Private equity funds are buying up homes across the US and West, driving up rent and costs of living. Economist Michael Hudson explains how corporate landlords are a result of financialized capitalism
In Upton Sinclair's classic, The Jungle. the Jurgis Rudkus family bought a house that was flipped, and when they lost it, it was flipped again. In essense, that is what corporations are now doing to rental property, driving rents continually upward, and increasing homelessness. Will it drive the working class to do what was done in the French Revolution, and behead the aristracy through the passing of common sense working class oriented laws?
So we are living the neoliberal nightmare that has been around for fifty years. Many years ago I read Robert W. Mchesney's definition of neoliberalism as the introduction to Noam Chomsky's book Profits over People. It was obvious there would be hell to pay. There has been a huge amount written about the negativities of neoliberalism and never part of the political dialogue . Another conspiracy of silence ruining our societies. The political idiocracy and the MSM have been co-belligerents in the massive betrayal.
Are we to conclude that passivity, stupidity and complacency are the death knell of Western Civilization.
Look up why the "Neoliberals" deliberately dropped that name in the mid 1950s. They wanted to present it as a "natural" way of doing things, so that people could not even imagine there can be any other way:
From what I've learned and seen, I do tend to believe that passivity, stupidity and complacency are indeed the death knell. How else can you explain electing a grifter, felon and as Rex Tillerson describes him 'A fucking moron' as president of the United States which I refer to as Los Esatados Estupidos.
Ppl don’t seem to realize the only thing Oligarch (Rentier) Class is capable of is suck out the Interest/RENT from the working people. That's literally ALL they can do..
The Essence of Capitalism is the constant, excessive CONCENTRATION of Capital and therefore Power in the hands of a small group (Oligarchy).
The Capitalists, through their ownership of the Means of production and Capital which came from the previous exploitation of workers (or just inherited) , are thereby in a position to further exploit workers.
Look up how many apartments the orange man inherited. Not Earned, inherited
Only delusional idiots would expect this guy to care about "working people"..
***
About 80% of ALL Listed Stocks (incl. entire MIC) are owned by 3 Corps only: BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.
When those Imperialist WEF stooges say "You will Own Nothing and be Happy" they mean YOU (and me) will own nothing. Because THEY will own EVERYTHING
***
"A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness."
This from Ben was somewhst irritating as it betrays an alliegance to the racial divide and conquer politics of the Imperialist genocidal Dems.
"So we see more and more that working-class Americans, in particular, Black and Latino working-class Americans, are now unable to own a home, because the houses are being bought up by these landlords, these investors, including corporate landlords on Wall Street, and they have to pay higher and higher rents to the landlord class."
There's no good reason to put a racial spin on the suffering of wage slaves, Ben. Also, I don't even know if that statement is true. Where I live in the west almost every homeless person falls into a different demographic. They are almost uniformly middle aged white men.
By racially prioritizing the suffering of wage slaves, you perpetuate the racial division and consequent political impotence of the wage slaves in the US. The Dems have produced a terrible amount of false consciousness with their bourgeois racial politics. Think critically about it. Don't just thoughtlessly reproduce it, please.
Here is my summary of de facto US domestic policy* as described by Professor Michael Hudson and other experts eg Prof Radhika Desai, bank auditor Lena Petrova.
It is entirely based on hard evidence, is easily digestible, easily remembered and easily repeatable for those who wish to spread the truth.
These are the steps:
1. POLITICAL CAPTURE of the all the pillars of power in the USA:
the house of representatives, the senate, military, police, judiciary, media, intelligence agencies etc.
Who conducts this political capture and hence who owns and controls the Deep State? CAPITALIST BIG MONEY:
from traditional private banking cartels to investment/hedge fund manager Vulture Capitalists, to modern day Tech Bro Mafia, these are the puppet masters behind the curtain, the wizards of Oz.
