Tag Archives: Housing

Costs Are Spiraling Out of Control

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

And how do we pay for these spiraling out of control costs? By borrowing more, of course.

If we had to choose one “big picture” reason why the vast majority of households are losing ground, it would be: the costs of essentials are spiraling out of control. I’ve often covered the dynamics of stagnating income for the bottom 90%, and real-world inflation, i.e. a decline in purchasing power.

But neither of these dynamics fully describes the relentless upward spiral of the cost basis of our economy, that is, the cost of big-ticket essentials: housing, education and healthcare.

The costs of education are spiraling out of control, stripping households of income as an entire generation is transformed into debt-serfs by student loan debt. The soaring costs of healthcare are a core driver of higher costs in the education complex (and government in general), and to cover these higher costs, counties raise property taxes, which add additional cost burdens to households and enterprises as rents rise.

Rising rents push the cost structure of almost every enterprise and agency higher.

Then there’s the asset inflation created by central bank ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) which has inflated a second echo-bubble in housing that has pushed home ownership out of reach of many, adding demand for rental housing that has pushed rents into the stratosphere in Left and Right Coast cities.

The increasing dominance of monopolies and cartels has eliminated competition in sector after sector. Monopolies and cartels skim immense profits even as the value, quality and quantity of their products and services decline: The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets From plane tickets to cellphone bills, monopoly power costs American consumers billions of dollars a year.

Thanks to their political influence, monopolies and cartels have legalized looting, raising prices and evading anti-trust regulations because they can pay whatever it takes in our pay-to-play political system.

Let’s look at a few charts that illustrate the relentless rise in costs:

Do you reckon these two charts are connected–soaring costs and ballooning administrative payrolls?

Student loan debt is soaring above $1.5 trillion, guaranteeing profits to lenders and debt-serfdom to the students exiting with degrees that are in over-supply, i.e. possessing little scarcity value in an over-credentialed economy:

The echo housing bubbles in many locales exceed the nosebleed valuations of the previous bubble:

And how do we pay for these spiraling out of control costs? By borrowing more, of course:

Even at low rates of interest, the cost of servicing skyrocketing debt increases, leaving less net income to support additional borrowing.

What will it take to radically reduce the cost basis of our economy? A fundamental re-ordering that breaks up all the cartels and monopolies that push prices higher even as they deliver lower quality goods and services would be a good start.

“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets”

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By Staff, Anticap.wordpress.com

Source: Popular Resistance

Chris Rock may be right. Still, Americans are well aware that economic inequality in their country is obscene, even though they often underestimate the growing gap between the poor and the rich.

But it’s Frank Rich, who conducted the interview with the American comedian, who made the more perceptive observation:

For all the current conversation about income inequality, class is still sort of the elephant in the room.

All the experts agree—from Thomas Piketty and the other members of the World Inequality Lab team to John C. Weicher of the conservative Hudson Institute—that inequality in the United States, especially the unequal distribution of wealth, has been worsening for decades now. Both before and after the crash of 2007-08. And there’s no sign that things are going to get better anytime soon, unless radical changes are made.

But, as it turns out, even the experts underestimate the degree of inequality in the United States. The usual numbers that are produced and disseminated indicate that, in 2014 (the last year for which data are available), the top 1 percent of Americans owned one third (35 percent) of total household wealth while the bottom 90 percent had less than half (45.3 percent) of the wealth.

According to my calculations, illustrated in the chart at the top of the post, the situation in the United States is much worse. In 2014, the top 1 percent (red line) owned almost two thirds of the financial or business wealth, while the bottom 90 percent (blue line) had only six percent. That represents an enormous change from the already-unequal situation in 1978, when the shares were much closer (28.6 percent for the top 1 percent and 23.2 percent for the bottom 90 percent).

Why the large difference between my numbers and theirs? It all depends on how wealth is defined. Both the World Inequality Lab and the Federal Reserve (in the Survey of Consumer Finances) include housing and retirement pensions in household wealth—and those two categories comprise most of the so-called wealth of most Americans. They just don’t own much in the way of financial or business wealth. They live in their houses and they retire based on contributions from their wages and salaries over the course of their work lives. They produce but don’t take home any of the surplus; therefore, they just don’t have the ability to amass any real wealth.

For the small group at the top, things are quite different. They do get a cut of the surplus, which they use, not only to purchase housing and put aside in their pensions, but to accumulate real wealth, for themselves and their families. If we take out housing and pensions and calculate just the shares of financial or business wealth—and, thus, equities, fixed-income claims, and business assets—the degree of inequality is much, much worse.

Yes, rich people in the United States are very rich—even more than either regular Americans or the experts believe.

But that’s not the real elephant in the room. The big issue that everyone is aware of, but nobody wants to talk about, is class. And that’s the reason there should be, if not riots, at least a sustained political movement to transform the existing economic and social structures in the United States.

Zucktown, USA

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Facebook, Amazon, and Google are reviving the ill-fated “company towns” of the Gilded Age

By Julianne Tveten

Source: The Baffler

EARLIER THIS YEAR IN SILICON VALLEY, a phalanx of six-figure-earning Facebook engineers confronted Mark Zuckerberg about subsidizing their extortionate rents. Meanwhile, the contract laborers who serve them bacon kimchi dogs and duck confit found themselves cordoned off from the affordable housing market—where salaries approaching $74,000 qualify—and began converting their garages into homes. Still, if these events point to a dire situation, they’re but the latest stirrings of the hulking leviathan that is the region’s housing crisis—an issue that has peppered the headlines of news outlets great and small for nearly a decade.

