
Rescue offers no
guarantee of a better life, but it does make it possible. Like refugees
whose rescue from a cataclysmic fate allows them to envisage a better
future, we now have the potential to create a better world. First,
though, we have to traverse a no-man’s-land; we are leaving the old
pre-pandemic world but have not yet entered into a new one. This will
naturally create anxiety and a desire to return to familiar territory.
This is the greatest danger, and recalls the words of Jay Gatsby in
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “Can’t repeat the past?
Why, of course you can!” Set in the Jazz Age of the Roaring Twenties,
the depiction of the exuberance following from the devastating pandemic
of 1918 and WWI could well be repeated, as the pent-up desire to
socialise and spend creates a roaring 2020s. A century ago, that ended
in tears, with the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and WWII.
Bouncing back is bad
In a recent book
(Goldin 2021), I argue that that returning to ‘business as usual’, or
‘bouncing back’, means we would be heading in the same direction that
brought us to the catastrophe we are in today. Other widely used
expressions are similarly worrying. ‘Bouncing forward’ implies we are
leaping ahead along the same tracks which lead over a precipice. A Great
Reset, as called for by the World Economic Forum, or ‘reboot’, another
popular phrase, can suggest that we should go back to what has already
been programmed, when what is needed is a different operating system.
‘Building back better’ – the slogan used by the Biden–Harris
presidential team – is more encouraging but still worrying; if there is
one thing that Covid-19 has taught us, it is that our system is built on
shaky foundations. Building back on unstable foundations guarantees
future collapse. To prevent future pandemics, which could be much more
deadly than Covid-19, and to stop catastrophic climate change and other
crises, we need to change direction. Is this possible, and in what way?
strategic culture | With the UN World Food Program announcing that some 270 million people worldwide now face starvation,
the ongoing debate about the real aims of the technocracy is profound.
The question is whether their aim tends more towards major population
reduction, or more towards a new type of slavery.
It appears that philosophical and long-term practical questions
remain a mystery. We will argue that evil, not simply the influence of
the base upon the superstructure, is at the core of this endeavor. We
have defined evil as inflicting the highest degree of pain upon the
greatest number of resisting subjects. In short, we have defined evil as sadism, inflicting evil because it brings satisfaction to those inflicting it.
Because evil is fundamentally a destructive force, it cannot create
anything: nothing in it is truly novel nor of use to humanity. Its
pleasures are short-lived and spurious. It is unsustainable,
self-defeating, ultimately leading to self-destruction.
We have adequately assessed from any number of sources that nefarious
interests are behind this process, who seek to make the process also
about the exercise of power, in addition to several other aims
(remaining in power, exercising power in ways consistent with their
occult beliefs about evil, etc.). We understand that they are ‘evil’
because they involve a type of ‘power-over’ (as opposed to
power-with/consent) which derives this power from fear-mongering and
terrorism upon the population. Terrorism here is defined as the
operationalized use of fear, pain, and other injury towards
socio-political aims.
Had their plans not been rooted in evil, they would have used soft-power tactics like manufacturing consent, to arrive at their ends.
The aim of the Great Reset is to transition the ruling plutocratic
oligarchy into a technocratic one. The basis of plutocracy is finance,
and the introduction of AI and automation eliminates the basis for
finance as the foundation of an economy of scale. This is because
automation and deflation move in tandem, making new technologies net
losers. Therefore a new paradigm accounting for this post-financial
‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, must be introduced.
theeconomiccollapseblog | Over the past couple of years we have become accustomed to expecting
the unexpected, but soon we many have to start anticipating the
unthinkable. In this article, I am going to be discussing a couple of
potential scenarios that would have been unimaginable to the vast
majority of Americans just a few short years ago. Unfortunately, our
world is now changing at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking, and
many things that were once “unimaginable” could soon become reality.
Let’s start by talking about the record-setting heat wave which is
making the epic megadrought in the western half of the country even
worse. Many western farmers planted crops this year hoping that weather
conditions would eventually turn in their favor, but that has
definitely not happened. In fact, at this point 88 percent of the West is experiencing at least some level of drought.
2021 has been the worst year of this multi-year megadrought so far,
and last week was the worst week for this drought up to this point in
2021. Old temperature records were shattered all over the West, and
some areas were already seeing triple digits by 8 o’clock in the morning…
The West is in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave
this week, as all-time records were shattered and daily records broken
in over a dozen states.
Even by desert standards, the heat wave in the Southwest is atypical.
On Thursday, the National Weather Service in Tucson tweeted that the
city recorded a temperature of 100 degrees at 8:14 a.m., the second
earliest time in the day recorded since 1948.
That is crazy.
Can you imagine hitting triple digits before you have even finished your morning coffee?
Summer had not even officially begun yet last week, and yet new all-time record highs were being established all over the place…
Record-breaking temperatures spread from California to
Montana this week. On thursday, the all-time high temperature was tied
in Palm Springs, California at 123 degrees, breaking the previous June
record of 122 degrees.
Salt Lake City tied its all-time record high of 107 degrees. The old
record was notably set in July — when temperatures are usually at their
highest for the year in that region. This comes after daily record highs
were broken Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in Salt Lake, each with
temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
We have never seen anything quite like this in the state of Utah.
With drastic limits placed on what little water he has,
Tom Favero said he and many farmers along this west side of Weber County
were forced to watch some crops die. “We’ve all made serious choices of
what fields we can water and what we can’t,” Favero said.
Another Utah farmer that lost a lot of corn and an entire field of barley said that it really “hurts” to see his hard work go to waste…
Farmer Dean Martini pointed at one of his fields. “That
corn there, where I can’t water, I don’t have the water. It makes me
sick to see it go to heck like that.”
With limits on amount and time, he said there wasn’t enough water
flowing to make it across his fields. While some of the corn dried up,
he had to let a whole field of barley go too. “It hurts buddy. That
hurts,” Martini said.
Of course this is just the beginning.
If this summer is as hot and as dry as they are projecting, we could see catastrophic crop failures all across the West.
And that is really bad news, because the state of California alone produces more than a third of our vegetables and about two-thirds of our fruits and nuts.
A few years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that we would be
facing a crisis of this magnitude in 2021, but here we are.
