This is a perfect, illustrated example of venture capital squeezing out individuals, cornering a market, and trying to extract ALL the profits from it. This sort of behavior is why housing prices have shot up nationwide. Home ownership was already under siege from underemployment, inflation, and educational loan burdens. Now we have the malfeasance of big companies trying to capture the low-hanging fruit in the housing market, which will only serve to further erode the American dream of the middle class, to the benefit of the already-wealthy. Zillow may have over-leveraged their algorithm here, but, rest assured, there are people out there doing this on a wide scale.
I once had a strained conversation with a good friend over the concept of a wealth tax. I was for it; he was very much against it, on the grounds that most of the “wealth” we’re usually talking about is in the form of stocks, which are “paper money.” He feels that this sort of asset is useless unless sold and converted to cash, when it will be taxed, if any gains are realized, and all’s fair in love in war, so to speak.
But this viewpoint overlooks the fact that “paper money” is an asset that has an strongly-estimable value in the future, just as much as real estate. And that means it can be borrowed against. The way the world works, and the laws of increasing returns being what they are, a guy like Elon Musk can just ask the nearest national bank for several hundred million dollars in cash, pay essentially nothing for the service, and all he would need to do is throw a stack at the armored car company to deliver it to his house, where he could fill up the pool in the back yard with the bills, and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck.
I mean, heck, I could do it, if I had a some short term need. I’m not going to get even Ms. Dugan’s rate, let alone Musk’s, but I could do it. I could borrow money against my portfolio, and use the money to pay for something like… college tuition. Oh, crap. This is probably a better option than actually dipping into the asset, huh?
I’ve watched The Big Short many times now. In fact, I just rewatched it again a couple weeks ago. This video makes some really good points about the 2008 mortgage meltdown in its 7-minute introduction, and draws lines between some dots which I didn’t even realize were left unconnected by the movie.
The big question that this all raises is, “Who?” Someone, somewhere, selling mortgage bonds, had to have realized, “Hey, I’m literally running out of mortgages to bundle into new bonds. I need the banks to start selling more mortgages, but the only way they can do that is to offer mortgages which make no traditional, financial sense.”
As I’ve noted many times on this blog, I’ve watched the housing situation in the Valley for decades, because of the IT/programming angle. Sure, a programmer can make twice the money on the coast, but housing is five to ten times more expensive. I don’t know how it is sustainable, or why it hasn’t collapsed, in the 20 years I’ve been paying attention.
This is where I entered this particular picture. When I started hearing about teaser-rate mortgages that allowed people to get into housing in California that they normally wouldn’t be able to afford, I did the thinking, and came away perplexed. Who would buy a house, predicated on barely being able to afford the teaser rate, knowing that they were either going to have to sell or find a way better job in 2-3 years? It just didn’t make sense to me.
The idea of these ridiculous teaser-rate mortgages had to start with someone. They didn’t make sense from the perspective of the buyer, or the bank, in any traditional sense. But, as this video points out, they made perfect sense if the bank was only interested in writing the mortgage with the intent to sell it into the bond market, where they would no longer care if it went into default.
I bought my first house around 1998. I was already hearing about how banks were selling their mortgages, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to drive across town and talk with the people who held “my paper.” So I bought a mortgage with the old, established, local bank here in town. Imagine my surprise when I got a letter just a week after closing that my mortgage had been sold to a big bank. At least mine was a “real” mortgage, based on sustainable numbers, but it’s easy to see that the craze of bundling mortgages was already well underway, 20 years before the crash.
And then my local bank was gobbled up by some other chain, and has been bought and sold multiple times since. But that’s a rant for another day.
So, now, 14 years after the crash, and watching movies and videos about it all, I finally realize: there was a guy. There had to have been a guy; a guy who had an “aha!” moment. He went to a bank, and talked them into this scheme of selling unsustainable mortgages, purely as cord wood for the inferno raging in the mortgage backed security market. As soon as he did, the bank became complicit. As soon as bond agency started buying these mortgages to bundle into bonds, they became complicit. As soon as they asked the bond rating firms to falsify their ratings, they became complicit. And when the FTC and the SEC didn’t do their jobs to oversee the ratings agencies, they, too, became complicit.
But there was a guy. Who was that guy? I’m just curious. I want to know who he was. How he spread the idea like a virus. How he made out when it all came crashing down. Maybe that’s a known known, but I haven’t heard his name. And it wouldn’t be surprising. I mean, one guy lighting the touch paper to the entire world’s economy? If I were complicit, I wouldn’t want to go around pointing fingers. And if I were the guy, I would surely keep my head down too.
Given the extremely predictable turmoil that emerged from Gettr’s content policies, though, I wonder if there isn’t something to this: a false-flag social network, set up only to watch it burn to the ground.