Thanks in part to this accretion of bad press, Zuckerberg and his fellow cyborgian billionaires have sprung into action as property developers. In July, Facebook announced plans to create “Willow Campus,” an aggressively rectilinear, Rem Koolhaas-designed rebrand of a Menlo Park office complex it purchased in 2015. The expansion of its headquarters will boast fifteen hundred units of housing, 15 percent of which it claims will be “offered at below-market rates.” If that isn’t sufficiently microcosmic, the company promises to dedicate 125,000 square feet to commercial space, promising a grocery store, pharmacy, and the cryptically worded “additional community-facing retail.”

Equally if not more responsible for crafting California’s bloodsucking geometric crapscape is Google, whose newfangled parent company Alphabet has vowed to provide temporary housing, in the form of modular dwellings, for three hundred of its employees in its home city of Mountain View. For years, Google has been seeking to wrest control of the city from its government; last year, it gained over 370,000 square feet of office space along with the right to develop 1.4 million square feet in the North Bayshore neighborhood after vying with LinkedIn to furnish the territory with a new police station, road improvements, and college scholarships. (The modular homes will be constructed on a former NASA air base, which the company signed an agreement to lease for sixty years.)

We’re witnessing, in these schemes, a revival of the company town. An oft-recurring feature of the Western capitalist imaginary, the company town’s American variety dates back to the nineteenth century; railroad industrialist George Pullman’s eponymous city in Illinois provides one of the more illustrative examples. Pullman characterized his town, completed in 1884, as a lucrative, pro-business utopia filled with satisfied participants, employee and investor alike. Its veneer was indeed shiny: the amenities it promised—yards, indoor plumbing, gas, trash removal—were rare for industrial workers of the time, and its ultra-formal gardens and shopping center, which equipped them with a barbershop, dentist’s offices, a bank, and a slew of overpriced retail, offered a vanguard capitalist’s dabbling in luxury.

There was a catch: paternalistic and omnipresent capitalism. Immaculately manicured trees were merely curtains obscuring a panopticon, one that kept workers behaviorally economized. (White workers, that is—the town expressly excluded black people.) “[Pullman] wanted to create a company town where everybody would be . . . content with their place in the capitalist system,” Jane Eva Baxter explained to Paleofuture. Workers were forced to rent—with no option to buy—the uniform row houses that corralled them, and from which they worried over persistent inspection and imminent eviction. Their employers likewise controlled which books filled their libraries and which performances took place in their theaters, and a ban precluded them from congregating at saloons or holding town meetings unless sanctioned by the Pullman Company, lest they entertain the notion of unionizing.

The forced exchange not just of labor, but of personal autonomy, for the tenuous ability to buy bread or light one’s stove is, in a word, inhumane, and in three, cause for revolt. Pullman workers had organized several strikes throughout the 1880s, but none were so monumental as the one in 1894. In response to the prior year’s economic depression, Pullman opted to slash workers’ wages; rents, however, remained steadfastly fixed, enriching the company’s reported worth of $62 million while leaving workers with as little as two cents (after paying for housing costs). In partnership with the American Railway Union, four thousand Pullman workers, galvanized and desperate, withheld their labor, and legions of workers throughout the nation would soon join them. Yet the strike collapsed when the Cleveland administration, in a violent display of authoritarianism, deployed federal troops and imprisoned labor leaders. Not long after, by Illinois Supreme Court order, the town was forced to sell everything not used expressly for “industry.”

Still, Pullman’s fiasco didn’t discourage other magnates. In 1900, chocolatier Milton Hershey began construction on a factory complex near a collection of dairy farms in rural Pennsylvania, where he declared there’d be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil”—a Delphic precursor to Google’s now infamous and defunct slogan, “Don’t be evil.” To attract workers, Hershey reclaimed many of Pullman’s gilded comforts: indoor plumbing, pristine lawns, central heating, garbage pickup, and eventually, the theaters and sports venues any company town worth its salt would host.

What was designed as a wholesome advertisement for the company quickly morphed into a miserly surveillance state. Hershey, who served as the town’s mayor, constable, and fire chief, patrolled neighborhoods to survey the maintenance of houses and hired private detectives to monitor employees’ after-hours alcohol consumption. While the town managed to stage a sort of idyllic capitalist performance for onlookers, by the 1930s its employees resented their binding environs and the Depression-era layoffs they endured from a company earning ten times its annual payroll in after-tax profits. A crippled attempt to unionize with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) bred a 1937 sit-down strike; days later, farmers and company cheerleaders armed with rocks and pitchforks bloodied and ejected the dissidents, destabilizing for good another corporate-civic lark. Hershey’s vast estate, however, remains unscathed to this day.

If Facebook and Google have begun to revive the company town, Amazon has already given it a futuristic luster. California’s inchoate company towns pale in comparison to their northern counterpart, which occupies 19 percent of Seattle’s office space and a farcical 8.1 million square feet. (Its CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, has vowed to acquire four million more over the next five years, a muscular move meant to complement his midlife-crisis physique.) Touting its sponsorship of local engineering and sustainability programs, Amazon crows about such “investments” as its dog park, playing fields, art installations, and Buckyball-reminiscent domical gardens. Of course, with Bezos’s colonizing aspirations comes yet another bellicose rental market—the very conditions Facebook and Google claim to be combatting. When considered alongside its recent purchase of Whole Foods, Amazon’s dream of tethering its employees to their jobs—by way of homogenized cubes for rent and lightly discounted quinoa chips—is fast becoming a reality.

