The American Economy Runs On Poverty And Precarity

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.

GottDAYYUM..., Investment Firms Buying Up Trailer Parks Too!!!

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.

Canada Too..., We'll Rent You What We've Made It Impossible For You To Buy!!!

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

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) June 10, 2021

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.

America Is Designed To Incentivize Crime At The Highest Levels

nakedcapitalism |  In America you always had two systems of justice, but it’s particularly bad right now. So it’s just like if you commit fraud, if murder people, as long as you do it with a spreadsheet, you get a bonus instead of a jail sentence. And I think that’s a crisis. It is also the crisis that we’re dealing with, with big tech. It is the crisis… Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, they have been caught for fraud multiple times, lying to advertisers, lying to publishers knowingly to induce more spending on Facebook. There are multiple consent decrees with the Federal Trade Commission. It’s similar with the other firms as well. They routinely lie, commit perjury and whatnot. And that’s kind of like a legacy of this policy framework and ideological framework that we inherited from the Bush administration and the Obama administration of simply not enforcing the rule of law against the powerful.

So that’s I think the dynamic that we’re dealing with today and it’s across every sector of the economy, right? It’s not just opioids, it’s not just big tech, it’s kind of everywhere. And what this does is two things. When you have effectively lawlessness for white collar elites, it both penalizes honest business people who cannot compete when they’re not willing to lie, steal and cheat. If the other guy’s allowed to lie, steal and cheat and you don’t want to do that, you lose, right? So it undermines honest business. And then it also creates a situation where criminals become the pinnacle of society. And I think we saw that with Trump, where Trump… Cy Vance who was the DA of Manhattan, a Democrat. He had them dead to rights on real estate fraud years ago, way before he was kind of in politics. And he just… Trump’s lawyer gave Cy Vance campaign money and Cy Vance didn’t bring the case.

And so if he had just brought that case, if he had said, this is a criminal act to defraud people of their money, Trump wouldn’t have been in politics, right? But because he didn’t, Trump was in politics. And I think what people saw in 2016 was, well, they’re all crooks. So I’m going to pick the guy that appeals to me. And the thing is, is that analysis, they’re all crooks, is right. They are all crooks. Not everyone obviously. But the structure of our elite society, if you look at it, it’s just designed to incentivize criminal behavior, lying, cheating, and stealing at the highest level. And that’s the reaction… We’re seeing a reaction to that and there are many different reactions to that. One of them is this sort of Trumpist reaction. Another one is kind of the Lina Khan and the FTC reaction. But that’s where our politics is right now.

And the Biden administration is kind of a transition moment, right? Just like the Trump administration was kind of a transition moment to a new kind of politics. We’re not totally sure what that’s going to be. I think that, that’s similar with the Biden ministration. It’s a transition moment to a new form of politics. And we’re a little bit unsure about whether we’re going to address this problem with the rule of law. It’s not just criminal law. It’s also antitrust law, insider trading, kind of all of finance. And you can look at SPACs, that’s just corporate behavior, insider dealing. Are we going to address that in a meaningful way? Are we going to restore equal political rights to all, or are we going to go and kind of transition sort of officially into an oligarchy and shed the vestiges of democracy that we have?

Rob Johnson:

Well, I think the fact that Donald Trump got elected in 2016 and his, if you will, bumper sticker, his credo was the system is rigid and people felt like they were hearing what they understood and it appealed to them out of their despair or their despondency related to where the system was. And I would say what’s perhaps hopeful now is after four years of Donald Trump and the January 6th insurrection, some of the people in power are afraid of going back to that, to a repeat performance. And while they may be under the same pressures, money and politics and enforcements and revolving doors for senior public officials enticed what you might call to not enforce or to enforce and subsidize powerful interests, all of this collectively frightens elected officials that they may be sending us in the direction of an authoritarian and perhaps violent person who does not abide by any rules.