Paleoclimatologist Kathleen Johnson is quite “worried” about what will
happen this summer, and she is warning that this drought is shaping up
to be the worst the region has experienced “in at least 1,200 years”…
I’m worried about this summer – this doesn’t bode well,
in terms of what we can expect with wildfire and the worsening drought.
This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that
we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years.
bloomberg |Rising real-estate prices are stoking fears that homeownership, long considered a core component of the American dream, is slipping out of reach
for low- and moderate-income Americans. That may be so — but a nation
of renters is not something to fear. In fact, it’s the opposite.
The numbers paint a stark picture.
After peaking at 69% in 2004, the homeownership rate fell every year
until 2016, when it was 64.3% — its lowest level since the Census Bureau
started keeping track in 1984. The rate rebounded in Donald Trump’s
presidency, hitting 66% in 2020, but that trend is likely to be arrested
by a housing market that is desperately short on supply and seeing
month-over-month price increases greater than they were in the frenzied
market of 2006.
This process is painful, but it’s not all bad.
Slowly but surely, most Americans’ single biggest asset — their home —
is becoming more liquid. Call it the liquefaction of the U.S. housing market.
Even in the best markets, single-family homes
have historically been an extremely illiquid asset. Appraisals have to
be made on an individual basis, and mispriced homes can sit on the
market for months waiting for a potential buyer — only for that buyer’s
financing to fall through.
Liquid assets, like publicly traded stocks and
corporate bonds, earn what’s known as a liquidity premium: Their market
price is many times the dividend or coupon that investors get from
holding them. The more liquid an asset, the higher that premium goes. On
the flip side, those same high-flying stocks and bonds can see their
prices collapse when investors get spooked and withdraw their cash from
the market.
Houses have typically traded with very little
liquidity premium. That meant a relatively low purchase price compared
to what it would cost to rent — the equivalent of the dividend from
housing investment — and stable prices over time.
These
two factors made houses a good investment for moderate-income families
who often lacked the cash and the risk tolerance for market investments.
As investments went, single-family homes were cheap and slowly grew in
value in both good times and bad.
In the early 21st century, automated appraisals and mortgage underwriting began to change that.
Combined with the repackaging of subprime loans into presumably safer
CDOs, they created a far more liquid market for housing. In response,
housing prices soared — and became more sensitive to the vagaries of the
markets. When investors pulled out of CDOs, buyer financing dried up
and the whole housing market crashed.
It may have seemed at the time like a failed
experiment. But financialization had changed the housing market forever.
Houses are now more prone to be priced high relative to rents, and to
see their prices fluctuate with the market. The very features that made
home buying an affordable and stable investment are coming to an end.
gpenewsdocs |FRIES: Pat, from farmers and fishers groups, to
cooperatives and unions, the Long Food Movement calls on civil society
and social movements to unite and collaborate. This as a forceful
counter position to an agribusiness-led transformation of the food
systems. Your report Transforming Food Systems by 2045 maps out what
this kind of ground up collaboration could achieve. So, as the title
suggests you are looking decades ahead. What was the impetus behind
that?
Joe Biden’s new anti-terrorism initiative classifies “anarchist violent extremists” that “oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which are perceived as harmful to society” as “domestic violent extremists.” pic.twitter.com/GKmsQsGBaA
MOONEY: Well we back in 2016, in fact, we began to
talk about the need for a strategy that was not so short-term as it has
always been. That it can’t just be are two or three years of thinking.
We need to be thinking further down the road. And we were expressing our
general frustration, many of us in civil society, that we’re always
trapped into these cycles of funding which is so short that we really
can’t do the horizon scanning that’s important. So we talked about,
well, let’s build something different.
Let’s try to see if we can imagine not just what we would like to
have down the road but how we would get to it. We all have the same kind
of dreams of the way we’d like to see the world be. But can we really
get there? Can we politically practically do it? So the exercise of the
Long Food Movement was to not just dream of what we want but really do
the politics of it. You know, what’s really viable in terms of moving
institutions, moving money around to get where we want to be.
FRIES: The Long Food Movement is for decentralizing
control and democratizing food systems as the key to feeding the world
as well as (re)generating ecological and other systems vital to people
and planet. You say achieving that will require policy frameworks at
every level of governance – from local law to international agreements
–that support and empower small holder and peasant farmers all over the
world. Talk about policy frameworks that have moved in the opposite
direction by supporting and empowering agribusiness. And the role of
agribusiness in getting governments to make those policy choices. For
example, what did agribusiness want and get from government say back in
the days when biotechnology was the then new technology?
MOONEY: Back in the even the late seventies and the
eighties agribusiness was saying, we have a technology here
biotechnology, genetically modified crops, which will feed the 500
million, at that time there are 500 million malnourished people in the
world. That would solve that problem. They would take care of that and
that they had the only tools that would actually be able to do it. They
said that they needed some help to do it though.
They needed three things basically. They needed government regulators
to get out of the way; give them the freedom to act as they wanted to.
Secondly, they needed to be able to be given regulation, a certain kind
of regulation, intellectual property rights over life, over plants and
livestock so that they would own it. And so no bad regulations but the
regulations they wanted which give them more corporate power. And then
thirdly, they needed to turn the public sector researchers in
agriculture into basically servants for the private sector. So do the
basic work for us and we’ll do the rest.
FRIES: Just to clarify the third point about what
agribusiness wanted was to turn public sector agricultural researchers
into servants for the private sector, so this was to get the sort of
research they wanted. In other words, research that advanced the
interests of high-input, chemical intensive agriculture and that
eventually will feed into profits for the main agribusiness players. So,
pro-GMO research.
MOONEY: The Green Revolution sort of research we’ve
been hearing about for ever. And all the developments coming out of
universities and government research stations around the world for
agriculture as well. The research money in the public sector goes into
again support services for the private sector, basic research for the
private sector.
FRIES: What were some real world consequences of
this policy framework that agribusiness wanted and got? Take one
example, I am thinking here of corporate concentration in food systems.
What happened there?
MOONEY: Well, we went from roughly 7,000 private
sector seed companies in the world when I first got into this work in
the seventies, to where we now have really what, five or six at the
most. In many ways, it’s really only three or four companies that really
control all of commercial production of seeds and pesticides together.
So it’s vastly concentrated compared to what it was.
FRIES: So there’s been a lot of corporate takeover and buyout activity.