Like George Pullman and Milton Hershey, the tech industry’s elites take all prisoners in their respective campaigns to expand, absorb, and dominate. The tech company town, that most contemporary of neofeudalist wangles, is the next step in West Coast corporate behemoths’ quest to lure employees into a twenty-four-hour working existence—the totalizing successor to bottomless Indian food spreads, on-site bike-repair shops, and Frank Gehrized habitats. Its premise deviates not at all from that of its antecedents: a genial, painstakingly aestheticized service to workers, where beneficent corporate hands take the reins of the public good  for the well-being of the community. This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate.

Certainly, the megalomaniacs who aim to populate municipal fixtures with registered-trademark logos will expect cities to genuflect at every turn. Bezos has exemplified this in Seattle, whose recent measure to “tax the rich” drove him to seek another location in which to build Amazon’s second headquarters. While residents of its hometown grapple with a commandeering leech that “suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep,” Amazon will soon attempt to prime another city to be sapped. Meanwhile, the smooth-faced metallic vampires of California have just begun to cosplay as frontiersmen, raring to follow Bezos’s lead. Drunk on glib TED Talk propagandizing, and accustomed to dismissing the civic inconveniences of corporate regulations and poor neighborhoods, our technosettlers feel little need to heed the lessons of the past when their chief interest is to monopolize the future. Taxing the techie billionaires is a start, but only when cities refuse to be their hosts will they cease to be their parasites.

 

Julianne Tveten writes about the technology industry’s relationship with socioeconomics and culture. Her work has appeared in Current Affairs, Hazlitt, In These Times, The Outline, and elsewhere.

It’s time to call the housing crisis what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory

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By Laurie Macfarlane

Source: OpenDemocracy.net

One of the basic claims of capitalism is that people are rewarded in line with their effort and productivity. Another is that the economy is not a zero sum game. The beauty of a capitalist economy, we are told, is that people who work hard can get rich without making others poorer.

But how does this stack up in modern Britain, the birthplace of capitalism and many of its early theorists? Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released new data tracking how wealth has evolved over time. On paper, the UK has indeed become much wealthier in recent decades. Net wealth has more than tripled since 1995, increasing by over £7 trillion. This is equivalent to an average increase of nearly £100,000 per person. Impressive stuff. But where has all this wealth come from, and who has it benefitted?

Just over £5 trillion, or three quarters of the total increase, is accounted for by increase in the value of dwellings – another name for the UK housing stock. The Office for National Statistics explains that this is “largely due to increases in house prices rather than a change in the volume of dwellings.” This alone is not particularly surprising. We are forever told about the importance of ‘getting a foot on the property ladder’. The housing market has long been viewed as a perennial source of wealth.

But the price of a property is made up of two distinct components: the price of the building itself, and the price of the land that the structure is built upon. This year the ONS has separated out these two components for the first time, and the results are quite astounding.

In just two decades the market value of land has quadrupled, increasing recorded wealth by over £4 trillion. The driving force behind rising house prices — and the UK’s growing wealth — has been rapidly escalating land prices.

For those who own property, this has provided enormous benefits. According to the Resolution Foundation, homeowners born in the 1940s and 1950s gained an unearned windfall of £80,000 between 1993 and 2014 alone. In the early 2000s, house price growth was so great that 17% of working-age adults earned more from their house than from their job.

Last week The Times reported that during the past three months alone, baby boomers converted £850 million of housing wealth into cash using equity release products – the highest number since records began. A third used the money to buy cars, while more than a quarter used it to fund holidays. Others are choosing to buy more property: the Chartered Institute of Housing has described how the buy-to-let market is being fuelled by older households using their housing wealth to buy more property, renting it out to those who are unable to get a foot on the property ladder. And it is here that we find the dark side of the housing boom.

As house prices have continued to increase and the gap between house prices and earnings has grown larger, the cost of homeownership has become increasingly prohibitive. Whereas in the mid-1990s low and middle income households could afford a first time buyer deposit after saving for around 3 years, today it takes the same households 20 years to save for a deposit. Many have increasingly found themselves with little choice but to rent privately. For those stuck in the private rental market, the proportion of income spent on housing costs has risen from around 10% in 1980 to 36% today. Unlike homeowners, there is no asset wealth to draw on to fund new cars or holidays.

In Britain, we have yet to confront the truth about the trillions of pounds of wealth amassed through the housing market in recent decades: this wealth has come straight out of the pockets of those who don’t own property.

When the value of a house goes up, the total productive capacity of the economy is unchanged because nothing new has been produced: it merely constitutes an increase in the value of the land underneath. We have known since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo that land is not a source of wealth but of economic rent — a means of extracting wealth from others. Or as Joseph Stiglitz puts it “getting a larger share of the pie rather than increasing the size of the pie”. The truth is that much of the wealth accumulated in recent decades has been gained at the expense of those who will see more of their incomes eaten up by higher rents and larger mortgage payments. This wealth hasn’t been ‘created’ – it has been stolen from future generations.