So I think that your diagnosis is exactly right, and this place, this limbo you describe with the Biden administration is fascinating. They are at what that blues singer with my name, Robert Johnson, called the crossroads. They got to choose the path. But let’s talk a little bit about… You’d said with regard to Mark Zuckerberg or others, who’s going to call out the truth here? I mean, you do, but many think tanks are tax deductible, what would you call it? Marketing institutions for power. That’s where they get their source of funding. Many institutions in the media depend on advertising. Many universities depend upon donors and wealthy alumni. And even the arts now depend on big corporate power for structure of live shows, radio promotion, visibility that inspire sales. Where does the truth come from and where does the impetus for deep structural reform in response to the despair of a Trump like return? How do you see that?

Matt Stoller:

It’s a really good question. And I think that the truth, this is going to sound cheesy, but I think that the truth lies in the heart of the public. I think the public has views about how politics works and politicians respond to those views. And you have a bunch of elite institutions, which I think are corrupt across the board. But the public kind of creates the wind. Those elite institutions are kind of like the sailboat, right? And you can put the sail in lots of different ways, but ultimately if the wind is blowing in one direction or the other, that determines what you can do more than how amazing the boat is.

But the boat is something that you can control. So you’re kind of looking at… Elites like to look at the boat and decide, should we do this thing or should we use that sail or this other mechanism? But the wind is what really matters. And I think one thing that I’ve noticed, and I think people don’t really… Particularly Democrats, they don’t want to admit it but Obama was a really bad president and it matters that he was a really bad president. That his policies-

… That he was a really bad president. He pursued policies that concentrated wealth and power into the hands of corrupt actors. Not necessarily for bad reasons. He might’ve been doing it in good faith. It’s not a personal comment on him. But the consequences of his policies were horrific, and they made us a weaker country, an angrier country, a more frustrated country. The opioid crisis exploded on his watch. And it wasn’t that the Republicans were mean to him. He had bad ideas. And he used his political power to pursue those bad ideas. He put people in like Geithner and Michael Froman and a whole bunch of others to do bad things, to offshore jobs. And they did it because they thought to bail out Wall Street, to enact a foreclosure crisis, to essentially grant amnesty for white collar executives for crime.

Geriatric Old Birds Dipping Their Felonious Bills On Capitol Hill...,

oldest |  Congress is made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both houses of Congress have an age requirement: it is at least 25 years of age for the House and at least 30 years old for the Senate. While these age requirements are generally low, most members of Congress are nearly senior citizens.

This list contains current members of Congress in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. We have previously covered the Oldest Senators Ever as well as the Oldest U.S. Congressmen (House of Representatives) ever. Some of the people on this list are also on those lists as well.

As of May 2020, this list is as accurate as possible and will be updated as needed.

Eric Schmidt's Public/Private Connected Coalition Model Includes Reddit

mintpressnews |  Reddit is one of the world’s most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States’ eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.

That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company’s decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO’s think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for “Jessica Ashooh Reddit” filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.

This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official — all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.

The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who’s who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.

Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly noteworthy, given both these individuals’ roles in the region. As Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program, denounced as “genocide” by the successive United Nations diplomats charged with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes, Albright casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children, stating “the price is worth it.” Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior national security advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.

That mRNA Spike Protein Is Very Dangerous

npr |  The largest U.S. database for detecting events that might be vaccine side effects is being used by activists to spread disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

Known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, the database includes hundreds of thousands of reports of health events that occurred minutes, hours or days after vaccination. Many of the reported events are coincidental — things that happen by chance, not caused by the shot. But when millions of people are vaccinated within a short period, the total number of these reported events can look big.

Epidemiologists consider this database as only a starting point in the search for rare but potentially serious vaccine side effects. Far more work must be done before a cause-and-effect link can be determined between a reported health event and a vaccine.

"It's a very valuable system for detecting adverse events, but it has to be used properly," says William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "And it's ripe for misuse."

In fact, VAERS has played a major role in the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. The data is regularly appropriated by anti-vaccine advocates, who use the reports to claim falsely that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous. They are aided by the fact that the entire VAERS database is public — it can be downloaded by anyone for any purpose.