MOONEY: Yeah. On a massive scale. I mean, it’s been a
huge convergence. Really it started in the seventies and it’s kept on
going. It hasn’t stopped. It’s transforming itself. Who’s doing the
converging has been changing over time. When I was first dealing with
this, the biggest seed company in the world was Royal Dutch Shell. They
bought more than a hundred seed companies and they thought they were
going to be big in the market. They decided they couldn’t do it after
awhile. Then they got out of it and more conventional crop chemical
companies took over and bought the seed companies. Now, of course, we’re
seeing a new development where it’s the big data companies that are
moving in and taking over large sectors of the food system.
FRIES: And you think there is more to come. That this trend shows no signs of slowing down.
MOONEY: It’s coming because again the industrial
food chain is changing. It’s no longer the chain with all the links in
it that we used to have. Seeds used to be sold and owned separately from
pesticides and from fertilizers. And farm machinery companies were
stuck in the business of producing tractors. The traders and the
Cargills of the world and the processors and the retailers were all
different folks. With big data management and the ability to manipulate,
not just digital information but also to manipulate digital DNA to
actually adjust, technologically computer-wise adjust living materials
makes it possible for the biggest companies with the biggest computers
to step in and really try to govern the large chunks of the food chain.
So seeds and pesticides have become one basically with the farm
machinery companies and the fertilizer companies. They could actually
just become one big input sector. The grain trading companies are kind
of lost in this whole exercise. They’re not quite sure that they’ve got
anything that anyone else wants anymore. The processors and the
retailers are coming together more. And the big data managers behind all
of that, the Amazons and the Alibabas of the world, the Googles and
Tencents of the world, whether it’s China or Germany or the United
States are saying: well, we can actually manage that better than anybody
else can. So you get Alibaba advising peasant producers in China on how
to grow pigs and gardens as well as how to market their products, as
well as setting them up for retail sales in the stores.
taibbi |TK: Jon Stewart made the lab-leak hypothesis mainstream
last week. You were one of the first media figures to try to bring
attention in that direction. What was the response when you raised your
own concerns, and what's your reaction now, given the way that
discussion has suddenly become permissible?
Weinstein:
The lessons of the lab leak are many. Of course, those of us who could
see that the official narrative was wildly inconsistent with the
evidence were aggressively stigmatized. Many were driven to self
silence. And the official narrative could easily have held, causing
dissenters to be recorded in history as cranks. This is standard for
such a situation. Unfortunately, there is no appetite for extrapolating
from the lab leak to other COVID questions. Today Tony Fauci announced a
multi-billion dollar initiative to search for new drugs to treat COVID,
and Carl Zimmer dutifully reported the story with excitement in the
NYT, even as the revelations about Fauci’s apparent corruption and
responsibility continue to surface. There was no mention of the danger
implied in new drugs and EUAs. The idea of repurposed drugs doing the
job safely and cheaply is elided with the baseless assertion that a
search for useful existing drugs was essentially fruitless. There is
simply no update to the public’s trust in authority based on the lessons
of the lab leak, no recognition that officials are often mistaken, or
lying or both.
And that’s the core of the problem with YouTube’s
policy. Official consensus has been frequently laughable in the context
of Covid, often with deadly consequences. If ever there was a moment for
scientific generalists to help their audience understand the evidence,
this is it.
Consider this bizarre fact. In Sept. 2020, Politifact
“fact checked” the lab leak hypothesis and declared it a “pants on fire
lie.” Politifact was forced to walk that conclusion back in May 2021.
My flow chart had a lab leak at almost 90% as of April 2020. In June of
2021 Politifact “fact checked” the assertion (made on the DarkHorse
Podcast by Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology) that
“spike protein is cytotoxic.” They declared it false. How did they end
up the arbiter of factual authority in this case? Shouldn’t the
presumption be with Dr. Malone, and with DarkHorse?
TK:
Don't tech companies and health officials have a responsibility to try
to prevent dangerous speech during an emergency like a pandemic? Do you
feel that any discussion on a topic like this should be allowed, or do
you believe there should be a minimal factual standard? What's the
proper way to regulate this dilemma in your opinion?
Weinstein:
I don’t think it works this way. Once you create the right to shut down
speech for the good of the public, that tool becomes a target of
capture and true speech is silenced. Furthermore, humans are stuck with
the fact that heterodoxy exists at the fringe with the cranks. No one
has a way to sort one from the other, except in retrospect. So if you
regulate the cranks out of existence, you also shut down meaningful
progress. The price of that is incalculable. Heather had a great piece
on this published recently (What If We’re Wrong? In the on-line magazine Areo).
TK: Even if there are serious risks to your business, do you intend to stop talking about the subject?
Of
course not. Lives are on the line. Too many have been lost already.
This is an absolute moral obligation. That doesn’t mean we won’t pick
battles strategically, but even loss of our channels is acceptable if
the madness surrounding COVID treatment and prevention can be stopped.
If you squint hard enough you can see where they missed editing out the puppet strings in the video feed.
They’ve pulled out the John Stewart card to convince the squishy
Millennials that China is our enemy. Google will now whitewash all
references to Ft. Detrick, their October 2019 exercises and all the rest
of it. Remember, Millennials, in general, don’t know anything. They
just Google shit and think they’re informed.
John Stewart is the foundation on which their basic lack of
inquisition is built on while at the same time telling them they are
cynical and informed. That’s why the cognitive dissonance over this was so thorough. They now have to side with the evil Republicans and Trumptards over the ‘China Virus’ because John Stewart told them so.
It’s as predictable as it is pathetic.
I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but it’s clear that Davos
is burning bridges left and right, they are accelerating their plans
and calling in all the markers. They are burning their accumulated
political capital very quickly because they now realize they have a
little more than a year to do all the damage they are going to do.
There will be political surprises all across Europe this year and
next. By the time they are done the Democrats will look like Labour in
the UK, a brittle shell of a party built on equal parts envy and smarm,
and the Republicans, guided by Trump, will return to power with a
vengeance we’ve never experienced in U.S. politics. It will not be
pretty.
And if John Stewart had any effect the other day he will be one of
the reasons why this plan will work. If it doesn’t work then James
Cameron better stop working on those Avatar sequels and begin
development of Titanic 2: Zombie Boogaflu.
Then again, by the time it comes out it’ll be more Ken Burns than Kurosawa anyway.
Because the goal of this little theatrical display is nothing less
than the reunification of the broken American electorate. Both Left and
Right, animated by the virus of American exceptionalism, will need
someone to blame for the tragedies of today and the hardships of
tomorrow.