Capture is done by
- legalised bribery of all decision makers in all sectors (exemplified by Citizens United court verdict that there is no limit to monetary contributions to political campaigns)
- blackmail of "leaders"is more covert but undoubtedly equally pervasive and the public can only be guess at how truly widespread it is by the refusal of TPTB to release the Epstein files
- assassination of inconvenient Deep State opponents is also more commonplace than we know, from the famous cases of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcom X etc to lesser known targets such as journalist Gary Webb who exposed CIA drug crimes and who the CIA claimed committed suicide by shooting himself in the head TWICE.
- Elections are entirely rigged to ensure any candidate with any chance of victory is always a pawn of capitalist big money. Whoever you vote for, you always get John McCain. In the two party, first past the post, electoral college system, the only two candidates allowable are both corrupt pawns of Big Money. Each party has mechanisms to ensure presidential nominees can never again be democratic choices of the people eg JFK, but will always be Big Money Pawns eg the super delegate voting system within the DNC, which in 2016 and 2020 prevented Bernie Sanders from becoming the "Democratic" party nominee. Other tactics ensured Jill Stein was denied ballot status in many states and could never reach anywhere near 5% threshold vote.
2. Once political capture is achieved and PUPPET POODLE POLITICIANS are installed, they institute POLICIES OF PREFERENCE OF THE PARASITES OVER THE PRODUCERS so the parasites can railroad through their self serving policies to the detriment of everyone else. This explains the widening wealth inequality, worsening living conditions of ordinary people and crumbling public infrastructure in the USA.
3. The basic agenda of Capitalist Big Money is to CHASE the HIGHEST FINANCIAL RETURNS possible irrespective of any adverse consequences to ordinary people or the environment, dismissively termed "externalities". Much of this involves fraud eg stock market manipulations (eg share buybacks to create Ponzi pyramids, then shorting those stocks just before pulling the plug and when asset prices crash, buy assets back at rock bottom prices. This is similar to what happened with the GFC of 2008/9).
It must be emphasized that the disciplines of political science (both domestic and foreign policy analyses) and economics are artificial divisions, and are so intertwined they must be considered one and the same discipline (described by Prof Desai as Geopolitical Economics) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5ns65vglc8
Where were, are and will likely be the highest financial returns of the past, present and future?
- Bank usury
- War profiteering via the MIC
- Fossil fuel profiteering
- Financialisation and Privatisation of everything (the RENTIER PARASITIC ECONOMY AKA "FIRE" SECTOR as coined by Michael Hudson) which inevitably leads to
- Deindustrialisation
- The above have led to the USA spending far beyond its means for decades, now with $37 trillion in public debt, almost $20 trillion in private debt, multiple other unfunded liabilities (pensions, veterans' benefits, welfare etc) amounting to many trillions, an obscenely overvalued stockmarket etc, etc. This is US debt (mainly the bond market) and shares that can NEVER be redeemed.
It is an everything bubble that WILL collapse, however we just do not know exactly when. Even quisling stooge countries know this fact eg Japan, which responded to the Trump tariffs and consequent US stockmarket decline by selling off US TBills, which is the opposite of what always happened in the past (countries always bought US TBills in response to US stockmarket declines). This shows that the Global Majority is losing confidence in any US debt securities they may hold, quite apart from the fact that the USA could steal their gold or US denominated sovereign funds at any time. It is only a matter of time before the Global Majority get rid of such debt based US "assets" and Ponzi shares, which will mean the end of the US debt based financialised fraudulent economy.
4. US Capitalist Big Money is therefore now in the process of "grabbing anything that is not nailed down" (quote from Michael Hudson) and working out how to default on their debts while preserving their personal assets and maintaining control over US monetary policy and public finances. Hyperinflating the existing US dollar, then completely abolishing it by transitioning to one or more crypto based programmable and surveillable CBDCs are possible strategies.
I forgot to mention the other major rentier sector today, which is called Techno-feudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, the establishment of digital monopolies in money grubbing rentier / advertising / propaganda digital platforms eg PayPal, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Uber, Air BnB etc.