House prices are now on average nearly eight times that of incomes, more than double the figure of 20 years ago. It’s unlikely that house prices will be able to outpace incomes at the same rate for the next 20 years. The past few decades have spawned a one-off transfer of wealth that is unlikely to be repeated. While the main beneficiaries of this have been the older generations, eventually this will be passed on to the next generation via inheritance or transfer. Already the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ has become the ninth biggest mortgage lender. The ultimate result is not just a growing intergenerational divide, but an entrenched class divide between those who own property (or have a claim to it), and those who do not.

Misleading accounting and irresponsible economics have provided cover for this heist. The government’s national accounts record house price growth as new wealth, ignoring the cost it imposes on others in society – particularly young people and those yet to be born. Economists still hail house price inflation as a sign of economic strength.

The result is a world which is rather different to that described in economics textbooks. Most of today’s ‘wealth’ isn’t the result of entrepreneurialism and hard work – it has been accumulated by being idle and unproductive. Far from the positive sum game capitalism is supposed to be, we have a system where most wealth is gained at the expense of others. As John Stuart Mill wrote back in 1848:

“If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from?  It doesn’t materialise out of thin air. It doesn’t come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others’ labours, which they don’t receive.”

Britain’s housing crisis is complicated mess. Fixing it requires a long-term plan and a bold new approach to policy. But in the meantime let’s start calling it what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory.

The Value of Everything

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

We are looking more and more like France on the eve of its revolution in 1789. Our classes are distributed differently, but the inequity is just as sharp. America’s “aristocracy,” once based strictly on bank accounts, acts increasingly hereditary as the vapid offspring and relations of “stars” (in politics, showbiz, business, and the arts) assert their prerogatives to fame, power, and riches — think the voters didn’t grok the sinister import of Hillary’s “it’s my turn” message?

What’s especially striking in similarity to the court of the Bourbons is the utter cluelessness of America’s entitled power elite to the agony of the moiling masses below them and mainly away from the coastal cities. Just about everything meaningful has been taken away from them, even though many of the material trappings of existence remain: a roof, stuff that resembles food, cars, and screens of various sizes.

But the places they are supposed to call home are either wrecked — the original small towns and cities of America — or replaced by new “developments” so devoid of artistry, history, thought, care, and charm that they don’t add up to communities, and are so obviously unworthy of affection, that the very idea of “home” becomes a cruel joke.

These places were bad enough in the 1960s and 70s, when the people who lived in them at least were able to report to paying jobs assembling products and managing their distribution. Now those people don’t have that to give a little meaning to their existence, or cover the costs of it. Public space was never designed into the automobile suburbs, and the sad remnants of it were replaced by ersatz substitutes, like the now-dying malls. Everything else of a public and human associational nature has been shoved into some kind of computerized box with a screen on it.

The floundering non-elite masses have not learned the harsh lesson of our time that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic, while the elites who create all this vicious crap spend millions to consort face-to-face in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard telling each other how wonderful they are for providing all the artificial social programming and glitzy hardware for their paying customers.

The effect of this dynamic relationship so far has been powerfully soporific. You can deprive people of a true home for a while, and give them virtual friends on TV to project their emotions onto, and arrange to give them cars via some financing scam or other to keep them moving mindlessly around an utterly desecrated landscape under the false impression that they’re going somewhere — but we’re now at the point where ordinary people can’t even carry the costs of keeping themselves hostage to these degrading conditions.

The next big entertainment for them will be the financial implosion of the elites themselves as the governing forces of physics finally overcome all the ruses and stratagems of the elites who have been playing games with money. Professional observers never tires of saying that the government can’t run out of money (because they can always print more of it) but they can certainly destroy the value of that money and shred the consensual confidence that allows it to operate as money.

That’s exactly what is about to commence at the end of the summer when the government runs out of cash-on-hand and congress finds itself utterly paralyzed by party animus to patch the debt ceiling problem that disables new borrowing. The elites may be home from the Hamptons and the Vineyard by then, but summers may never be the same for them again.

The Deep State may win its war against the pathetic President Trump, but it won’t win any war against the imperatives of the universe and the way that expresses itself in the true valuation of things. And when the moment of clarification arrives — the instant of cosmic price discovery — the clueless elites will have to really and truly worry about the value of their heads.

 

Trump proposes huge hike in military and police spending

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discretionary_spending_pie_2015_enacted

By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

The Trump administration sent instructions to federal agencies Monday proposing a $54 billion increase in spending for the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security, to be offset by $54 billion in cuts for other agencies, mainly those involved in domestic social services and regulation of business.

Trump’s budget outline sets the stage for his first address to Congress on Tuesday. It provides further evidence that the Trump administration will be dedicated to radically rolling back social spending to finance a dramatic escalation of military operations, both in the neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and against the United States’ ‘great power’ rivals: China and Russia.

Federal departments are being told to file budget requests for the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2017 based on the numbers they were given by the Office of Management and Budget. Each agency will be responsible for working out the cuts required to meet proposed reductions, while the Pentagon, CIA and DHS will propose expanded operations with the additional funds they are to be awarded.

There were no details made public about the exact budget ceilings given to each federal department, but White House officials made it clear that foreign aid programs in the State Department and anti-pollution regulation through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would suffer some of the largest cuts.

The total budget of the EPA is only $9 billion, so many other domestic programs are certain to be hard-hit, involving such departments as Education, Labor, Transportation, Agriculture (which includes food stamps), Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services.