That’s the script anyhow. It’s what passes for good writing these days in Commie-wood.
If Chinese Premier Xi Jinping is smart he will not take advantage of
the paralysis and vacuum at the top of the U.S. political system as led
by the Olden Girls and make a move on Taiwan. He should just do nothing
and let Davos’ plans to get the two countries to fight fall flat. That would honestly be the best possible outcome at this point.
The good news is Stewart’s curtain call was a bit too much needle
scratch and not enough Honest Injun. The bad news is that most of the
people he was targeting can’t tell the difference.
And even if they do see through his schtick that just leaves us even
more angry and divided than before while Nancy Pelosi forces struggle
sessions over Juneteenth in Congress, organizing election fraud in
Georgia may get Stacey Abrams the Nobel Peace Prize and the government
is trying to make the X-Files a documentary.
technologyreview | The implant was fine; it was me that was unpaired. I’d fallen out of
sync with the city, and I hated it for taking people away from me and
leaving me on my own.
It’s safest to stay indoors: stay
home. It’s the only way you can avoid the awkwardness, the
disappointment, the fear. Delete Netflix and Uber Eats, install Prime
Video and Amazon Restaurants. Stay at home and build your own city, make
your own dopamine map. What’s the point of being lonely if you can’t do
it by yourself?
At first,
I tried to watch only movies set in New York, as though that had some
significance. So the Avengers movies seemed a good place to start. I
thought maybe watching the city being repeatedly reduced to rubble at a
whim—endless computer-generated buildings demolished into nothing more
than Technicolor pixel dust—might give me the hits I needed. But the app
barely registered a spike for the first two hours and 22 minutes.
It
wasn’t until I got to the post-credits scene—the one where the whole
team is sitting around, silently eating, in some nameless, unaffiliated
NYC shawarma joint—that my phone started to vibrate.
I’m not
going to lie: for a fleeting moment I was ecstatic. I couldn’t tell you
if it was just the dopamine spike or some joyful relief that the app had
actually registered it. I rewound the scene and watched it again. Same
spike, but with a slightly lower peak, according to the app. Third time
was similar, but the results diminished again. Time to find more
content.
At first I thought I’d have to watch whole movies for
it to have the same impact—like I needed to build up some sense of
connection with or investment in the characters before their friendships
had any personal weight—and started earnestly slogging through the
entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But a YouTube fluke showed me
otherwise. Before I could stop it, autoplay served me a clip from Ant-Man and the Wasp
where Ant-Man is playing with his daughter, and my phone vibrated in my
lap. Repeatedly. It was a fucking revelation. I didn’t even have to sit
through countless rubble-cities and the eternal melodrama and the
endless wisecracking and the infinite polygons. Context was dead: all
that mattered was fleeting, calculated emotional spikes.
It’s not
hard to find the content once you know where to look. Listicles are your
guide—the real maps to dopamine city are called things like “The 10
Most Heartwarming Moments in the MCU” or “The MCU’s 12 Best Friendships”
or “Relive These Feel-Good Moments from the MCU.” Start by searching
Tumblr and Screen Rant and you’ll find them all. It’s even better and
more efficient if they give you the time stamps. Tony and James sniping
at each other in Iron Man (00:10:42). Nick Fury buddy-copping with Carol in Captain Marvel (01:48:07). Peter Parker and Ned Leeds in whichever Spider-Man movie that was (00:23:38).
And
then there’s the death scenes, which are perfect if you’ve also got
some unresolved societal-level mourning to work through. When Killmonger
dies in Black Panther. When Quicksilver dies in Age of Ultron. Spider-Man in Infinity War. Peggy in Winter Soldier. When Groot says “We are Groot” in Guardians of the Galaxy 2.
After
a while, of course, you don’t need to search it out; it finds you.
Before too long, every ad on every web page was screaming at me about
young-adult-oriented TV shows I never knew existed and Star Wars
spin-off cartoons. My YouTube recommendations filled up with nothing but
fan-edited compilations of superheroes weeping, or supercuts of every
time Frodo and Sam hugged.
There
was this whole culture I’d avoided, that I thought I was somehow above,
that wasn’t for me. An entire industry built to serve up comforting
dopamine hits to a population wracked by technologically mediated
loneliness, and exhausted by a society that felt like it was in
constant, confusing collapse.
caitlinjohnstone | In a society that's enslaved to egoic consciousness as ours is, the
things that generate the most public interest will be those which
flatter or infuriate common egoic constructs. This is not unique to
politics; advertisers have raked in vast fortunes by associating
products with common cultural mind viruses like body image issues and
personal inadequacy, and TV show hosts like Jerry Springer and Maury
Povich figured out decades ago that you can attract massive ratings by
letting people feel smug and superior at the sight of poor and
uneducated guests acting out emotionally.
To make something go
viral, it needs to appeal to the ego. Advertisers understand this. Media
executives understand this. Propagandists understand this.
Creating big psychological identity structures out of our politics
makes the job of the propagandists so very much easier; it's like a
lubricant which lets mass-scale psyops glide smoothly into public
consciousness. From there it's a very easy task to get people hating
Russia or China for this or that partisan reason, or to get people
believing Trump or Biden are helping the American people despite their
both continuing and expanding the same murderous and oppressive status
quo of their predecessors.
This is why the partisan divide is the
most heated and contentious it's ever been, while the actual behavior
of each mainstream party when it's in power brings in only the most superficial of changes.
The oligarchs who own the political/media class desire the continuation
of the status quo upon which they have built their empire, but they
also want to keep the public as plugged in as possible to the partisan
perspectives which facilitate the propaganda that cages our minds.
The
solution to this, on an individual level, is to dismantle any egoic
attachment you might have to either of the mainstream political factions
which preserve the status quo. This includes any attachment to the phony populism of progressive Democrats, and it includes any attachment to the phony populism of Trumpian Republicans.
These factions within the mainstream factions are themselves propaganda
constructs which will never be permitted to advance any agenda that
isn't desired by the oligarchic empire; they serve only to keep people
who would be inclined to reject mainstream politics plugged in to
mainstream politics.