Also: The biggest future rentier enterprise on the US Techbro agenda was digital AGI, requiring heaps of super-high-end chips by NVIDIA, and LLM by software companies like "Open" AI (= closed AI) costing multiple $billions and using shitoads of energy. This US enterprise was vampire-staked and zombified by the advent of China's DeepSeek, truly open AI (=completely free) using a handful of mediocre chips and a pittance of energy and costing less than $6 million.
THE USA WILL GO BANKRUPT, COLLAPSE AND BREAK UP , which is exactly what the USA tried to do to Russia, now on an economic rise and civilisational resurgence. Talk about Karma.
Judge Nappy also refers to specifuc situations in which the US Deep State has coerced, threatened and likely blackmailed US decision makers to do the bidding of Capitalist Big Money, in keeping with the model I outlined above on US domestic policy.
What a great interview with Prof Hudson! I didn't realize he knew that about Karl Marx and Adam Smith both having the same fundamental Wage Labor Theory.
The main issue now, though, is we're completely detached from the Fractional Reserve System of money creation.
Blackrock started out as part of Blackstone, then broke off to focus on private wealth management, and Blackstone focusing on real estate, infrastructure, private equity and credit. I just bring this up bc I feel it is my duty to point out that the Chairman of Blackrock Investment Group is Thomas Donilon, who was also the Nat Security advisor under Obama admin and also worked for Clinton and Carter admins( Donilons deputy was genocide Blinken). While these are diff co’s, I feel it is my duty to point out Donilon’s wife is Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF. Because within this story is the entire raw deal capitalist swindle, REGARDLESS OF PARTY. The more you know… Anyway, excellent interview, thank you!
In Upton Sinclair's classic, The Jungle. the Jurgis Rudkus family bought a house that was flipped, and when they lost it, it was flipped again. In essense, that is what corporations are now doing to rental property, driving rents continually upward, and increasing homelessness. Will it drive the working class to do what was done in the French Revolution, and behead the aristracy through the passing of common sense working class oriented laws?
"The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery."
- Upton Sinclair
Sinclair was definitely right.
From your keyboard to God's Ears.
"LOOOOOCIE ❗️ WE got a lotta Organisin to dooo,"
So we are living the neoliberal nightmare that has been around for fifty years. Many years ago I read Robert W. Mchesney's definition of neoliberalism as the introduction to Noam Chomsky's book Profits over People. It was obvious there would be hell to pay. There has been a huge amount written about the negativities of neoliberalism and never part of the political dialogue . Another conspiracy of silence ruining our societies. The political idiocracy and the MSM have been co-belligerents in the massive betrayal.
Are we to conclude that passivity, stupidity and complacency are the death knell of Western Civilization.
Look up why the "Neoliberals" deliberately dropped that name in the mid 1950s. They wanted to present it as a "natural" way of doing things, so that people could not even imagine there can be any other way:
youtu.be/VQ4_y3rkX5Q?t=108
From what I've learned and seen, I do tend to believe that passivity, stupidity and complacency are indeed the death knell. How else can you explain electing a grifter, felon and as Rex Tillerson describes him 'A fucking moron' as president of the United States which I refer to as Los Esatados Estupidos.
Ppl don’t seem to realize the only thing Oligarch (Rentier) Class is capable of is suck out the Interest/RENT from the working people. That's literally ALL they can do..
The Essence of Capitalism is the constant, excessive CONCENTRATION of Capital and therefore Power in the hands of a small group (Oligarchy).
The Capitalists, through their ownership of the Means of production and Capital which came from the previous exploitation of workers (or just inherited) , are thereby in a position to further exploit workers.
Look up how many apartments the orange man inherited. Not Earned, inherited
Only delusional idiots would expect this guy to care about "working people"..
***
About 80% of ALL Listed Stocks (incl. entire MIC) are owned by 3 Corps only: BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.
youtu.be/sZDh8JvUG1Q?t=1509
***
When those Imperialist WEF stooges say "You will Own Nothing and be Happy" they mean YOU (and me) will own nothing. Because THEY will own EVERYTHING
***
"A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
Excellent contribution by Michael, as usual.
