Big investment funds are attacking the middle class and winning

Neoliberalism: a political approach that favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending; neoliberalism is a political development of capitalism and a political and economic ideology that seeks to (i) maximize the freedom of the market by removing barriers to the private accumulation of wealth, and (ii) become a power over and above the state directed to the ends of profit without government interference; neoliberalism opposes regulation over which it has no control; the controlling ethic of capitalism is prudence which leads to wealth, but the ethic of neoliberalism is the accumulation of wealth for its own sake which leads to political power; neoliberalism, as the de facto only available political and economic option has had catastrophic effects on society and the environment



The Pandora Papers is an investigation based on about 11.9 million leaked confidential documents that show flows of money, property and other assets hidden in the global offshore financial system and some American states such as South Dakota. The Washington Post and other news organizations exposed the involvement of political leaders in this system of wealth flow. In the United States, secrecy hides assets from local, state and federal governments, creditors and people abused or exploited by wealthy and powerful people and interests. This confidential information leak is the largest of its kind made public so far. The documents were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which organized the investigation.

The Washington Post reports on the activities of a huge investment fund called Progress Residential. The venture buys single family homes and other residential properties based on computer analysis. It makes cash offers to quickly obtain property. It then rents out the property and makes profit. The WaPo writes:

The venture, Progress Residential, acquires as many as 2,000 houses a month through the use of a computerized property-search algorithm and swift all-cash offers. Progress executives boast that the company’s efficient management practices have been a boon to their tenants who cannot afford to buy one of the “entry level” homes.

But according to previously undisclosed documents and dozens of interviews with renters and former employees, Progress Residential has been ringing up substantial profits for wealthy investors around the world while outbidding middle-class home buyers and subjecting tenants to what they allege are unfair rent hikes, shoddy maintenance and excessive fees.

“There’s just no human decency,” said Victoria Bates, an Amazon warehouse worker who lives on Tammy Sue Lane with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. Bates said the company regularly failed to fulfill ordinary maintenance requests. While the company said it “addressed” within five days most of the 37 work orders she submitted, Bates said most of the time it didn’t fix what was needed: It took several months for the company to repair a leaky water heater, she said.

Meanwhile, Bates said, the firm levies a profusion of fees that “take advantage of regular people working paycheck to paycheck.” 

In a statement, Progress Residential defended its operations, including the treatment of tenants, saying that its rents and fees are in line with industry standards and market rates.

“All of our entities conduct business according to the highest ethical and legal standards,” the company said.

Behind Progress Residential is Pretium Partners, a New York-based investment firm whose business plan and investors are revealed in the Pandora Papers, a trove of offshore financial records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with The Washington Post. 

The plan sought to exploit the 2008 U.S. housing crash, which forced millions of homeowners into foreclosure and left a glut of cheap houses for sale. The financiers’ plan called for buying up tens of thousands of these properties at depressed prices and renting them to families who had lost their homes or, because of tightened lending practices, could no longer qualify for a mortgage.

To raise money for the project, Pretium Partners sent confidential invitations to people wealthy enough to put up at least $2 million. Executives projected annualized returns of 15 to 20 percent, according to a 238-page solicitation to investors in 2012. In total, Pretium Partners raised more than $1 billion, and the resulting real estate venture became Progress Residential.

Unfortunately, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are heavily influenced by neoliberalism and the corrupting money it puts into our pay-to-play system of politics. By not being able to buy a home, middle class families cannot accumulate intergenerational wealth by that means. Living paycheck to paycheck hollows out the middle class. In time, the middle class will shrink to a small and politically unimportant force in American politics. 

Neoliberal capitalists love this. They feast on the middle class. There’s just so damn much money to be made by just squeezing the middle class for all its has.

Questions: Progress Residential claims to operate according to high ethical and legal standards, and from the company's point of view, they arguably do, but do they from the average person’s point of view? Why is home ownership out of reach for so many average Americans, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck[1]? 

Footnote: 

1. The middle and lower classes are under severe financial stress. Once source comments: About 54% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. And nearly 40% of high earners — those making more than $100,000 annually — said they live that way. 