And of course the ultimate solution to this
problem is for humanity to awaken from the ego. All propaganda relies on
egoic hooks in public consciousness to circulate itself, so if humanity
begins dropping its habit of creating psychological identity structures
altogether (which it looks like it might), we will become harder and harder to propagandize. Since humanity's collective problems ultimately boil down to
the fact that sociopaths manipulate our minds at mass scale, such a
transformation would make a healthy new world not just possible but
inevitable.
bloomberg | Over the next few weeks, a company called Kernel
will begin sending dozens of customers across the U.S. a $50,000 helmet
that can, crudely speaking, read their mind. Weighing a couple of
pounds each, the helmets contain nests of sensors and other electronics
that measure and analyze a brain’s electrical impulses and blood flow at
the speed of thought, providing a window into how the organ responds to
the world. The basic technology has been around for years, but it’s
usually found in room-size machines that can cost millions of dollars
and require patients to sit still in a clinical setting.
The
promise of a leagues-more-affordable technology that anyone can wear
and walk around with is, well, mind-bending. Excited researchers
anticipate using the helmets to gain insight
into brain aging, mental disorders, concussions, strokes, and the
mechanics behind previously metaphysical experiences such as meditation
and psychedelic trips. “To make progress on all the fronts that we need
to as a society, we have to bring the brain online,” says Bryan Johnson,
who’s spent more than five years and raised about $110 million—half of
it his own money—to develop the helmets.
Johnson is the chief executive officer of Kernel, a
startup that’s trying to build and sell thousands, or even millions, of
lightweight, relatively inexpensive helmets that have the oomph and
precision needed for what neuroscientists, computer scientists, and
electrical engineers have been trying to do for years: peer through the
human skull outside of university or government labs. In what must be
some kind of record for rejection, 228 investors passed on Johnson’s
sales pitch, and the CEO, who made a fortune from his previous company
in the payments industry, almost zeroed out his bank account last year
to keep Kernel running. “We were two weeks away from missing payroll,”
he says. Although Kernel’s tech still has much to prove, successful
demonstrations, conducted shortly before Covid-19 spilled across the
globe, convinced some of Johnson’s doubters that he has a shot at
fulfilling his ambitions.
A
core element of Johnson’s pitch is “Know thyself,” a phrase that harks
back to ancient Greece, underscoring how little we’ve learned about our
head since Plato. Scientists have built all manner of tests and machines
to measure our heart, blood, and even DNA, but brain tests remain rare
and expensive, sharply limiting our data on the organ that most defines
us. “If you went to a cardiologist and they asked you how your heart
feels, you would think they are crazy,” Johnson says. “You would ask
them to measure your blood pressure and your cholesterol and all of
that.”
The first Kernel helmets are headed to brain research
institutions and, perhaps less nobly, companies that want to harness
insights about how people think to shape their products. (Christof Koch,
chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle,
calls Kernel’s devices “revolutionary.”) By 2030, Johnson says, he wants
to bring down the price to the smartphone range and put a helmet in
every American household—which starts to sound as if he’s pitching a
panacea. The helmets, he says, will allow people to finally take their
mental health seriously, to get along better, to examine the mental
effects of the pandemic and even the root causes of American political
polarization. If the Biden administration wanted to fund such research,
Johnson says, he’d be more than happy to sell the feds a million helmets
and get started: “Let’s do the largest brain study in history and try
to unify ourselves and get back to a steady state.”
eudaeminiaandcompany |In American life, everything, so much as can be, is private. Almost nothing is public.
You go from your big house to your big car to your big sofa and you sit
in front of your big TV. Back and forth to and from work you go this
way. You barely need to speak to another person at all — except in the
way of a commodity. The market mediates all human relationships, more or
less — even romantic ones, now, which are brokered by algorithms, and
reduced to raw sexuality. Everyone is a commodity.
That
sounds like the stuff my favourite teenage punk bands would say. But
they were right, the more I think about it. What does it mean when
commodified relations are the only ones left in a society?
Well,
people grow estranged. From each other. They don’t see each other as
fellow travellers anymore, fellow citizens, husbands, mothers, fathers,
grandparents…anything.
So what are they? They’re rivals. Adversaries.
For what, in what? In a series of games. I shouldn’t call them games,
though, because the stakes are very real. One game is played at work —
Americans compete for “jobs,” in “jobs,” ferociously. They work famously
long hours and get little to no real rest or succour. Why? Because, of
course, everything is attached to the “job” — healthcare, retirement,
childcare, etcetera. I put it in quotes because the only real point of this is to make billionaires richer — Americans are right where they were in economic terms half a century ago.
Americans are rivals for work, which makes them adversaries for basic resources — money, medicine, food, shelter. And
they’re also rivals and adversaries for status. Big cars, big houses,
big TVs. Americans are told that status and power are all that count in
life, apart from money — and they obey this dictum weirdly mindlessly.
They preen on Instagram and spend their money on shinier and bigger and
faster things, and go ever deeper into debt. They don’t really regard
each other as neighbours, friends, colleagues. They’re rivals in these
zero-sum games: for basic resources, by way of production, and then for
social status, by way of consumption.
This
is a strange story of individualism and materialism run amok, gone
haywire, pushed to the extreme. American life is so alienating because,
above all, it’s hyper-individualistic. Like I said, you can go a day — a
week — without ever talking to another living soul as anything other
than a commodity. That is because you are never sharing anything with anybody, something as simple as public space.
Americans famously deny each other healthcare — while carrying guns to Starbucks. Mass shootings are weekly if not daily
events. America’s legendary cruelty and hostility isn’t a fiction. And
neither is the idea that at its heart is an materialism and
individualism gone haywire. Everything is private — that’s a statistical
fact, about 85% of America’s economy is private, and just 15% public.
That’s
a recipe for selfishness that goes off the charts. When everything is
private, and so little public, it’s not just that you don’t rub elbows
with anyone else, except as a commodity — and well, commodities are disposable. It’s also that a kind of enmity takes over. You’ve got your big house and big car and big TV. And now you have to keep it.
The world becomes a threat, to the hyper individualistic, hyper
materialistic personality — and sharing anything with anyone, which is
vulnerability, becomes a liability.
theatlantic | When you come into money as I
did—young, scared, and not very savvy about the world—you are taught
certain precepts as though they are gospel: Never spend the “corpus”
(also known as the capital) you were left. Steward your assets to leave
even more to your children, and then teach them to do the same. And
finally, use every tool at your disposal within the law, especially
through estate planning, to keep as much of that money as possible out
of the hands of government bureaucrats who will only misuse it.