"There's very little control over what can be accessed and what can be manipulated," says Melanie Smith, director of analysis at Graphika, a company that tracks vaccine misinformation online. She says that she sees VAERS data being shared across a wide variety of anti-vaccine social media channels. "I would say almost every mis- and disinformation story that we cover is accompanied by some set of VAERS data."

VAERS was established decades ago, partly in direct response to the anti-vaccine movement. In 1982, a TV documentary called DPT Vaccine Roulette aired nationwide. It was filled with unsubstantiated claims that the vaccine given at the time against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus could lead to intellectual and physical disability.

 

Covid mRNA Therapeutic Mortality

openvaers  |  According to the VAERS reporting system (within the CDC) there were 5,997 currently reported fatalities in 2021 attributed to vaccinations during the first half of this year.

Of that 5,997 number: 5,888 are directly attributed to COVID vaccinations.

Reported Deaths post COVID Vaccine: Total 5,888

U.S. District Judge Harshly Rejects Houston Nurses Compulsory Vaccination Lawsuit

Chron |  A federal judge threw out a lawsuit filed by employees of a Houston hospital system over its requirement that all of its staff be vaccinated against COVID-19.

The Houston Methodist Hospital system suspended 178 employees without pay last week over their refusal to get vaccinated. Of them, 117 sued seeking to overturn the requirement and over their suspension and threatened termination.

In a scathing ruling Saturday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes of Houston deemed lead plaintiff Jennifer Bridges’ contention that the vaccines are “experimental and dangerous” to be false and otherwise irrelevant. He also found that her likening the vaccination requirement to the Nazis' forced medical experimentation on concentration camp captives during the Holocaust to be “reprehensible.”

Hughes also ruled that making vaccinations a condition of employment was not coercion, as Bridges contended.

“Bridges can freely choose to accept or refuse a COVID-19 vaccine; however, if she refuses, she will simply need to work somewhere else. If a worker refuses an assignment, changed office, earlier start time, or other directive, he may be properly fired. Every employment includes limits on the worker’s behavior in exchange for remuneration. That is all part of the bargain,” Hughes concluded.

Built To Rent Suburbs: Remember YOU Owning Nothing Is Part Of The Plan...,

WSJ |  Today, built-to-rent homes make up just over 6% of new homes built in the U.S. every year, according to Hunter Housing Economics, a real estate consulting firm, which projects the number of these homes built annually will double by 2024. The country’s largest home builders are planning for that future. Backed by banks and private investment firms, they have already bet billions on the sector, and will put down some $40 billion more during the next 18 months, Brad Hunter, founder of Hunter Housing Economics, projects. Built-to-rent subdivisions have been constructed or are under development in nearly 30 states. Taylor Morrison Home Corp. , Mr. Wood’s development partner and the nation’s fifth-largest builder, has said built-to-rent could soon become 50% of its total business. The company didn’t disclose the current share.

Homeownership is expected to decline over the next two decades—a trend that started with the generation after the baby boomers, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates for homeownership. Prices are rising faster than ever, leaving more people, including those with higher incomes, more likely to rent.

Built-to-rent subdivisions are attractive to some urban apartment renters who want to move to the suburbs but are unable or uninterested in buying a home. Many young professionals and families are less keen than their parents in being tied down by a 30-year mortgage, according to real-estate analysts, builders and tenants. They want the flexibility of renting and the freedom that comes with being able to pick up and leave after a lease. As they age, they may want the yard, garage, good schools and roomy basement, without the headaches of mowing that yard or buying a new motor when the garage door breaks.

Built-to-rent subdivisions are attractive to some urban apartment renters who want to move to the suburbs but are unable or uninterested in buying a home. Many young professionals and families are less keen than their parents in being tied down by a 30-year mortgage, according to real-estate analysts, builders and tenants. They want the flexibility of renting and the freedom that comes with being able to pick up and leave after a lease. As they age, they may want the yard, garage, good schools and roomy basement, without the headaches of mowing that yard or buying a new motor when the garage door breaks.