Another source: According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid. Almost 3 in 10 adults have no emergency savings at all, according to Bankrate’s July 2019 Financial Security Index, while the January 2020 Financial Security Index survey showed that 4 in 10 U.S. adults would cover the cost of a $1,000 car repair or emergency room visit using savings. In a 2019 report on the economic well-being of U.S. households, the Federal Reserve Bank determined that nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit card charge that they could quickly pay off. 

From the liar files: Chinese companies that tells us they don't do the Chinese government tells them to do

The Washington Post has analyzed public marketing presentations by the computer hardware and internet company Huawei, now taken offline to hide them. Not surprisingly, the presentations had evidence that the company was involved in Chinese government spying on the Chinese people. 

The marketing presentations had been posted on a publicly accessible Huawei website, but the company removed them last year. They show Huawei touting the use of its technologies to help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor individuals of political interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.

Huawei technology: Monitoring people by voiceprint

Also not surprising, the company denies everything. A company statement comments: “Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report. Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.” What a bunch of liars.

Huawei claims to be just an innocent maker of computer and cloud hardware and software. The company says it would never cooperate with the Chinese government in China to do anything nefarious. At this point, it is worth noting that the Chinese government is brutal, authoritarian and it is the law, regardless of what the written laws may say. So, if Huawei did refuse to do what it was told to do in China or anywhere else on the planet, some Huawei heads would roll, maybe literally.

Huawei publicly claims that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers. But the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on the company’s slides accords with long-standing concerns about lack of transparency. Huawei is the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear. For years, Huawei has been criticized that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. 

WaPo comments: “A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies. .... The new details on Huawei’s surveillance products come amid growing concerns in China, and around the world, about the consequences of pervasive facial recognition and other biometric tracking. Even as the Chinese Communist Party continues to rely on such tools to root out dissent and maintain its one-party rule, it has warned against the technologies’ misuse in the private sector.”

Question: Is it credible to believe that, just like it does with all other Chinese companies, the Chinese government doesn't tell Huawei what to do and the company does it, or is Huawei just plain lying?

From the grossly excessive nails in the coffin files: The 2020 election was not stolen

According to the AP, a detailed analysis of all the fraudulent votes in the 2020 election indicates that Biden won fair and  square. An article, Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump, AP finds, lays the evidence out.

The AP notes that its review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by the fascist Republican Party and our treasonous ex-president found fewer than 475 instances. That would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election even if all those 475 votes went to Biden. Some of the fraudulent votes were for the traitor and most of the fraudulent votes were caught and not actually counted.

The AP commented that its review of the evidence that took months and included more than 300 local election offices. That makes it one the most comprehensive examinations so far of suspected voter fraud in 2020 presidential election.

Questions: Should the ex-president and the Republican Party be called out as domestic terrorists? Or, is the AP lying and millions of fraudulent votes were cast and counted, making Biden an illegitimate president as the ex-president and many or most Republicans still claim? 

1/6 Traitor sentenced to 28 months

The Washington Post reports that one of the traitors at the 1/6 coup attempt who threatened to kill Pelosi received a paltry 28 month sentence. He took at least two guns and 2500 rounds of ammo to the 1/6 GOP party in D.D. This murderous thug, 53 year old Cleveland Meredith repeatedly texted treasonous sentiments to his family and friends. One message that said he was “gonna collect a … ton of Traitors heads.” Another said “he [Trump] wants HEADS and I’m gonna deliver.” He also texted twice that he was considering “putting a bullet in her [Pelosi’s] noggin on live TV.” 

In other activities, Meredith is a devout follower of the QAnon religion. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican luminaries in congress will probably want to give this fine patriot the Congressional Medal of Honor or something like that. Meredith deserves celebration of his resistance to tyrannical Democratic Party democracy and the evil Democratic Party rule of law and their stolen election.