If
you are raised in a deeply conservative family like my own, you are
taught some extra bits of doctrine: Philanthropy is good, but too much
of it is unseemly and performative. Marry people “of your own class” to
save yourself from the complexity and conflict that come with a broad
gulf in income, assets, and, therefore, power. And, as one of my uncles
said to me during the Reagan administration, it’s best to leave the
important decision making to people who are “successful,” rather than in
the pitiable hands of those who aren't.
I
took far too long to look with clarity upon these precepts and see them
for what they are: blueprints for dynastic wealth. Why it took me so
long is a fair question. All I know is that if you are a fish, it is
hard to describe water, much less to ask if water is necessary, ethical,
and structured the way it ought to be. As long as no one so much as
raised an eyebrow about the ethics of the CRAT, the CRUT,
and the credit swap, who did I think I was to query the fundamentals? I
did not have the emotional courage to go down that path.
There
was another reason for my inaction, and I am deeply ashamed to say what
it was. But here goes: Having money—a lot of money—is very, very nice.
It’s damn hard to resist the seductions of what money buys you. I’ve
never been much of a materialist, but I have wallowed in the less
concrete privileges that come with a trust fund, such as time, control,
security, attention, power, and choice. The fact is, this is pretty
standard software that comes with the hardware of a human body.
As
time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are
similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you
need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of
calm, now you find that you can’t stop at six. Likewise, if you move up
from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to
coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you
through a public airport terminal again.
Comforts,
once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become
necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common
feeling with the rest of humanity.
I
tell you all this not to defend myself; that’s between me and my
conscience. I am telling you this because human nature is a mighty
force, and fighting it requires understanding it.
What has caused me to question my indoctrination has been ethics.
FT | Felix Marquardt, a former global schmoozer and current author of The New Nomads, explains why attempting to solve the world’s problems up a Magic Mountain in Switzerland over the course of a few short days, is a quick fix that does more harm than good.
A few weeks ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) pulled the plug on its gathering in Singapore in August. The reasons invoked by the organisers for this third cancellation (plans for an alternative, exceptional meeting in Lucerne in May were also scrapped earlier this year) centred around health concerns and logistics.
The truth is more complex and the malaise runs deeper.
The pandemic has exposed the contradictions of the WEF as a project and its terminal lack of legitimacy and credibility in the post-Covid era.
My inkling as an addict in recovery, is that the organisers are unable to come to terms with this because, just like others in the throes of active addiction, they are in denial.
I used to be a senior adviser to a number of global leaders and a Davos cheerleader. I also used to do a lot of drugs. I had my last drink and drug seven years ago.
At the height of my substance abuse, I thought I couldn’t possibly be an alcoholic or an addict. Addicts were people shooting up on park benches or sucking on glass pipes in crack houses. I was flying around the world in business class, living in five star palaces, working for heads of state (including dictators), people running for office (including aspiring dictators) and CEOs of some of the world’s largest multinationals.
A few years into recovery, I came to a different realisation: I had flourished in Davos and in other global circles of power not in spite of my being an addict, but in no small part because I was one. The high which proximity with power, fame and wealth fuelled in me wasn’t that different from the high I felt when I did drugs.
So what do my experiences say about others in the WEF circus?
The pandemic has sparked a global existential crisis in many of us, including pillars of the Davos establishment. It has been about recognising, belatedly, that what we’ve been calling “normal” is a form of civilisational suicide.
Many of us are coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know how to decorrelate greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth and that the phrase green growth is, for now and the foreseeable future, an oxymoron. In a world where about 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the 10 per cent wealthiest humans — those of us who earned not millions but $38,000 or more in 2015 — the climate crisis is fundamentally an inequality crisis.
Yet from its inception, the WEF has hence been engaged in an exercise of contortion to not have a meaningful conversation on growth. It has since then been paid hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars (governed by Swiss law, the finances of the WEF are frighteningly opaque) by entities whose shareholders are eager to avoid it.
If we have indeed become addicted to carbon, growth and extraction, the techno-utopian verbiage which has become the lingua franca of Davos has become a liability.
The author Lewis Hyde once wrote that the spread of alcoholism happens when a culture is dying. A healthy, functioning culture turns its children into grown-ups. Addicts in contrast are defined by Jung’s characterisation of the puer aeternus.
That prism of addiction helps explain our culture’s childish “solutionism”. Like addicts in recovery who get a daily reprieve but are never “cured”, what we are dealing with are predicaments not problems. Problems, like the equations schoolchildren are asked to solve, have solutions. In contrast, you can respond to predicaments in a more or less constructive and healthy way but they cannot be solved. You have to live with them.
The current, dominant, “feelgood” approach mirrors that of an addict, in recovery but secretly hoping that they will one day be able to “manage” their substance use. The Davos crowd seek quick fixes, takeaways, action points and deliverables, rather than dwelling on the thoroughly uncomfortable reality of our condition, for fear of going into depression or becoming paralysed by inertia. The sooner that is ditched, the better. “The highest form of hope,” the French author George Bernanos once wrote, “is despair overcome.” But to overcome it, you first need to go through the despair. You need to hit rock bottom.
commondreams | A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
finds that the U.S. continues to suffer from the extreme and growing
wealth and power of inherited-wealth family dynasties – and the growth
of their extreme wealth accelerated during the pandemic.
The report, “Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality,”
tracked the 50 wealthiest families from 1983 to 2020 using data from
Forbes. IPS researchers found that by 2020, the 50 families had amassed
$1.2 trillion in assets. For the 27 families on the Forbes 400 list in
1983, their combined wealth had grown by 1,007 percent and for the five
wealthiest dynastic families, their wealth increased by a median 2,484
percent during 37 years. The Walton family led the pack with an increase
of 4,320 percent, while the Mars candy family saw its wealth increase
3,517 percent.
“When we focus on the surging fortunes of
first-generation billionaires – and their shocking tax avoidance – we
forget to look at the troubling growth of dynastic families and the
changes in tax policies that will enable the children of today’s
billionaires to become tomorrow’s oligarchs,” said Chuck Collins,
co-author of the report and author of the new book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.