The biggest federal social programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are not affected by the budget order, which involves only funding for so-called discretionary programs, those financed through annual congressional appropriations. Entitlement programs, where benefits are paid out automatically to those who establish their eligibility, are covered by a separate budget process.

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney appeared at the White House press briefing Monday afternoon to explain the action taken by the Trump administration. He emphasized that setting what he called the “top-line budget number” for each department was only the start of a protracted process.

The OMB will use the figures from each department and agency to prepare a budget outline to be submitted to Congress on March 16. A full budget will not be ready until sometime in May, Mulvaney said. He also indicated that while spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were not addressed in the action taken Monday, “entitlement reform”—i.e., cuts in these critical programs—would be a subject of discussion with congressional leaders later in the budget process.

Press reports identified the three White House officials who have played the main roles in the initial budgeting: Mulvaney, who was confirmed on February 16 as budget director; National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, the huge investment bank; and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, the former chief executive of the fascistic Breitbart News site, who exercises increasingly broad sway over all White House policy decisions.

While no details have yet been released of what the $54 billion increase in military-police spending will pay for, the scale of the increase, in and of itself, shows the real character of the Trump administration. This is to be a government of war abroad and mass repression at home.

Trump himself touched on this theme in typically rambling and unfocused remarks to a meeting of the National Governors Association Monday. “We never win a war,” he said. “We never win. And we don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. So we either got to win, or don’t fight at all.”

He continued, telling the governors, “My first budget will be submitted to the Congress next month. This budget will be a public safety and national security budget, very much based on those two with plenty of other things, but very strong. And it will include a historic increase in defense spending to rebuild the depleted military of the United States of America at a time we most need it.”

Additional money for the Pentagon is likely to go to a dramatically increased tempo of operations in Iraq and Syria. Defense Secretary James Mattis delivered proposals to the White House Monday for an offensive against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as required by an executive order issued by Trump last month. No details are available yet, but any acceleration of the bombing campaign, let alone the deployment of significant numbers of the US ground troops, would increase the cost of that war by many billions.

The $54 billion increase would also presumably include funds for the construction of Trump’s planned wall on the US-Mexico border, as well as a massive increase in spending on detention facilities for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants to be rounded up under the executive orders already issued by the White House.

The federal budget is operating under the constraints imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the bipartisan legislation negotiated by the Obama White House, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a Democratic-controlled Senate. This set up the so-called sequester process, under which all discretionary spending is subject to a budget freeze, for both domestic and military programs.

Each year, increased spending for programs under the sequester has been worked out on the basis of roughly equal increases for domestic and military programs. Last year, for fiscal year 2016, Congress approved $543 billion for domestic discretionary programs and $607 billion for the military. The Trump White House plan would thus represent a cut of about 10 percent for domestic programs, and an increase of nearly that amount for the military.

Any significant change in the sequester process would require support from congressional Democrats, particularly in the Senate, where the Republican party holds only a narrow 52-48 edge, and any major legislation would require a 60-vote majority to pass.

Several congressional Republican leaders criticized the White House plan as insufficiently skewed to the military. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas issued a statement criticizing the “low budget number” and adding, “The administration will have to make clear which problems facing our military they are choosing not to fix.”

Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared that the Trump plan is “a mere 3 percent above President Obama’s defense budget, which has left our military underfunded, undersized and unready.”

For all the statements by Trump and the Republicans bemoaning the supposedly “depleted” state of the US military, the United States spends more on its armed forces than the next 15 countries in the world combined. The military budget is only inadequate if the mission of the US military is assumed to be the conquest of the entire planet and the subduing of all armed resistance from any quarter—which is actually the perspective of the American ruling elite.

Government, Terrorism, Money, Education and Other Important Discussions

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By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The elite power structure – which uses the monetary system, war, false flags and the monopolized media as their primary mechanisms of control – has infiltrated every major government of the Western World. How do we know this? It’s simple; if they hadn’t been hijacked, then governments would have already begun a process of revolutionizing the way in which our societies are organized so that it benefits all of us, not just a select few.

The US Presidential race and two of its candidates have shown a small amount of hope for real change in America, something that not just its citizens desperately need, but the entire world too. Once the game is changed in the US – so that the government no longer works for those in control of the multinational and banking corporations – it will undoubtedly reverberate around the world.

Clinton is obviously a mouthpiece of the status quo and therefore cannot be trusted to enact real change. After all, she is an oligarch. On the other hand, Sanders and Trump appear to be anti-establishment, but are they really? It’s difficult to really know, because they could be controlled opposition. Yet even if they are separate to the existing order, can we really trust that they’ll do the job that the world’s peoples, and the environment, truly need?

Actions always speak louder than words, so regardless of the rhetoric of Trump and Sanders, does their policy agenda actually align to the truths that have been exposed by the many independent social researchers who are doing a wonderful job for the betterment of humanity?

Read below and decide for yourself.

The Real Policies for Change

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it reflects the fundamental shifts that we should be implementing in the short term to move into a new era of health and prosperity for humanity, and the environment we inhabit. In other words, these changes are the first essential steps if we want to overcome the dysfunction and deception that plague the hearts and minds of the people, as well as the systems that guide our collective activity.

If a political party or politician does not discuss these topics in general, then they are not aligned to the changes that we need, and therefore true progress. This is most likely because of two reasons; ignorance and/or corruption.

