Investors account for 30 per cent of home buying in Canada, data show – The Globe and Mail

Investors have become more prevalent in Canada’s housing market, accounting for 30 per cent of all residential real estate purchases in the first part of this year, according to new data.

Source: Investors account for 30 per cent of home buying in Canada, data show – The Globe and Mail

First they came for corporations, and I said nothing, because I didn’t own a corporation.

Then they came for retail chains, and I said nothing, because I didn’t own a retail chain.

Then they came for franchises, and I said nothing, because I was not a franchisee.

Then they came for housing, and now I can’t afford to buy a house.

Private equity and investment banks have been buying up literally everything over the past 40 years, driving up prices, keeping all the profits for the so-called “1%”, pushing workers into government assistance, and forcing our civilization back into a modern form of feudalism. Will there ever come a day when we can get our governments to break them up, and recreate the actual “free” markets that capitalism was supposed to based on?

Cummins, Brought to You by the Letters B and V

Cummins’ CEO just proudly spammed the whole company, announcing that she was “delighted” that the board has approved 3 more corporate officers for the company.

Goodie.

The only way this announcement affects me is to let me know that the company is now spending several more million dollars per year on executive pay packages. And this is happening as I am watching them like a hawk, and expecting them to announce a 3-5% headcount reduction later this year, to jump on the bandwagon that every other big company is riding.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of the impact of this interruption to my workflow. In fact, I have no idea who inside the company is supposed to benefit from this information, or in what way.

This can only be about juicing news for Wall Street, which has nothing to do with people, and everything to do with holding companies. Cummins is just another one of countless companies in the US which is being run by Blackrock and Vanguard, and various investment banks that you may (or may not) have seen printed on your 401K statements. According to Yahoo!, Cummins is 86% owned by “institutions.” Our country is being run by companies, and our companies are being run by Wall Street.

UPDATE 12/8/23: Many companies are announcing layoffs just before the holidays. (What an annoying time to do so!) Cummins offered early retirement buyouts. I’m hoping that this settles the balance sheet to their satisfaction.

UPDATE 1/4/24: Oops. CEO Jenn Rumsey says this settlement won’t affect stock price, business outlook, or even internal compensation. I hadn’t realized that Cummins made so much money year over year to be able to weather a settlement like this without even a flinch. I think this shows that the figure was reached based on Cummins’ ability to pay, rather than some quantifiable harm their actions supposedly incurred. This feels like a political shakedown, by a liberal administration, of a sympathetic Fortune 250, with deep pockets, which happens to make a product that’s politically unpopular with the party’s base.

How The Total State Circumvented The Constitution

Oligarchs, with their financial ability to influence mass media, education, and marketing, quickly proved to be the social force most able to manipulate the public will. With all three branches now functionally subject to the same democratic selection pressures it is no surprise an oligarchy came to achieve hegemonic social force in the United States.

Source: How The Total State Circumvented The Constitution

Combine that with this (spoken of Reagan’s effect on anti-trust, via Robert Bork’s influence):

It was obvious from the start that “consumer welfare” was a scam, a ruse designed to let monopolies flourish and to install “autocrats of trade” on their thrones. Despite its ideological bankruptcy, “consumer welfare” was able to repel its critics for decades, because it had deep-pocketed backers – no different from tobacco-cancer denial or climate denial.

Source: Pluralistic: 15 Sep 2022 California’s antitrust case against Amazon – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

And we have all the elements we need to conclude that the US is now a complete corporatocracy, under the control of our oligarchs, or billionaires.

I remember reading a post on Reddit, a long time ago, by a guy who claimed he was friends with a half-dozen billionaires. The thing that stuck out at me was that Congressmen ask, “How high?” when asked to jump by a billionaire, because the checks they can write for campaign contributions can swing an entire election.

Lisa Kahn may make some headway with modern trustbusting, if given the time to get moving with a second Biden term, but with the Citizens United ruling, it’s only a matter of time until the powers that be get her out of their way through a sympathetic administration.

 

Pluralistic: 21 Aug 2022 The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve Reaches Apogee – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Office 365 went from being an online version of Microsoft Office to being a bossware delivery-system. The Office 365 sales-pitch focuses on fine-grained employee tracking and comparison, so bosses can rank their workers’ performance against each other. But beyond this automated gladitorial keystroke combat, Offce 365’s analytics will tell you how your company performs against other companies.

That’s right – Microsoft will spy on your competitors and sell you access to their metrics. It’s wild, but purchasing managers who hear this pitch seem completely oblivious to the implication of this: that Microsoft will also spy on you and deliver your metrics to your competitors.