“In
a healthy democratic society with a functioning tax system, wealth
disperses over decades as people have children, pay their taxes, and
give to charity. But with a weak tax system on wealth – as confirmed by
the recent leak showing low billionaire taxes – we are now seeing
wealth accelerate over generations, leading to consolidated wealth and
power,” he said.
The report finds that inherited wealth
dynasties are growing due to an inadequate tax system, excessive hiding
of wealth in dynasty trusts, and low charitable giving by
multi-generational wealth dynasties. It also finds that members of the
inherited wealth generation are using their wealth and power to rig the
rules to get more wealth and power. Some are even using their charitable
donations and political giving to press for lower taxes.
Other key findings from the report include:
Dynastic
wealth grows much faster than the wealth of ordinary families. The 27
families who were on the Forbes 400 list in 1983 had a median increase
in their net worth, adjusted for inflation, of 904 percent over those 37
years. In contrast, between 1989 and 2019—the most recent year
available—the wealth of the typical family in the U.S. increased by just
93 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars.
The
wealth of the very top grew even faster. The five wealthiest dynastic
families in the US have seen their wealth increase by a median 2,484
percent from 1983 to 2020. For example:
In
1983, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and his children were worth just
$2.15 billion (or $5.6 billion in 2020 dollars). By the end of 2020,
Walton’s descendants had a combined net worth of over $247 billion, an
inflation-adjusted increase of 4,320 percent.
The
Mars candy dynasty has seen its wealth increase 3,517 percent over the
past 37 years, from $2.6 billion in 1983 (in 2020 dollars) to $94
billion by 2020. The Mars family also stands out for the miniscule
amount of money they have stored in family foundations—$48 million as of
2018—in contrast to the large sums they have spent on public policy
advocacy to change tax laws.
Dynastic wealth
is persistent and consolidating. Of the 20 wealthiest families on the
list in 2020, 13 were already in the top 20 in 1983. Only 4 of the top
20 wealth dynasties are new to the list since 1983.
Wealth
for dynastic families has grown significantly during the COVID-19
pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the top 10
families on the Forbes dynasty list have had a median growth in their
net worth of 25 percent.
Dynastically
wealthy families wield a great deal of political power, and use it to
further their interests. The report profiles dynastic family members who
spend millions lobbying for favorable tax, labor, and trade policies,
give to candidates, campaigns and PACs, serve on policy advisory boards;
and even serve in government themselves. For example, members of the
Busch, Mars, Koch, and Walton families have together spent more than
$120 million over the past ten years on lobbying directly for tax,
labor, and trade policies favorable to their businesses and investments.
Dynastic
families exploit their philanthropic power too, through charities and
foundations. The report examined more than 248 foundations set up by the
top 50 families, housing more than $51 billion in assets. While many
move much-needed revenue to broader public interest charities, others
fund groups working to reduce taxes on the wealthy and roll back
regulations that constrain corporate profits. Some funnel millions to
donor-advised funds, which can fund dark-money political advocacy. And
in a few cases, family members have used them to compensate themselves.
The
report profiles all of the 50 families, including the Waltons, the
Kochs, the Mars family, and many others, some well-known and some
relatively unknown. The report explains the dangers from the extreme
consolidation of dynastic wealth and power.
cbsnews | Even as the nation rebounds from the coronavirus pandemic,
more than 2 million homeowners are behind on their mortgages and risk
being forced out of their homes in a matter of weeks, a new Harvard
University housing report warns.
Most of the homeowners at risk of foreclosure are either low-income
or families of color, said researchers who published the 2021 State of
the Nation's Housing report. Congress has dedicated $10
billion to help homeowners get caught up on payments, but it's unclear
if that funding will make it to families before mortgage companies begin
sending out foreclosure notices, researchers say.
Separately,
millions more renters are "on the brink of eviction," the Harvard
researchers found. Census data show that 6 million households are still behind on rent and could face eviction at the end of June, when federal eviction protections expire.
The Center for Disease Control order halting some evictions, and
federal liminations on foreclosures for federally-backed housing, both
expire on June 30. Housing advocates have pushed for the Biden
administration to extend both, but there is no indication an extension
will happen.
"With so many renters in financial distress, there are concerns about an impending wave of evictions," the Harvard report said.
More than 7 million homeowners took advantage of the foreclosure moratorium passed as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act
last spring. The provision was later extended by the Biden White House.
As of March 2021, most of those homeowners have started repaying
lenders and some are even up to date with their lenders. But that leaves
about 2.1 million still behind on their mortgages, researchers said.
NYTimes | Most city leaders, eager to rejuvenate downtown economies, have lifted
coronavirus restrictions. But rising violent crime has kept both
residents and tourists at home.
Mayors of American cities have yearned
for the moment they could usher in a return to normalcy, casting away
coronavirus restrictions on bars, restaurants, parties and public
gatherings.
Yet now, even with
reopenings underway across the United States as the pandemic recedes,
city leaders must contend with another crisis: a crime wave with no
signs of ending.
They are cheerleading
the return of office workers to downtowns and encouraging tourists to
visit, eager to rejuvenate the economy and build public confidence. But
they are also frantically trying to quell a surge of homicides, assaults
and carjackings that began during the pandemic and has cast a chill
over the recovery.
In Austin, Texas,
for example, 14 people were injured early Saturday morning in a mass
shooting as revelers jammed a popular downtown nightlife district.
Some city
officials have touted progressive strategies focused on community
policing in neighborhoods where trust between police officers and
residents has frayed. Others have deployed more traditional tactics like
increasing surveillance cameras in troubled areas and enforcing curfews
in city parks to clear out crowds, as the police did in Washington Square Park in Manhattan in recent days.
In
Chicago, which fully reopened on Friday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot made
clear that her focus was on reducing violence over the summer, and that
her administration would focus resources on 15 high-crime pockets of the
city as part of that effort.
“We owe it to all of our residents, in every neighborhood, to bring peace and vibrancy back,” Ms. Lightfoot said.
NYTimes | This is the conversation about poverty
that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight,
but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy
choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We
typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I
have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism
(“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they
would”). But there’s more to it than that.
It
is true, of course, that some might use a guaranteed income to play
video games or melt into Netflix. But why are they the center of this
conversation? We know full well that America is full of hardworking
people who are kept poor by very low wages and harsh circumstance. We
know many who want a job can’t find one, and many of the jobs people can
find are cruel in ways that would appall anyone sitting comfortably
behind a desk. We know the absence of child care and affordable housing
and decent public transit makes work, to say nothing of advancement,
impossible for many. We know people lose jobs they value because of
mental illness or physical disability or other factors beyond their
control. We are not so naïve as to believe near-poverty and joblessness
to be a comfortable condition or an attractive choice.