What The Whole And Entire F__k?!?!?!

centerforhealthsecurity |  The Center’s SPARS Pandemic exercise narrative comprises a futuristic scenario that illustrates communication dilemmas concerning medical countermeasures (MCMs) that could plausibly emerge in the not-so-distant future. Its purpose is to prompt users, both individually and in discussion with others, to imagine the dynamic and oftentimes conflicted circumstances in which communication around emergency MCM development, distribution, and uptake takes place. While engaged with a rigorous simulated health emergency, scenario readers have the opportunity to mentally “rehearse” responses while also weighing the implications of their actions. At the same time, readers have a chance to consider what potential measures implemented in today’s environment might avert comparable communication dilemmas or classes of dilemmas in the future.

The self-guided exercise scenario for public health communicators and risk communication researchers covers a raft of themes and associated dilemmas in risk communications, rumor control, interagency message coordination and consistency, issue management, proactive and reactive media relations, cultural competency, and ethical concerns. To ensure that the scenario accounts for rapid technological innovation and exceeds the expectations of participants, the Center’s project team gleaned information from subject matter experts, historical accounts of past medical countermeasure crises, contemporary media reports, and scholarly literature in sociology, emergency preparedness, health education, and risk and crisis communication.

The scenario is hypothetical; the infectious pathogen, medical countermeasures, characters, news media excerpts, social media posts, and government agency responses are entirely fictional.

Project team lead: Monica Schoch-Spana, PhD

Project team: Matthew Shearer, MPH; Emily Brunson, PhD, associate professor of anthropology at Texas State University; Sanjana Ravi, MPH; Tara Kirk Sell, PhD, MA; Gigi Kwik Gronvall, PhD; Hannah Chandler, former research assistant at the Center

Date completed: October 2017

Resources:

• SPARS Pandemic scenario book
• SPARS announcement from the Center
• SPARS Pandemic scenario book listing in the HHS Disaster Information Management Research Center's resource library

Finally, A Way To Privatize Public Housing - The Strings Attached Should Be Most Interesting

sacbee |  To fund the program, a “state-sponsored corporation” would make a one-time deposit using available dollars into a “new revolving fund.”

The state would then sell shares to investors to generate new revenue. As home values increase, so would the fund’s value, the Democrats say.

There is a chance that private companies and investors would replace the state-sponsored corporation to finance the fund, the plan’s blueprint includes. The state would provide tax incentives to inspire investment. The Democrats’ proposal states that the investors would help keep costs to the state low.

“So, Win-Win-Win,” the Democrats’ announcement reads. “Win #1 – homebuyers that can now afford a home and can thrive in the middle class and begin to build wealth; Win #2 – investors that get to protect and build their wealth by investing in California real estate; and Win #3 – California taxpayers and state budget that will face only minimal new costs.”

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article250735029.html#storylink=cpy

Is There Nothing These Oxygen-Thieving Maggots Won't Parasitize?

WSJ  |  A bidding war broke out this winter at a new subdivision north of Houston. But the prize this time was the entire subdivision, not just a single suburban house, illustrating the rise of big investors as a potent new force in the U.S. housing market.

D.R. Horton Inc. DHI 1.01% built 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, rented them out and then put the whole community, Amber Pines at Fosters Ridge, on the block. A Who’s Who of investors and home-rental firms flocked to the December sale. The winning $32 million bid came from an online property-investing platform, Fundrise LLC, which manages more than $1 billion on behalf of about 150,000 individuals.

The country’s most prolific home builder booked roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class—an encouraging debut in the business of selling entire neighborhoods to investors.

“We certainly wouldn’t expect every single-family community we sell to sell at a 50% gross margin,” the builder’s finance chief, Bill Wheat, said at a recent investor conference.

From individuals with smartphones and a few thousand dollars to pensions and private-equity firms with billions, yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses to rent out or flip. They are competing for houses with ordinary Americans, who are armed with the cheapest mortgage financing ever, and driving up home prices.

“You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house,” said John Burns, whose eponymous real estate consulting firm estimates that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in. “That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive,” he said.

The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there. Investors’ slice of the housing market grows—as it does in other boomtowns, such as Miami, Phoenix and Las Vegas—among properties priced below $300,000 and in decent school districts.