In this… post-modern era of the Information Age, how are we ever supposed to actually conclude anything about anything? I’m still scratching my head over the twin scandals of Trump’s supposed “pee tape” — which was a false flag, but reported as true — and Hunter Biden’s “laptop” — which was a real story, but reported as a false flag. By the time the dust finally settled, and the actual facts of these stories have been sorted out, and the clown show of perpetrators and accomplices revealed, we find that the political sides don’t care about the truth anyway. The impressions of those stories are what they took away, and that’s all that mattered to the people who perpetrated them on the American public. Where does that leave us?
At this point, I think it’s becoming clear that one of the most important tools of a false flag operation is, in fact, to weaponize social media and news organizations to fight with each other, to occlude the facts until your disinformation campaign has entrenched enough people in the opinions you want them to have that it doesn’t matter when the truth comes out. By the time it does, they don’t care to learn any more about the stories, you will have had the effect on people you wanted, and while the talking heads are sifting through the rubble, your next operation is already underway. Again, as a society, where does that leave us?
Terrific summary of the last few years of politics, as played out in the media. N.B., Twitter is never mentioned. For those that think that Twitter is a critical piece of the “news landscape,” and for the talking heads who try to make news stories tweets, Twitter is still downstream of CNN and Fox News.
The point everyone seems to be missing about the current hearing in the Supreme Court, reconsidering Roe v. Wade, is that we’re asking SCOTUS to adjudicate a nationally-binding, controversial interpretation of conflicting state laws. It doesn’t matter what you think of the issue of abortion: CONGRESS is the problem in our system here, NOT SCOTUS. If Congress would DO ITS JOB and WRITE LEGISLATION to make national policy on the subject, we wouldn’t be putting the Supremes in an unwinnable political situation. CONGRESS is the governmental body where the debate should be had, and where the process of democracy should be working, yet they are sticking their hands in their pockets, whistling tunelessly, and looking at the ceiling while everyone vents their spleen about the political leanings of the Supremes.
Congress is only interested in passing endless “continuing resolutions” to play games with the tax rules, dole out money to special interests, and collect campaign finance contributions, none of which is actually visible to the public. Every law being written now is just some lobbyist putting his employer’s wishes down on paper, and Congressmen shuffling around to see which way they need to vote, and what favors they’ll have to do, in order to NOT aggravate their largest donors. This is why every election is now based on how much you hate what the OTHER guy SUPPOSEDLY stands for, when no one has any real idea what hardly any of them will ACTUALLY put their name to. Congress is completely captured by Big Business, and until we “fix” the Citizens United ruling, they will never again make actual social policy by legislating again. If you manage to get something you want from our government, just consider yourself lucky that your desires happened to line up with some large donor or corporate PAC.
UPDATE: Someone on Twitter pointed out that the House has passed a bill, specifically to address the limitations of the recent, controversial Texas law, and pointed out astonishment how few people had heard about it. Indeed, that raises strange questions about why the media didn’t seem to do much to cover it.
Also, we were all (supposedly) educated in our public school system about the Senate filibuster, and how it was a strange loophole that’s been exploited for the entire history of the United States. It seems particularly silly, in these modern times, to block a vote by a 60% majority that could lead to passing a bill with a simple 51%, regardless of which party is in control of the body, or what law is being considered. I think it’s time to remove that parliamentary procedure once and for all.
Of course, it would be better if we repealed the 17th Amendment, and restored some semblance of States rights, as a check-and-balance to the Federal government — which the Founders envisioned, and wrote into The Constitution — but that matter was effectively settled when the Feds won the Civil War.
In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had “little, if any” impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document.
The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing.
Basically, this is everything you need to know about the state governance in the US. Literally all of our current national social issues take a backseat to what the Fortune 500 wants. Our governments, federal and state, do nothing but the bidding of big businesses, collectively decided by who’s in power, and which corporations are currently donating the most to campaigns. There’s nothing else to debate until Citizens United is fixed. Nothing. You can argue about gerrymandering and voting rights all you want, but personal voting does not matter in the slightest. Big business will always get what they want. If you happen to get something you want in the process, then just consider it a happy accident, and be on your way.
Nota bene, I’m NOT singling out a Democratic administration on this. There are innumerable examples of this sort of insider-turned-“lobbyist” on both sides of the aisle. Comcast, AT&T, and the FCC have had three-way incestuous relationship, stretching back for decades, across many administrations.
I have a simple question for every ‘expert’ who thinks they understand the root causes of the shipping crisis:
Why is there only one crane for every 50–100 trucks at every port in America?
No ‘expert’ will answer this question.
I’m a Class A truck driver with experience in nearly every aspect of freight. My experience in the trucking industry of 20 years tells me that nothing is going to change in the shipping industry.
This is the other half of the port problem itself.
Both of these stories talk all around the issue, but if you read between the lines, you can see the root problem, which I’ve been trying to explain for awhile now.
It is the business plan of every VC-funded startup today to buy their way into a market, use their funding to underprice everyone else out of it, come to monopolize it, and then extract all the profit from it going forward. (Or dualopolize, and collude with another heavy weight. Looking at you Verizon and AT&T.) Everyone else has learned the new playbook, and the US is experiencing runaway consolidation and monopolization in every market sector.