In any case, the exact way forward in each area is of course open for debate, but there must be an open and transparent dialogue held among the people. Simply, we all need to understand not just the issues, but the potential solutions to them.

This is obviously happening within conscious circles and progressive movements, however it’s not yet active within the mainstream mentality. This is just more evidence which illustrates that our politicians have failed us; that’s because it’s their job to bring these issues to the light of day so that everybody can participate in their resolution, if they so choose.

1. Monetary Policy: The way the economy is designed must rid society from the saturation of debt, move beyond indebtment to the oligarchs, cease the creation of fake currency by banks, overcome economic slavery by making the currency supply one of value and guarantee that local economies prosper.

2. Taxation Policy: The tax burden put on the people and the evasion of tax by multinational corporations needs to be resolved. One such method is abolishing all taxes and implementing a 2% debit-transaction taxso that citizens pay less tax, all individuals and businesses pay their fair share and there is an abundance of revenue to heal the wounds of a decaying society.

3. Budgeting Policy: Government revenues must be effectively and efficiently utilized to ensure the development of robust social services, increased wealth equality, the eradication of poverty, widespread sustainable practices, appropriate national defense programs and necessary infrastructure.

4. Defense and Foreign Policy: With unjust wars and false flag terrorism being the norm of the 21st Century, any decision to go to war must be sanctioned by the people via referendum. The reasons must be transparentally documented and validated as based in truth. All events at home and abroad that impact the decision-making of defense and foreign relations must be subject to robust and open investigations. Because national security is the first priority, all international relations should be treated diplomatically as the first line of defense.

5. Media Policy: The way in which information is disseminated throughout society must not be managed by monopolies, or a government. Media must be an open source platform where independent investigations are implemented and presented without bias. Any monopoly on the media must be disassembled so that the populace has unrestricted access to all the information necessary for the health and well-being of each individual and the community as a whole.

6. Education Policy: The way in which our children are educated is an indoctrination into the status quo, particularly economically and politically. The education system must therefore ensure that all children exercise their right to gain access to information that will help them to grow into healthy, happy and honorable adults, as well as question the way in which we organize society so that we can evolve it in alignment with our needs.

7. Governmental Policy: The amalgamation of government and business needs to be dissected. Politicians and bureaucrats are servants of the people and therefore must be representative of the needs and wants of the people. Moreover, government intervention of individual liberty and the free market must be also reduced.

8. Energy Policy: There is no longer any need to rely on fossil fuels, so creating the energy that society needs must be replaced with renewable resources – such as solar, air, water, wave, plant and free-energy technologies. Energy must also be made cheaply available to the public.

9. Health Policy: All foods and so-called medicines which impact the long-term health of the people must be labelled appropriately. Health programs that support emotional, psychological, philosophical, physical, spiritual, social and behavioral vitality must also be deeply embedded into schooling and other educational platforms. Holistic and preventative approaches to dis-ease must also be brought to the forefront of health education instead of relying on a symptomatic and prescriptive medical framework.

10. Medicine Policy: The pharmaceutical monopolies must be transformed into meeting the needs of the people, not shareholders and their profits. All natural and cheap remedies to disease – such as plant-based medicines and meditation – must be fully documented and reincorporated back into health education.

11. Housing Policy: Every person has a right to live in safe, comfortable and affordable housing. No individual should be homeless, unless by choice. Employment and Housing Policy must also be designed to ensure that the purchase of land is affordable and achievable for all.

12. Food Policy: The damaging impacts of industrial agriculture on earth’s natural systems, as well as the erosion of local economies (which is the direct result of trade agreements that primarily benefit the multinationals), needs to be reversed. One such way is by replacing it with a localized/regionalized Permaculture model where individuals and communities are supported to grow their own produce. This will help to increase local employment, as well as reconnect people to nature, the food they eat and their health requirements. In addition, all foods must be properly labelled and contain no toxic ingredients. GMOs must also be abandoned and organic foods must be readily available.

13. Water Policy: All citizens have a right to access safe and clean water. They should be supported to capture their own water needs. Where this is not possible, no toxins such as fluoride will be added to the water supply.

14. Animal Policy: All animal agriculture systems must respect the health and happiness of those animals. They must not subject them to any conditions in which they consistently suffer. One particular approach would be to incorporate it into a widespread permaculture model, in which animals are treated humanely.

15. Environmental Policy: Any practice that is environmentally unsustainable and negatively impacts the health and diversity of our natural systems is to be transformed into the opposite. The increasing extinction of animal and plant life must be reversed, as well as the trends of deforestation, ocean acidification and desertification.

16. Drug Policy: The war-on-drugs has been an epic failure because it has generated more crime, addiction, mental health problems and sent the market underground. It has also stigmatized the natural right to explore one’s own body and consciousness. The therapeutic and developmental aspects of so-called illegal drugs must be holistically researched so that society can be educated on both their positive and negative impacts. All illegal substances must be made legal, as they have begun to do in some countries, and a thoroughly-informed society must have safe access to pure substances for their own therapeutic, developmental and leisurely needs.

17. Sovereignty Policy: All citizens have natural rights, some of which have eroded through the recent policies of Western Governments. One example is privacy and another is the right to protest. This stripping of our rights needs to immediately stop and all rights aligned with natural law are to be reintroduced. No flesh and blood person should be treated as a legal fiction that works for a corporation impersonating as a government. This means that no legislation can impede on the natural laws that all individuals have a right to exercise.