“Limited housing supply, low rates, a global reach for yield, and what we’re calling the institutionalization of real-estate investors has set the stage for another speculative investor-driven home price bubble,” the firm concluded.

 

AG Merrick Garland Vows To Get Leakers Of Sacred Billionaire Tax Information

cracked |  On today's installment of our government undoubtedly having their priorities perfectly in check, newly-minted Attorney General Merrick Garland promised legislators that investigating the source of the alleged billionaire income tax data included in ProPublica's explosive report earlier this week stands firmly at the top of his agenda. 

“I promise you, it will be at the top of my list,” the former Supreme Court nominee told Sen. Susan Collins, during a Wednesday Senate Appropriations Committee budget hearing, per CNBC. Although the shocking ProPublica article, likely to be the first in a series, details how billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros allegedly used legal loopholes to pay next to nothing in personal income taxes, Garland is seemingly more concerned with how, exactly, the outlet obtained the data than why the ultra-wealthy allegedly aren't paying their fair share.

“Senator, I take this as seriously as you do. I very well remember what President Nixon did in the Watergate period — the creation of enemies lists and the punishment of people through reviewing their tax returns,” Garland explained. “This is an extremely serious matter. People are entitled, obviously, to great privacy with respect to their tax returns.” 

Despite the AG's evident passion on maintaining the sanctity of the rich's tax returns, it seems officials are already on the case – namely IRS Commissioner, Charles Rettig. “He said that their inspectors were working on it, and I’m sure that that means it will be referred to the Justice Department,” Garland explained. “This was on my list of things to raise after I finished preparing for this hearing.” Mr. Garland, if you're reading this, I know I may be a constant source of embarrassment for our mutual alma mater – Niles West High School – but you're really giving me a run for my money with this nonsense. 

The report, which aims to dispel the long-running myth "that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most," claims that through a series of legal loopholes – namely the fact that intangible assets, like stock earnings and increases in property value, are not taxable – some of America's richest business people have been paying much less than what some say they should to Uncle Sam. While ProPublica has stayed tight-lipped on how, exactly, they obtained these documents illustrating this phenomenon, which they claimed they received in “raw form, with no conditions or conclusions," the information included seemingly passed a reportedly rigorous fact-checking process. "In every instance we were able to check — involving tax filings by more than 50 separate people — the details provided to ProPublica matched the information from other sources," they explained.

 

Pissants: Taxes Are For Thee!!! NOT For Me....,

propublica |  In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.

The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.

 

 

If Your Profession Is "Lying For Billionaires" You're In Trouble When The People Catch On...,

statnews  |  To understand why billionaires are a sign of moral and economic failure, look no further than the Covid-19 pandemic.

Drug corporations could earn $190 billion from Covid-19 vaccine sales this year. Pharmaceutical profits have minted nine new pandemic billionaires, and helped eight existing billionaires enlarge their fortunes. Several of these are founders and private investors in three pharmaceutical corporations — Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac — whose vaccines use mRNA technology that was largely developed from publicly funded research.

Their financial bonanzas provide a disturbing contrast with vaccine apartheid. By the end of May, only 0.3% of all vaccine doses worldwide had been administered in low-income countries.

Facing condemnation for hoarding doses, the G-7 countries, which are meeting this weekend in England, are under pressure to launch a new plan to expand Covid-19 immunization globally. One hotly contested issue is whether they will call for mandatory sharing of mRNA vaccine technologies, including a proposed waiver of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 technologies.

Pandemic billionaires are speaking out against government intervention, warning it would undermine innovation and claiming that their firms can satisfy global demand for Covid-19 vaccines.

Because the public sector was largely responsible for developing mRNA technology and sharing it with corporations, the pandemic fortunes of these founders and investors stands in stark and repugnant contrast to billions of unvaccinated people.

Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac are each led by founders or longtime executives with a key role in company decision-making: Stéphane Bancel is Moderna’s CEO, Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin are BioNTech’s co-founders, and Franz-Werner Haas is CureVac’s CEO. In addition to getting head starts from publicly funded research, these companies also relied on private investment provided through venture capital or family offices (privately held companies that handle investment and wealth management for wealthy families). Venture capital investors include Flagship Pioneering, a Boston-based firm whose founder, Noubar Afeyan, also serves as Moderna’s chair, and MIG AG, a German venture capital firm that made early investments in BioNTech. Other large investors in BioNTech and CureVac were German family offices, including investments by Dietmar Hopp in CureVac and the Struengmann brothers in BioNTech.

Founders, executives, venture capitalists, and family offices all held substantial ownership stakes in the three mRNA companies heading into the pandemic. All of them had a choice at the start of the pandemic: maximize profits or maximize low-cost, global production of vaccines.

The three firms chose profit maximization, partnering with multinational companies or forging partnerships with a few contract manufacturers. This year, these companies will have sold nearly all their limited supply of vaccines to wealthy countries at high prices.

They could have instead chosen to avoid scarcity and hoarding by sharing technology, know-how, and intellectual property with other manufacturers, thereby expanding and decentralizing production. It wouldn’t be like they were giving away their intellectual property for free: sharing would allow these companies to earn royalties — and profits.

 

Only In America Can You Go To School For 20 Years To Earn Minimum Wage

Fauci knows exactly how much the losers who work in the labs are worth - trust and believe - you can’t make this s*#@ up. Do YOU want fresh students/technicians living in their cars and working in the BioSafetyLevel 3 BSL-3 labs?

 

The payscale of NIH funded positions is set by these jokers - after 20 years of schooling and a masters degree, you get to earn minimum wage doing the hands-on part of gain of function research.

 

Full-time, $32,697/year. OK.

32697 / 52 weeks / 40 hours = $15.71 / hr.

wisc.edu |

Position Summary:	The Influenza Research Institute (IRI) is an active and growing influenza research laboratory supporting cutting-edge research on negative-strand RNA viruses including influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and replication-deficient ebolavirus. The research group numbers over 30 including scientists, post-docs, technicians and grad students. We are looking for a Research Specialist who will characterize influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses and support other laboratory operations.
Position Duties:	List of Duties
Institutional Statement on Diversity:	Diversity is a source of strength, creativity, and innovation for UW-Madison. We value the contributions of each person and respect the profound ways their identity, culture, background, experience, status, abilities, and opinion enrich the university community. We commit ourselves to the pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, outreach, and diversity as inextricably linked goals.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison fulfills its public mission by creating a welcoming and inclusive community for people from every background - people who as students, faculty, and staff serve Wisconsin and the world.

For more information on diversity and inclusion on campus, please visit: Diversity and Inclusion
Degree and Area of Specialization:	Bachelors or Masters degree in biological sciences
Minimum Years and Type of Relevant Work Experience:	Minimum two years of laboratory experience. A moderate to strong knowledge and experience in molecular biology is required. In addition, animal experience and/or NGS experience is required.

Cell culture experience is important. Animal experience and biological safety level-3 (BSL-3) experience is desirable, but not required. Candidates with Illumina miSeq and ONT sequencing are encouraged to apply. Top candidates will be trained in biosafety, animal, and infectious disease research. Excellent verbal and written communication skills are required.

Additional Information:

The successful candidate must pass a background check and be approved by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under 42 CFR 73.8 and the Criminal Justice Information Security Risk Assessment. Ability to undergo and maintain a favorable background investigation and National Select Agent Registration security risk assessment. In addition, the ability to maintain a driver's license is required.

Annual seasonal influenza vaccination.

A criminal background check will be conducted prior to hiring.

A period of evaluation will be required.
Department(s):	A873100-SCHOOL OF VET MEDICINE/PATHOBIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Delleschau Breakaway Can't Be Manipulated Or Bought By Killer-Apes Chucking Bones Into Space...,

the-sun |  AMAZON billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space mission was met with ridicule yesterday — because people think his rocket is shaped like a giant todger.

Online jokers poked fun at the Blue Origin New Shepard craft, which will shoot him 60 miles above the Earth.

One said: “That rocket looks like a big willy.”

