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In fact you can think of much of the way the state and bourgeoisie has acted since 2008 has been to ensure that line recovers to where it should have been if no collapse. Yes, Obama foreclosed on people (mostly “new wealth” Black and Latino people), but he “saved” hundreds of millions of (mostly white) portfolios.
The Bourgeoisie knows that line is necessary to deflate class struggle, they know they’ll struggle with military recruitment if soldiers can’t expect to own a home at the end of their service.
For tailing it’s falling for the 80% of landlords that are “small” crying about corporate competition in their little dictatorships: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6510977/5686588
The thought that they’d buy single family homes to rent out is novel to me at least; I’d never heard of such a thing before.
They started getting involved in SFH after the foreclosures of 08, because they did not lose much relative net worth compared to people who own 1-10 homes, who lost net worth on all their assets at that time. They didn’t get involved before that because not many people were renting SFH in the 80s and 90s and prior, those homes were only for the middling strata and up. Also, by just financing homes in the past while prices continued to rise, there was no reason to get their hands involved to add more work when they can just seek interest on all development. When hundreds of thousands of homes suddenly became available, that’s when they took the opportunity to turn it into a business. And yeah I’m minimizing them because they are indeed a minimal (0.6% of all SFH stock) component of the market and concentrated in a few markets, but that is not tied to the overall indeces of those markets whatsoever. Any investor who owns the home would have the same position as any other, corporate or “mom and pop”, the resulting market will be the same.
Liberal/Petty Bourgeois media is taking advantage of the novelty of corporate investors in SFH to use us to fight for protections backing “small investors” worth millions against competition.
Housing costs (and building) are raising extra fast post 2009 because they received basically 0% interest rates to finance more homes to “recover” from the financial crisis. That corporate investors got in at that time is a simultaneous symptom of the crisis, which always benefits the highest bourgs as they eat up small capital owners (good riddance).
There is finally the last aspect that SFH cities or neighborhoods have become the “standard model” of US housing culture since the early 2000s, this is related to the eventual financial crisis too.
Artificial scarcity isn’t real in the housing market
There has never been more houses to workers in the US than ever before, supply and demand is hardly a factor in the price of ground rents, those are directly tied into Imperialism’s health.
Corporate investors cannot raise prices above the whole market, and if they do, all homeowners (the majority of which are “proletarians”) benefit the same, so they all engage in price raising politics.
Housing prices == rents and vice versa. If housing prices collapse so will rents, because they are the same thing. As long as someone or something is able to purchase at an ever increasing price, housing costs will continue to rise.
This battle over purchasing houses, is between the petty Bourgeoisie and the haute Bourgeoisie. The only difference between mortgaging out and paying rent is whether a so-called worker can profit from their investment in years time, it’s a class transition into the petty Bourgeoisie. You can look at historical charts that the price differences for renting vs loans is most often favorable towards renting, but the differences are slight.
These are also SINGLE FAMILY HOMES, 15% are rented out, 4% of those are rented out by corporations, so 0.6% of all SFH are owned to rent by corps, that 0.6% of landlords is raising the prices of all homes country wide? Besides, SFH should be for the most part destroyed for climate reasons when Socialism comes.
Home-ownership is hardly related to healthcare costs besides both being financialized sectors that seek rent, I’m not sure what your connection is.
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Housing prices and rents always go up, because it’s mandated by state policy. Rents == Prices because home values are tied to expected rents.
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“Institutional Investors” own at most 4% of SFH rental housing, this is not total SFH just the 15% that are rented out. Corporations are a minor factor of homeowners, whom nearly all are bourgeois. No matter who is speculating, the result is the same. Rents have always risen and rises are not at all tied to the % of corporate investors involved.
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Of all SFH, less than 10% is owned by “investors” 8/10 of those are “mom and pop”.
“Corporations” are a red herring in the housing question, the fault is the bourgeois structure of US housing culture which empowers tens of millions of people to surplus value and property rights.
Y’all need to read Engels on the Housing Question, don’t tail the petty bourgeoisie on this.
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good 🫡 I hope nobody is able to afford so the prices of homes plummet and tens of millions of speculators lose their “investment”
Relevant snippet from Palo Alto:
Safiyo Mohamed immigrated from Somalia only three months before she started as a stower at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota. After three days of training (only in English), she began emptying incoming boxes from the conveyor belt into boxes from which the pickers picked. The system had a strict quota: 2,600 items sorted for every 10-hour shift, or a consistent average of less than 14 seconds per object. To fit in any kind of break you had to go faster, so as a beginner, Safiyo tried to avoid taking any breaks. Still, after her first week, her manager told her she was too slow and made more mistakes than the acceptable number: one per shift, an inhuman error rate of .04 percent. What help she got concerning strategies for improvement came from the other Somali workers who filled the warehouse. (As in the Hoover-era gold mines, white English-speaking managers boss groups of nonwhite workers, whose ethnic composition depends on the location; in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a high proportion of them are East African immigrants.) “After my shift, I couldn’t even cook for myself. I barely had the energy to take a shower and often went to bed with an empty stomach,” Mohamed recalled in an essay about her experience for Sahan Journal. “I had nightmares about getting fired, disrupting the little sleep I was getting. They treated me and every other warehouse worker like a machine, not a human.” Feeling like she had no other way to support her family, Safiyo lasted longer than most, 30 months. In Amazon’s numbers, she turns up as an unqualified success. That’s how it’s supposed to work; that’s how Amazon came to dominate retail and how Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man.