Most
Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of
others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would
manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see
much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation,
lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to
the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the
economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft
rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers
who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good
reason not to take those jobs. These would reflect not America’s love of
poverty but opposition to the inconveniences that would accompany its
elimination.
Nor would these costs be
merely imagined. Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise
when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to
pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that
would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power.
We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The
truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is
rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as
intolerable. You can see it happening right now, driven by policies far
smaller and with effects far more modest than a guaranteed income.
newyorker | One
day in October, 2016, Carrie Presley was visiting her boyfriend, Ken
Mills, when she received a phone call from a neighbor informing her that
someone had just been shot outside her home. Presley lived with her
seventeen-year-old daughter, Cheyenne, in a two-story clapboard house on
Jackson Street, in the northern part of Dubuque, Iowa. The neighborhood
was notorious for its street crime, and Presley, who was, as she put
it, in “the housing community”—she received Section 8 housing
vouchers—had grown used to the shootings and break-ins that punctuated
life there. After talking to Cheyenne, who was in tears, Presley rode
with Mills back to her house, where police were sweeping the perimeter
of the property. As Presley recalled, Mills looked at her and said,
“We’re not doing this anymore.” It was decided that Presley and Cheyenne
would move in with Mills and his son Austin.
Mills,
a long-haul truck driver and the father of four grown children, lived
in a three-bedroom single-wide in the Table Mound Mobile Home Park, a
quiet community of more than four hundred mobile homes arranged in a
tidy grid. The homes in the park are not as portable as its name
implies; they’ve been placed on foundations, and their hitches have been
removed. From afar, they look a little like shipping containers sitting
next to small rectangular lawns. In Iowa, park owners can choose
whether to accept Section 8 vouchers—which are distributed to 5.2
million Americans—and many, including the owner of Table Mound, do not,
citing the administrative burden. By moving, Presley would lose her
government subsidy, and she and Cheyenne would have less space, but, as
Presley told me, “I was sacrificing material goods for a sense of
safety.” She and Cheyenne held a garage sale, and watched as their
neighbors walked away with the kitchen table, a dresser, armoires, and
most of their clothes.
In
the U.S., approximately twenty million people—many of them senior
citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities—live in mobile homes,
which are also known as manufactured housing. Esther Sullivan, a
sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver, and the author of the
book “Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place,”
told me that mobile-home parks now compose one of the largest sources
of nonsubsidized low-income housing in the country. “How important are
they to our national housing stock? Unbelievably important,” Sullivan
said. “At a time when we’ve cut federal support for affordable housing,
manufactured housing has risen to fill that gap.” According to a report
by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there isn’t a single
American state in which a person working full time for minimum wage can
afford a one-bedroom apartment at the fair-market rent. Demand for
subsidized housing far exceeds supply, and in many parts of the country
mobile-home parks offer the most affordable private-market options.
In
the past decade, as income inequality has risen, sophisticated
investors have turned to mobile-home parks as a growing market. They see
the parks as reliable sources of passive income—assets that generate
steady returns and require little effort to maintain. Several of the
world’s largest investment-services firms, such as the Blackstone Group,
Apollo Global Management, and Stockbridge Capital Group, or the funds
that they manage, have spent billions of dollars to buy mobile-home
communities from independent owners. (A Blackstone spokesperson said,
“We take great pride in operating our communities at the highest
standard,” adding that Blackstone offers “leading hardship programs to
support residents through challenging times.”) Some of these firms are
eligible for subsidized loans, through the government entities Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2013, the Carlyle Group,
a private-equity firm that’s now worth two hundred and forty-six
billion dollars, began buying mobile-home parks, first in Florida and
later in California, focussing on areas where technology companies had
pushed up the cost of living. In 2016, Brookfield Asset Management, a
Toronto-based real-estate investment conglomerate, acquired a hundred
and thirty-five communities in thirteen states.
Holy shit this is a DISASTER. Permanent capital is making it impossible to buy a home and in their bid to become America’s landlord. https://t.co/vKcbEHzOj4
thestar | A Toronto-based condo developer’s plan
to buy $1 billion worth of single-family homes and use them as rental
properties has sparked outrage from critics who say it’s an example of
how corporations can profit from the country’s housing crisis.
Core
Development Group, which develops and manages a wide range of real
estate projects across Canada, said it plans to build a far-reaching
single-family home rental business that will consist of 4,000 rental
units in Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and Atlantic Canada.
The
plan, first reported by the Globe and Mail, will target eight cities in
Ontario — including Hamilton, London, Kingston, St. Catharines, Barrie,
Peterborough, Cambridge and Guelph — before expanding outside Ontario
by 2026.
Critics say the strategy
mimics similar moves by American corporations in the aftermath of the
2008 financial crisis that bought swaths of housing stock and rented
units to tenants while keeping the equity.
It’s
called the ‘financialization’ of housing — where corporations and
financial markets treat housing as a vehicle for wealth and investment
rather than a social necessity, often to the detriment of individual
homebuyers, says John Pasalis, president of Realosophy Realty.
“It’s
hard enough for first-time homebuyers to get into the market. Now,
they’re competing with billion-dollar investors who are just buying
properties to rent them out, in a market where we’re not building enough
single-family homes to begin with,” said Pasalis.
Real estate prices have soared during the pandemic, driven in part by low interest rates and rising demand. Toronto home prices jumped almost 30 per cent in May, to $1.11 million, while smaller cities and rural areas have seen increases as high as 50 per cent in one year.
Housing
advocates have pointed to a critical lack of supply in single-family
dwellings, forcing homebuyers to fight over the limited stock available
while prices inflate. This problem is exacerbated, they say, by
corporations that reduce the remaining supply by buying up homes and
converting them to rentals.
“It’s
wrong on all possible levels. It takes more properties out of our
inventory, and can only do harm to an already-tight supply,” said Ron
Butler, a mortgage broker with Butler Mortgage.
In
an interview with the Star, Core founder Corey Hawtin defended the
plans to purchase single-family homes, saying that the company is buying
far less than one per cent of the homes that trade in the Ontario
market on a yearly basis.
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