Another said: “Is it me, or does Jeff Bezos’ rocket look like a giant penis?”

And one quipped: “It’s basically a giant flaming space dildo.”

Bezos, 57 — worth £186billion — and his brother Mark, 53, will be on the rocket’s first crewed flight on July 20, 15 days after he steps down as Amazon boss.

The 11-minute mission will see the six-seater capsule soar above the Earth.

One seat is being auctioned, with bidding topping £2million.

Why Does A 92 Year Old Man "Serve" As Gatekeeper Of The Left Or Talk To Ana Kasparian?

jacobin | In 1967, Noam Chomsky emerged as a leading critic of the Vietnam War with a New York Review of Books essay critiquing US foreign policy’s ivory tower establishment. As many academics rationalized genocide, Chomsky defended a simple principle: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

A groundbreaking linguist, Chomsky has done more to live up to this maxim than almost any other contemporary intellectual. His political writings have laid bare the horrors of neoliberalism, the injustices of endless war, and the propaganda of the corporate media, earning him a place on Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” and in the surveillance files of the CIA. At ninety-two, Chomsky remains an essential voice in the anti-capitalist movements his ideas helped inspire.

Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila interviewed Chomsky for Jacobin’s Weekends YouTube show earlier this year. In their conversation, Chomsky reminds us that history is a process of continuous struggle, and that the working-class politics needed to secure universal health care, climate justice, and denuclearization are out there — if we’re willing to fight for them.

AK  Let’s start with a big question — why does Congress continuously tell the American people that it will not deliver on policies that have overwhelming public support?

NC Well, one place to look always is: “Where’s the money? Who funds Congress?” Actually, there’s a very fine, careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues and politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study in which they investigated a simple question: “What’s the correlation over many years between campaign funding and electability to Congress?” The correlation is almost a straight line. That’s the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences: greater the funding, higher the electability.

And in fact, we all know what happens when a congressional representative gets elected. Their first day in office, they start making phone calls to the potential donors for their next election. Meanwhile, hordes of corporate lobbyists descend on their offices. Their staff are often young kids, totally overwhelmed by the resources, the wealth, the power, of the massive lobbyists who pour in. Out of that comes legislation, which the representative later signs — maybe even looks at occasionally, when he can get off the phone with the donors. What kind of system do you expect to emerge from this?

One recent study found that for about 90 percent of the population, there’s essentially no correlation between their income and decisions by their representatives — that is, they’re fundamentally unrepresented. This extends earlier work by Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page, and others who found pretty similar results, and the general picture is clear: the working class and most of the middle class are basically unrepresented.

 

The People Who Control "AI" Are The Worst Humans Alive

caitlinjohnstone |   Learn enough about what’s happening in the world and you realize that most people in your society have worldviews that are completely and utterly wrong. This can seem bold, perhaps even arrogant, but if most people weren’t deluded about the world, the world wouldn’t be so fucked.

And it’s not that people are dumb; intelligence has little to do with it. Some of the most intelligent people on earth promote the same deluded worldviews as everyone else. The problem isn’t intellect, it’s manipulation, and anyone can be manipulated no matter how smart they are. This mass-scale manipulation is the result of wealthy people buying up narrative influence in the form of media, political influence, think tanks, lobbying, NGOs, etc, in conjunction with the mass-scale manipulations of the powerful government agencies which are allied with them.

The powerful work to manipulate the way the general public thinks, acts and votes to ensure that they remain in power. They pay special attention to who the most influential people in our society are, which is why the most prominent voices are so often the most delusional. There are filters in place designed to keep anyone from rising to positions of influence if they don’t support the consensus worldview promoted by the oligarchic empire, and once they do rise to influence they are actively herded into echo chambers which reinforce that worldview.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that the most influential voices in a virulently capitalist society will be those who have profited and benefited from the status quo. Of course they’re going to believe the system is working fine; it treats them like royalty.

This is why you can’t defer to recognized authorities when it comes to understanding your world; the system which selects and installs those authorities is designed to serve the powerful, not to tell the truth. The responsibility for understanding your world is yours, and yours alone.