The traitor's guns

The traitor's gun accessories and ammo

In court, the judge read the text messages, many of them vulgar. She wanted to emphasize her belief that “the level of discourse in this country has become so debased and degraded.” Really? Nah, can't be.

Meredith pretended to be contrite, commenting “I know what I did was wrong. It was political hyperbole that was too hyper. … I’m very embarrassed about the whole situation. It’s not who I am and it’s not who I want to be remembered as.”

Political hyperbole. That is all it was. Just innocent Republican patriots with guns doing their patriotic thing.

Questions: Should the Republican Party be named as a domestic terrorist group? QAnon?

Supreme Court Conservatives grope for “non-political” rationales to overturn Roe v. Wade

It appears that Chief Justice John Roberts is looking for a way that appears to be “non-political” to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. A recent paper by a legal scholar points out that in the oral arguments about a Mississippi abortion law a couple of weeks ago, Roberts focused on what the parties in Roe asked the court to do. In a master stroke of misdirection, Roberts shifted attention from what the Roe court held in 1973, to what the parties involved argued in that case. That is a new angle on attacking settled precedent (stare decisis). The New York Times writes:

A new study traces a trend at the Supreme Court: looking to what the lawyers had argued in assessing whether to follow a precedent. 

A decision in the Mississippi case is not expected until late June. If the court overrules Roe, an increasingly real possibility, it will have to explain why it is departing from the principle of stare decisis, which is legal Latin for “to stand by things decided.”

At his 2005 confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Supreme Court should be wary of overturning precedents, in part because doing so threatens the court’s legitimacy.

“It is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” he said, listing various factors the court must consider before it takes the momentous step of discarding a precedent. They include, the court has said, “the quality of the decision’s reasoning.”

At the argument in the Mississippi case, concerning a state law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, the chief justice refined that factor in an apparent attempt to dampen the jolt to the system.

He suggested that the fetal-viability line established in Roe was not a crucial part of the decision’s reasoning. “Was viability an issue in the case?” he asked. “I know it wasn’t briefed or argued.”

In shifting the focus from what the court had done to what the parties in the case had asked it to do, the chief justice was trying to justify upholding a 15-week line while stopping short of overruling Roe entirely, which would allow states to make all abortions illegal.

Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, explored this mode of argument in a recent article in The Supreme Court Review called “Advocacy History in the Supreme Court.”

The article makes the sensible point that a full understanding of a Supreme Court decision requires consideration of how the parties had framed the case.  

Chief Justice Roberts’s question about Roe was in a sense irrelevant, as the significance of fetal viability had been thoroughly argued in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed Roe’s core holding.

That made Roe a “super-duper precedent,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said at Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation hearings. The chief justice did not adopt Mr. Specter’s terminology, but he did not quarrel with the senator’s larger point.

The NYT article points out that legal arguments in a prior decision can be relevant, so lawyers review those briefs and arguments. Another legal expert the NYT spoke with asserted that the opinion in a decided case can sometimes be less helpful than the prior briefs and arguments. But here Roberts’s inquiry went farther. His reasoning clearly suggested that the meaning and weight of a decision may depend on the arguments that had been presented to the court in Roe.

The NYT went on to point out that Roberts pulled a similar stunt in 2007. There, to limit race as a factor in assigning students to public schools to achieve integration Roberts cited a key precedent, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned public school racial segregation. In that 2007 case, Roberts wrote that his opinion was “faithful to the heritage” of Brown by quoting from the original briefs in the case and from the oral argument in 1952. The NYT comments on that clever tactic: “Lawyers who had worked on the Brown litigation called the chief justice’s analysis ‘preposterous’ and ‘100 percent wrong.’”

Whether it is preposterous or 100 percent wrong, it is clear that the Republicans on the Supreme Court are desperate to overturn Roe. The other Republicans are less concerned with the appearance of being political than Roberts, but it is clear that he wants the same outcome as the other Republican justices. 

This analysis reflects a criticism that for decades critics have directed at the court. They criticize the practice of deciding a case first and then trying to figure out how to make it look grounded in legal principle and not personal ideology or bias. Clearly, the Republicans on the court are rigid ideologues who are heavily biased to overturn Roe. That is a major part of why they were picked. 