A detailed 2020 investigation found that Amazon’s warehouse workers have a serious-injury rate nearly twice the warehouse industry average. And the more robotized the distribution center, the higher the injury rate. “If you’ve got robots that are moving product faster and workers have to then lift or move those products faster, there’ll be increased injuries,” an Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspecting physician with experience in the company’s facilities told reporters. Racing to catch up with machines rigged to run hot hurts people. Efficiency causes injuries, which is another way of saying that, for Amazon, injuries are efficient. Amazon’s delivery must be very efficient, because drivers get injured even more—a lot more. And unlike warehouse workers, Amazon delivery drivers don’t technically work for Amazon, even if they’re wearing Amazon uniforms delivering Amazon packages in their Amazon vans following Amazon’s directions to Amazon customers.
For most of its existence, Amazon got its packages to customers’ doors just as everyone else does, contracting with the U.S. Postal Service or the big private shippers UPS and DHL for the dreaded “last mile” delivery. But as part of Operation Dragon Boat, the company planned to bring shipping inside the Amazon tent, or at least next to it. Driving trucks around is dangerous—for drivers, for the other people on the road, and for the legally liable employers. Trucks kill people, especially when you drive fast. Amazon drivers, unsurprisingly, have to drive fast if they want to keep their jobs, and their trucks do kill people. But when it comes time to hold someone responsible, Amazon is nowhere to be found. Patricia Callahan’s 2019 investigation for ProPublica and the New York Times couldn’t establish exactly how many deaths Amazon drivers were responsible for because they are all contractors, hired through the Delivery Service Partner program.
Amazon has absurd injury rates while they get a lot of great press for their “automation”, but what such “automation” is actually doing is setting a dangerous pace for the human bodies. With such high turnover and higher than local average wages, Amazon is able to pace workers at inhuman speeds, to their body’s breaking point, because each individual worker is an expiring commodity to them.
puts on conspiracy hat: inb4 shooter is Uke agent
“One lesson from Texas history is that repression was so severe because resistance was so daunting-a lesson to keep in mind as this century unfolds”
No it’s not. Wages in the Imperialist countries are buffed by super-exploitation of the global South.
The amount of resources Americans use means that they are condensing into a “middle class” above the 3rd world nations workers and below the Imperial Bourgeoisie.
Spending most if not all of your paycheck does not mean you aren’t “middle class” (petty bourg or labor aristocrat). You were never meant to be able to accumulate wealth, the bourgs want you to consume it and for them to get it in their balance sheets at the end of the day because you bought goods and services from their property. If you are accumulating significant wealth that can’t be wiped out due to crises (ex: getting very ill, medical costs), you are certainly not exploited. If you are consuming more labor than you put out, but break even on paper, you’re still not exploited (Imperialist wages).
This is why Economism (and accompanying social democracy) is dead end politics that is incapable of handling national contradictions that Imperialism feeds on.
As well, the top 80% of income brackets have been getting increased wealth and income, since the end of WW2.
The only segment of the US working class that is difficult to describe as a labor aristocracy (in NAFTA states) is being shredded to pieces.
This segment of the working class should be the focus of organization in the core. The rest should only be organized secondarily, as their interests align with Imperialism too much.
Yes the article is incorrect and it seems a lot of reporting is playing it safe by using neutral pronouns, but I’ve heard passed on info that Nex preferred the masculine pronouns.
Edit:
Could come off as conflicting information, but it wouldn’t be unexpected that a young person would be still coming to understand their presentation in their environments
Nex used he/they pronouns according to his friends btw. JSYK when talking about this tragedy moving forward.
Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation is a required reading for Chunka Luta Network. You can find it in the Chunka Luta Library: https://mega.nz/folder/cuMwjRyK#eDPayQSdYFwaCh9qr8zzPw/file/cvUg1BxR
This reading is required because we need every communist in North America to know the current violent conditions for native communities and individuals, as well as the structure of White Supremacist occupation.
It describes the overall process of what this is showing a slice of, ongoing genocide.
Using python makes it much easier to maintain scripts especially if they are useful for many people. I like bash for adhoc stuff on my machine or my sandbox, but most of my coworkers are not strong in it so it’s not good for prod ops.