You can see the after-effects of this approach right now in New York. Uber has “won,” and the cab business is now in the toilet. The incumbent hegemony has been overthrown, and medallions (cab “licenses”) are now worth 1/5th what they were a couple years ago. Naturally, the state is proposing relief for cab companies, but it doesn’t give much relief to individual owners, and many of them are on hunger strike for more help.
We say that the United States has a capitalist economic system, but every business since the Reagan 80’s has concentrated its efforts to accrete as much power as possible, and use it to bully current competitors, and prevent new entrants into the market. This has resulted in our current situation where 2 or 3 companies control virtually everything about any particular market you can point to. The classic examples are food and entertainment/news. And when any large-enough business gets in trouble, the government is Johnny-on-the-spot to come rushing in with a bailout. So much for taking risks being the operative balance to getting to enjoy the profits.
The excess capacity of every link of every supply chain in the country has been liquidated for short-term profit over the past decade, and then COVID happened. And, very naturally, as predicted perfectly by the corporate model, the companies which have their respective leash on the various parts of this problem are yanking on them, to try to extract more profit from “the market.” Except that we, the average citizen, are “the market” here, and that’s why we’re seeing people start talking about inflation. It’s coming, and it’s inevitable, because the US has “free market capitalism” in name only now. Between the bailouts, and with as much involvement as Congress has “regulating” every market and industry now, it’s hard not to call our system a planned economy, which, of course, is the classic euphemism for Communism.
Netflix can’t seem to close the door on “The Closer,” with the streaming giant only further inflaming controversy with its defense of Dave Chappelle’s mocking of the transgender community in his latest comedy special.
This article is a pristine example of what’s wrong with “internet” “news,” and why we, as a society, are so fractured and antagonistic towards each other.
A Netflix co-CEO has responded to the backlash, and, frankly, was unequivocal about their position. The only reason they could be described as not being able to “shake” the controversy is because someone with an axe to grind at The Hill says so in an article designed to… incite more controversy. All links in the article refer back to… more articles at The Hill, and this article adds no new developments to the story.
I watched the special. I worked through the language, and watched it till the end. There are some pointed opinions about gender expressed, which I can understand some people would take umbrage with, in particular. However, what cannot be misconstrued — unless you are specifically trying to misconstrue it — is that the overall message of the special — the entire point of it, in fact — is one of unequivocal support for human beings, no matter what social tribe they identify with. (Except if they’re white, which I actually appreciate in the context of his oeuvre.)
Towards the end, Chappelle makes one of the most compelling and compassionate statements about the modern human condition that I’ve ever heard anyone make, and I have a real problem with people who can’t see past their own prejudices to hear it. Anyone coming away from watching the show with any message other than love towards any minority is purposely trying to leverage selected quotes to gin up hatred towards Chappelle, and cash in on the resulting clicks. In my opinion, this sort of behavior is literally strangling society as we have known it up till now.
UPDATE: Hold up.
“I should have recognized the fact that a group of our employees was really hurting,” Ted Sarandos said in an interview.
$10 says they pull the special within a month. Now that the people decrying the program have seen that they can draw blood in the form of an apology for the reaction to the reaction, they will double down on getting the episode removed from the service.
These were literally back-to-back posts on Imgur’s “front page.” The underwritten war of the political class being waged by PAC’s and foreign governments on social media is literally saying the exact same things about each other, and make it seem like they are trying to tip the party balance in this country. It makes no difference.
I also see that ZeroHedge has posted a graph about sharply-increasing inflation, which I’ve been predicting for awhile now. To wit, it’s nearly doubled in just the last 6 months. The supply chain issues in every sector are the problem. They’ve all been strangled for short-term profits for at least a decade, and there’s nothing stopping the continued accretion of power through mergers in every industry.
The oligarchs have taken over this country, and are extracting all the profits from every financial sector. The top 1% own more than half the wealth in the country, and this situation can only get worse, exponentially. The tipping point has been passed. The most galling part of this is that they’ve gotten the rest of us to bicker about which party has doomed us to economic collapse, when they ownboth of them, top to bottom.
The oligarchs, through their media channels, will tell us that COVID has brought about this inflation, and the looming disaster to follow, but it was their profit taking which has stretched our supply infrastructure so thin that it couldn’t handle a predictable world-wide stress to begin with.
I don’t think the average person can see the utter futility about arguing Right-vs-Left politics when we’re living in a reincarnated feudalistic society, with modern-day versions of kings and lords, and vassals and serfs. Make no mistake: The idea of a democratic republic put forth in the US Constitution is dead and buried. Whatever we have right now, it is no longer a democracy nor a republic. It makes no material difference which “party” controls the government. Everyone in Washington is there to do the bidding of the largest corporations (and their officers) and the richest people (and their business interests), and they will, without fail, defer to them over the common man on every issue.
The reason we haven’t gotten socialized medicine yet is because the people running the largest health insurance companies haven’t figured out how to make even more money in such a system. As soon as they do, we’ll get an American version of the UK’s NHS the very next day.