Overturning Roe is probably what the Republicans are going to do, maybe with a ~65% or ~75% chance. They will do that at the end of next June, or maybe a month, two or three earlier if that is deemed politically helpful for Republicans running for office in the 2022 elections.

For some people, but not most Republicans, the harder Roberts tries to make the Supreme Court look non-political, the more political it looks. 

Questions: 

1. Is it the case that the harder Roberts tries to make the Supreme Court look non-political, the more political it looks? 

2. Is Roe a super-duper precedent, or is its precedent status irrelevant in view of the Republican judges’ (i) socially hyper-conservative political ideology, (ii) Christian nationalist dogma, and (iii) radical right political agenda for American society, government and law?

The Republican Party’s Leviathan of lies poisons American society

A campaign email from third ranking House Republican Representative Elise Stefanik 

of New York lied when it claimed that the Justice Department was targeting parents

as “domestic terrorists” for challenging critical race theory teaching

Credit...

A new York Times article focuses on blatant lies that at least some Republican candidates now routinely employ to help them raise money for campaigns. The NYT writes:

A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.

It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.

Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.

The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.

But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.

At least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.”

Campaign representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees also did not respond to a request for comment.

The people behind campaign emails have “realized the more extreme the claim, the better the response,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. “The more that it elicits red-hot anger, the more likely people donate. And it just contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the incivility and indecency of political behavior.”

The messages also underscore how, for all the efforts to compel platforms like Facebook and Twitter to address falsehoods, many of the same claims are flowing through other powerful channels with little notice.

[One expert commented to the NYT:] “Politicians and the consulting firms behind them, they know that this kind of messaging is not monitored to the same extent, so they can be more carefree with what they’re saying.” 

Mr. Luntz, the Republican pollster, runs frequent focus groups with voters and said they tended to accept misinformation uncritically.

“It may be a fund-raising pitch, but very often people look at it as a campaign pitch,” he said. “They think of it as context, they think of it as information — they don’t necessarily see this as fund-raising, even though that’s what it is. And so misleading them in an attempt to divide them from their money is pure evil, because you’re taking advantage of people who just don’t know the difference.”

The NYT article comments that one democrat they contacted about false information responded by saying it was a mistake and future emails would be more carefully fact checked. At least there is some respect for truth in that. By contrast, Republicans and the GOP refused to comment to the NYT about lies by Republicans. That probably means the Republicans are not going to stop lying. The Republican Party leadership arguably is in a state of full-blown moral rot, with respect for inconvenient facts and truths almost completely gone. 

Winning, power and wealth are the only moral values left in the GOP leadership now that the moral rot has finished its job. All that is left is a stinking husk of what used to be a reasonably principled political institution. 

Question: Is it pure evil as Mr. Luntz said to deceive people by enraging them or instilling terror in them with lies (emotional manipulation[1]) to raise money for campaigns, or for that matter anything else?

Footnote: 

1. I constantly use the phrase emotional manipulation here. It is useful to understand what I mean by that phrase. I mean it to refer to an emotional state of mind, most commonly from unwarranted fear and anger, but also from unwarranted distrust, moral outrage and disgust. The reason that propagandists appeal to negative emotions is because an emotional state of mind is well-known in cognitive science to cause minds to be more open to the messages that accompany emotion triggers. These emotional states of mind are fact and reason killers and all professional propagandists and high-level politicians know it. Speaking to emotional minds is much a more effective way to get what one wants, including money and votes. Making up anger- or fear-inducing lies is usually the best way to establish the pliant emotional state of mind that propagandists need to do their dirty work. Sometimes truth can establish fear and/or anger, but truth and reality is usually less effective.

A post here from last February focused on this issue in the context of emotions in preaching to Evangelical Christian congregations. To increase congregation size and cash donations, pastors are told to instill fear and anger. The emotional manipulation tactic is not limited to just politics.  It also causes moral rot in religion, commerce and probably most everything else.