18. Immunization Policy: All vaccines must be robustly studied independent of the pharmaceutical industry and the results made available to the public. All previous disease and death resulting from vaccines must also be publicly available. None will contain any ingredients other than to immunize against a specific disease. In addition, no child or adult will be forced or coerced into taking vaccines; every person must have their natural right to choose intact.

19. Atmospheric Policy: All geoengineering and chemical spraying programs are to immediately cease. The impacts that these programs have already had on the health of humanity, as well as the environment, must be holistically investigated and reversed.

20. Social Security Policy: Pensioners, people with a disability and other persons who require financial support must be treated with respect and must be able to comfortably live above the poverty line. Where possible, they will be supported to increase their education, training and skills so that they reenter the workforce. There should also be widespread volunteering programs with inherent incentives so the knowledge, skills and services of the elderly can be utilized for the benefit of the community.

Further Thoughts

There are many more areas that need to evolve, but its important to focus on the priorities in such as short piece. No doubt, many of you reading this would have been shocked and confused by some of the information herein. You might have even rejected elements to it, because it might have seemed too conspiratorial or challenging to believe. That’s okay; every single one of us who have woken up to these realities felt the same the first time we heard them too.

In any case, if you’d like to do follow up research, the links provided above will help you to initiate the process. Go deep too; it’s only when we individually undertake our own independent and robust research that we can come to a solid understanding of the true state of the world. The tip of course is to not be fooled by the propaganda narratives of the matrix-media and ensure we undertake research through the independent channels and progressive social researchers.

Furthermore, the above plans of attack are designed for the short to mid term. This does not discount the deeper agenda of moving from an economy of scarcity, to one of abundance. There are many models to achieve this, such as several resource-based economies, but until we build the foundations and start moving in that direction we have to work with what’s in front of us, right now.

In addition, of course it’s necessary to build new systems outside of the existing model to make the old ones redundant, yet we still need to use the systems that we’ve got and aim to transform society from within. After all, a balanced and holistic approach, is always the right approach.

Final Thoughts

Never has a government exposed all of the above issues. They might touch on some of them to some degree, but unfortunately we don’t have so-called leaders who actually call out the real challenges that we collectively face. There’s no doubt that some politicians know about these actualities, but the reality is they don’t publicly disclose it in fear of losing their credibility, or their livelihood.

But things are changing. Not only are more and more people joining the awakening community by educating themselves and taking action in response to these dysfunctions, but there are also political parties forming who dare to expose these truths to their audience and design robust policies in response. One such group is The Australian Sovereignty Party (ASP); in fact, many of the links above will direct you to the policies they’ve designed to rectify the failures of past governments.

Many parties around the world could learn a thing or two from this political force.

If you’re Australian, I highly encourage you to read the policy material at their website and join if their ethos resonates with you. Any person from around the world can join as an affiliate member too, so anyone is more than welcome to sign up to learn about how a true political party works. In addition, share this article and the ASPs progressive policies among your friends and family so that the momentum builds to bring Australians (and others) up-to-date with a political outfit that actually represents the real needs of you, me and all of us.

If you also believe in transforming our world into a better place, then at the very least research their policies. I know you’ll be pleasantly surprised (view their website here and follow them on facebook here). Furthermore, following is an interview I did with the President of the ASP, Daniel Huppert. In it he discusses many of the issues found in this article and the ASPs policy response to them. Enjoy.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

The 1 Percent’s Houses Are Getting Bigger and Swankier While Average Americans Struggle To Make Rent

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For a view of the inefficiencies of the free market, there’s no clearer view than the U.S. housing market, where there are as many as 29 empty homes for every homeless person.

By Bob Larson

Source: In These Times

Today’s gigantic class cleavages bring to mind Matthew 8:20, where Jesus describes his persecution: “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” This description could increasingly also apply to the wrong end of our lopsided capitalist society, which shows itself nowhere more clearly than in housing.

The Wall Street Journal has characteristically thorough reporting on the current housing market, in which it observes “a severe shortage of midtier apartments,” meaning those “aimed at the working class.” This “dearth of lower-priced apartments” has driven up rents for lower- and middle-income-earners, with a market segment average of $845 a month—a daunting figure for many of today’s part-timers and even full-timers.

The reason for this “severe shortage” is pure market economics: “Construction costs are generally too high to justify building new complexes for low- and middle-income tenants. …The difference in costs between installing granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances is so slight compared to buying land and installing elevators that economists say developing a luxury apartment and a midtier one comes out roughly the same.” This has meant that “the supply of less expensive apartments…had decreased 1.6% since 2002. Over that time, high-end apartment inventory has increased 31%.” Not surprising, since rents for the higher-income occupants average $1,702. This isn’t exactly a glowing review of capitalism’s alleged ability to meet consumer demand, regardless of income level.

These market dynamics are especially important for today’s generation of young “millennials,” as the business press observes they tend to rent more, “younger Americans either can’t afford to buy a house or don’t want to.” They’re willing to accept small apartment sizes also, and for reasons that reflect the economic realities of the new generation: “They have diminished expectations, less access to financing and a strong desire to stay in cities.” The tendency for normal working families to be squeezed by high rents out of safe neighborhoods, or into tinier spaces, is another example of the invisible hand giving the finger.