This from Ben was somewhst irritating as it betrays an alliegance to the racial divide and conquer politics of the Imperialist genocidal Dems.
"So we see more and more that working-class Americans, in particular, Black and Latino working-class Americans, are now unable to own a home, because the houses are being bought up by these landlords, these investors, including corporate landlords on Wall Street, and they have to pay higher and higher rents to the landlord class."
There's no good reason to put a racial spin on the suffering of wage slaves, Ben. Also, I don't even know if that statement is true. Where I live in the west almost every homeless person falls into a different demographic. They are almost uniformly middle aged white men.
By racially prioritizing the suffering of wage slaves, you perpetuate the racial division and consequent political impotence of the wage slaves in the US. The Dems have produced a terrible amount of false consciousness with their bourgeois racial politics. Think critically about it. Don't just thoughtlessly reproduce it, please.
Wesley Lepatner, former Goldman Sachs parasite turned Blackstone parasite and lifelong Zionist, was "Mangionied" in Manhattan last month
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGbbdNbwoPs&pp=0gcJCf8Ao7VqN5tD
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/world-news/blackstone-executive-wesley-lepatner-killed-in-manhattan-shooting/
Thoughts and prayers, boohoo.
As for the Palestinians being genocided in Gaza, who cares?
DE FACTO U.S. DOMESTIC POLICY
By EAB
Here is my summary of de facto US domestic policy* as described by Professor Michael Hudson and other experts eg Prof Radhika Desai, bank auditor Lena Petrova.
It is entirely based on hard evidence, is easily digestible, easily remembered and easily repeatable for those who wish to spread the truth.
These are the steps:
1. POLITICAL CAPTURE of the all the pillars of power in the USA:
the house of representatives, the senate, military, police, judiciary, media, intelligence agencies etc.
Who conducts this political capture and hence who owns and controls the Deep State? CAPITALIST BIG MONEY:
from traditional private banking cartels to investment/hedge fund manager Vulture Capitalists, to modern day Tech Bro Mafia, these are the puppet masters behind the curtain, the wizards of Oz.
Capture is done by
- legalised bribery of all decision makers in all sectors (exemplified by Citizens United court verdict that there is no limit to monetary contributions to political campaigns)
- blackmail of "leaders"is more covert but undoubtedly equally pervasive and the public can only be guess at how truly widespread it is by the refusal of TPTB to release the Epstein files
- assassination of inconvenient Deep State opponents is also more commonplace than we know, from the famous cases of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcom X etc to lesser known targets such as journalist Gary Webb who exposed CIA drug crimes and who the CIA claimed committed suicide by shooting himself in the head TWICE.
- Elections are entirely rigged to ensure any candidate with any chance of victory is always a pawn of capitalist big money. Whoever you vote for, you always get John McCain. In the two party, first past the post, electoral college system, the only two candidates allowable are both corrupt pawns of Big Money. Each party has mechanisms to ensure presidential nominees can never again be democratic choices of the people eg JFK, but will always be Big Money Pawns eg the super delegate voting system within the DNC, which in 2016 and 2020 prevented Bernie Sanders from becoming the "Democratic" party nominee. Other tactics ensured Jill Stein was denied ballot status in many states and could never reach anywhere near 5% threshold vote.
2. Once political capture is achieved and PUPPET POODLE POLITICIANS are installed, they institute POLICIES OF PREFERENCE OF THE PARASITES OVER THE PRODUCERS so the parasites can railroad through their self serving policies to the detriment of everyone else. This explains the widening wealth inequality, worsening living conditions of ordinary people and crumbling public infrastructure in the USA.
3. The basic agenda of Capitalist Big Money is to CHASE the HIGHEST FINANCIAL RETURNS possible irrespective of any adverse consequences to ordinary people or the environment, dismissively termed "externalities". Much of this involves fraud eg stock market manipulations (eg share buybacks to create Ponzi pyramids, then shorting those stocks just before pulling the plug and when asset prices crash, buy assets back at rock bottom prices. This is similar to what happened with the GFC of 2008/9).