Source: Pluralistic: 21 Aug 2022 The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve Reaches Apogee – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

I feel like a fool. I watch Microsoft like a hawk, and I didn’t even know about this. Every time I think I’m too cynical about a FAANG company — and Microsoft in particular — I find that I haven’t been nearly cynical enough.

With this new LinkedIn connection, in Outlook, it’s now possible for Microsoft to connect a particular person to a particular user in your current company’s “metrics.” I suppose they could use this to juice search results for recruiters in LinkedIn, or provide reports to potential employers. I wouldn’t put any of this past them.

WeWork Founder Adam Neumann’s New Start-Up Is Backed By Andreessen Horowitz – The New York Times

Mr. Neumann, who has purchased more than 3,000 apartment units in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville, aims to rethink the rental housing market by creating a branded product with consistent service and community features. Flow will own and operate the properties Mr. Neumann had bought and also offer its services to new developments and other third parties. Exact details of the business plan could not be learned.

Source: WeWork Founder Adam Neumann’s New Start-Up Is Backed By Andreessen Horowitz – The New York Times

“In the future, you’ll own nothing, and be happy.”

The middle class was born out of the post-war boom, and the iconic thing that defined the middle class was home ownership. Those times are simply gone now, as any economic chart can show. The housing market is experiencing a huge bubble, and what’s left of affordable housing is being gobbled up by private equity and “startup” monopoly power plays like this one. If the US were run by elected representatives, there might be a change to put a stop to this. But it’s not, any more. It’s being run by the very companies who want to own everything, and rent it back to us.

In the very near future, there will no longer be a “middle” class. Not as a category. Of course, there will be people who fit the description, but it won’t be some broad strata like it has been. There will only be people who own capital, and those that labor in it and for it. I suppose it’s just Capitalism, fully-formed, with a capital “C.” It’s weird, but the US is reinventing feudalism, right under the nose of the Constitution. The oligarch billionaires are the new monarchy, the government does whatever they tell them to do.

Big Bottle: The Baby Formula Nightmare

FDA officials see themselves as an elite priesthood, pursuing excellence merely by dint of being at the FDA. From this perspective, there is zero incentive to let new players into the baby formula market when, in their view, there are already excellent quality companies serving the market, such as Abbott Labs, Mead Johnson, and Nestle. It’s true that baby formula is overpriced in the U.S., costing about twice as much as it does throughout much of Europe. But to an FDA official, price is incidental.

Source: Big Bottle: The Baby Formula Nightmare

I mean, of course. How could it have been otherwise?

In my opinion, stock buybacks should simply be illegal at this point. They always seem to be a key part of every story about large corporations crippling our economy, and hurting the average person in favor of the executives running them.

This country was supposed to have been built on Capitalism with a capital “C,” meaning “free markets” should be providing “competition” and settling on appropriate prices. And yet every market of significance in this country is now being run by 2 or 3 large companies, who collude and “stay in their lane,” with governmental regulatory cover to preclude new entrants coming in at a lower price. And if there is a successful startup in some space, as soon as they start making enough difference to be noticed in the public filings of one of the “2 or 3” established companies in the space, they will be “aquihired,” and the FTC and SEC will stroke their chins and say, “ok.” And then whatever made the startup interesting will wither and die, ala Heroku and Salesforce.

Finally, the FDA needs wholesale reform, since this kind of crisis seems to happen a lot. I mean, the relationship between the FDA and Abbott Labs was also behind the rapid Covid testing scandal, where FDA official Tim Stenzel – who had worked at Abbott – then approved Abbott as one of two firms to make those tests, and blocked all other entrants. That’s why rapid Covid tests were both in shortage and much more expensive in the U.S. than they are in Europe. The FDA needs to be broken up so that its drugs and food divisions are separate, and it needs to take its mandate seriously for a resilient supply chain.

When Rockefeller encompassed the core of all of American business, and 25% of the government was funded by the taxes he paid alone, we got serious about not letting large companies run our country. We called it “trustbusting,” and there was a long history of it. I’m doubting that this era of American history is still being taught. We’re certainly not doing it any more.

Disney CEO apologizes to LGBTQ employees, halts political donations in Florida

Chapek said Disney was rethinking how it approaches political donations on Wednesday; on Friday, he said the company would pause them altogether pending an internal review. However, Disney will increase its “support for advocacy groups to combat similar legislation in other states,” Chapek said.

Source: Disney CEO apologizes to LGBTQ employees, halts political donations in Florida

To be clear, Disney considers stopping political donations in Florida to be a “sanction” against the State for trying to pass this law. Regardless of any personal stance on the proposed bill, I just want people to stop and think about what this says about how our government works, the power that political donations gives to corporations, and how the press reports this threat.

The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

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.

Source: The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

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.

We’re Already Past the Point of No Return

From the Left
From the Right

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 own both 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.