Condo or castle?

On the other hand, a convenient place to observe how the other side of the market works is “Mansion,” a weekly section of the elite-oriented Wall Street Journal, which profiles various different playground properties of elite management and the 1%. Like a lot of print and online media that cover housing, it’s part journalism of lifestyle trends and part naked sales pitch. But the window it provides on the day-to-day life of the ruling class is fascinating.

A conspicuous Mansion headline, “Masters of the Universe,” refers to the infamous phrase used to describe Wall Street power-brokers. But this reference is to the incredible scale of high-end master suites, “With square footage that rivals the average American home.”

The features are gobsmacking: “Amenities have included everything from small kitchens to beauty salons and pedicure stations. Some clients have requested private pools just off the master, separate from the home’s main pool.” At another development, private suites have separate “laundry rooms, small gyms or Pilates areas and ‘super closets’ within the master.” These super closets are their own embarrassment of riches: “closets have evolved from utilitarian storage spaces to showpieces modeled after designer stores, with fireplaces, seating areas and separate dressing rooms.” Illustrated with enormous color photos (often software-generated in the small print), you can easily see that several of these condo and mansion designs have bedroom suites that alone exceed the median modern US house size of 2300 square feet.

Elsewhere, the Mansion section observes that in New York City’s always record-setting property market, “At least two new developments in Manhattan are asking $1 million for a single parking spot,” not failing to notice that this is “about four times the cost of an average single-family home in the U.S.” Spaces can be had for less, but these particular concrete patches are associated with units sporting super-high price tags themselves.

A more old-world example comes from the Financial Times, where a recent edition of its high-living Town & Country section profiles a Scottish Duke with a fair-sized castle in the Argyles. The Times is eager to show a self-effacing, status-disregarding picture of the Duke, encouraging us to see the particularly ludicrous institution of Anglo-Scottish aristocracy with Downton Abbey post-status charm. But the local history is more realist: “To the distress of some Inveraray residents, the whole town was moved in the 1770s to give the castle a more secluded setting.”

Today His Grace is most concerned with fending off the increasingly left-leaning Scottish National Party’s proposals to increase the tax on landed estates like his, and split up the great family fortunes—although estates managed through corporations are exempt. But while he hopes to avoid any splitting of his assets, the Duke also confesses he seldom uses his castle’s two-story library: “I’m just not a book person.”

For the urbane London CEO needing a break from city noise, the WSJ Magazine recommends the “Soho Farmhouse,” actually a fantastically expensive members-only rural retreat with a country club, ice rink, horse stable, football field, event barn, boathouse and tennis courts. To ease rich members into their relaxation time, “a hidden camera scans license plates as guests enter the property,” and “guests are handed cocktails as their vehicles are whisked away…guests can specify their height and foot measurements when checking in online to ensure that they are given properly sized bicycles and Wellington boots for their stay.”

Knowing its audience, the magazine mentions an “Added bonus: If guests don’t want to make their own cocktails, they can summon one of two 24-hour roving milk trucks that have been converted into portable bars with bartenders on hand.” Look, no one appreciates the appeal of a roving bar more than me. But 160,000 kids will die from cheaply-treatable diarrhea-related diseases this month, and these fun cash-burning novelties are pretty obscene to African mothers watching their kids die from conditions that could be cured for far less than an executive’s artisan cocktail.

No vacancies, more vagrancies

But the gaping chasm in housing classes is most dramatically seen by comparing the often-mentioned number of empty houses and apartments, relative to the number of homeless citizens living on the streets or shelters around the United States. Real numbers can be looked up—the Census Bureau’s homeownership survey found that in the first quarter of 2015, 17.3 million housing units were vacant, excluding properties only vacant for part of the year. (Notably, the Mansion survey of gigantic master suites notes that these condos and mansions will often “most likely be a second residence for the potential buyer.”)

The number of homeless Americans is of course somewhat harder to pin down, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report for 2014 (the most recent available) finding 578,424 people homeless on a given night. However this HUD number is considered to be at best incomplete, as its “point-in-time” data reporting tends to underestimate the issue. Nonprofits and advocacy groups like the Urban League approach the number in a longer time frame, trying to estimate how many people experience homelessness over the course of a year. The numbers found through this approach are startlingly different, with older research suggesting numbers around 2.3 million, reflecting high turnover among the homeless population.

The most gross calculation from this data would suggest a ratio of 17.3 million year-round vacant units to 2.3 million homeless, or about 7.5 units per homeless individual. Using the HUD’s more conservative “Homelessness measured on a single night” data would give us an even more insane 29 homes or apartments for each homeless person!

Obviously, numbers anything like these point to a hugely irrational economic system, where people, including families with kids, are spending the nights in dangerous shelters or on the streets while millions of empty apartments and houses sit silently still.

This staggering inefficiency of housing markets throws the irrationality of capitalism into stark relief. Much like crumbling bridges and the unemployed construction workforce, the market economy’s failure to bring these economic factors together is pretty damning. Were Christ to return in our capitalist epoch, He’d need to ante up a lot more than the Word to find a place to lay His head—unless He, like other young Americans, had “diminished expectations” for housing.

About the Author

Rob Larson is Professor of Economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington State, and author of Bleakonomics: A Heartwarming Introduction to Financial Catastrophe, the Jobs Crisis and Environmental Destruction. Follow him on Twitter: @ironicprofessor.