It must be emphasized that the disciplines of political science (both domestic and foreign policy analyses) and economics are artificial divisions, and are so intertwined they must be considered one and the same discipline (described by Prof Desai as Geopolitical Economics) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5ns65vglc8
Where were, are and will likely be the highest financial returns of the past, present and future?
- Bank usury
- War profiteering via the MIC
- Fossil fuel profiteering
- Financialisation and Privatisation of everything (the RENTIER PARASITIC ECONOMY AKA "FIRE" SECTOR as coined by Michael Hudson) which inevitably leads to
- Deindustrialisation
- The above have led to the USA spending far beyond its means for decades, now with $37 trillion in public debt, almost $20 trillion in private debt, multiple other unfunded liabilities (pensions, veterans' benefits, welfare etc) amounting to many trillions, an obscenely overvalued stockmarket etc, etc. This is US debt (mainly the bond market) and shares that can NEVER be redeemed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ywGmYj_S0
It is an everything bubble that WILL collapse, however we just do not know exactly when. Even quisling stooge countries know this fact eg Japan, which responded to the Trump tariffs and consequent US stockmarket decline by selling off US TBills, which is the opposite of what always happened in the past (countries always bought US TBills in response to US stockmarket declines). This shows that the Global Majority is losing confidence in any US debt securities they may hold, quite apart from the fact that the USA could steal their gold or US denominated sovereign funds at any time. It is only a matter of time before the Global Majority get rid of such debt based US "assets" and Ponzi shares, which will mean the end of the US debt based financialised fraudulent economy.
4. US Capitalist Big Money is therefore now in the process of "grabbing anything that is not nailed down" (quote from Michael Hudson) and working out how to default on their debts while preserving their personal assets and maintaining control over US monetary policy and public finances. Hyperinflating the existing US dollar, then completely abolishing it by transitioning to one or more crypto based programmable and surveillable CBDCs are possible strategies.
5. Either way, ordinary USAnians are faaaaaarked.
I forgot to mention the other major rentier sector today, which is called Techno-feudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, the establishment of digital monopolies in money grubbing rentier / advertising / propaganda digital platforms eg PayPal, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Uber, Air BnB etc.
Also: The biggest future rentier enterprise on the US Techbro agenda was digital AGI, requiring heaps of super-high-end chips by NVIDIA, and LLM by software companies like "Open" AI (= closed AI) costing multiple $billions and using shitoads of energy. This US enterprise was vampire-staked and zombified by the advent of China's DeepSeek, truly open AI (=completely free) using a handful of mediocre chips and a pittance of energy and costing less than $6 million.
THE USA WILL GO BANKRUPT, COLLAPSE AND BREAK UP , which is exactly what the USA tried to do to Russia, now on an economic rise and civilisational resurgence. Talk about Karma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJalbNU9ax0
Judge Nappy also refers to specifuc situations in which the US Deep State has coerced, threatened and likely blackmailed US decision makers to do the bidding of Capitalist Big Money, in keeping with the model I outlined above on US domestic policy.
woodie guthrie wrote a song about the new york landlord aka as Trump’s old man
What a great interview with Prof Hudson! I didn't realize he knew that about Karl Marx and Adam Smith both having the same fundamental Wage Labor Theory.
The main issue now, though, is we're completely detached from the Fractional Reserve System of money creation.
Blackrock started out as part of Blackstone, then broke off to focus on private wealth management, and Blackstone focusing on real estate, infrastructure, private equity and credit. I just bring this up bc I feel it is my duty to point out that the Chairman of Blackrock Investment Group is Thomas Donilon, who was also the Nat Security advisor under Obama admin and also worked for Clinton and Carter admins( Donilons deputy was genocide Blinken). While these are diff co’s, I feel it is my duty to point out Donilon’s wife is Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF. Because within this story is the entire raw deal capitalist swindle, REGARDLESS OF PARTY. The more you know… Anyway, excellent interview, thank you!
🩸❗️Putting Americans in the street to profit ZioDonz HOMELAND CONCENTRATION CAMPS ❗️🩸