I used to say the plight of the homeless should never be an issue in the US. If we truly wanted to solve it we would. Now, however, as we move to being a something less than a 3rd world country, the plight of the homeless could very well be all of our situations. our chief felon and his crony billionaires truly don’t give a shit about people, although they talk like they do. They lie so well that their voters believe them, only to be left standing in the street without a job.
Partly because Dems seldom called out Republican propaganda of the previous forty plus years, thinking that average Americans were not that gullible, and too well-informed to believe Republican misinformation - but Himmler and the Nazis would have the last laugh.
No homelessness until the mental hospitals were emptied in the early 70's, aggravated and exasperated by Reagan policy.
Where I live, we have seasonal "campers," because we have good weather. Some people released from commitment in northern states are given a one way ticket to Florida.
On the west coast, same with Alaska. Alaska has the highest crime rate of any state, ships the criminals southward.
As Thom says, we definitely also have self inflicted housing crises -- but not in all states.
My home town has a thirrd world cost of living in a nothern state. As a rule of thumb 1 house in a city like NY or DC or LA can yield 10-15 similar homes in my home town. LOCATION x3.
Unlike us the Democrats, like yes even Bernie Sanders, knew that the propaganda was -well - propaganda and they had access to the truth of what damage the Republicans could do to the rest of us - yes the people; after all we voted them in to be public servants believing our government "by the people, for the people."
How could they think that average Americans were not that gullible???? too well informed??? Where on earth would they have gotten the detailed information required to assess what damage Republicans would cause. Only a Ross Perot chart with all the history that Thom has provided could make the average voter understand the inevitable consequences.
Richard,so true. The Dems just don't like confrontation,they like to talk,Oh.let's have a cup of coffee and see if we can work this out. The Republicans say,I going to " cut your tongue out" intimidate Dems so they become impotent.
Natl Guard personnel help in disasters, and that is exactly what this has become across the nation. We have the means, and most military folks love those missions and a good challenge.
Trump’s solution to homelessness isn’t to fix the problem. It’s to erase the evidence by evicting people from public spaces and cutting federal housing funds. He isn’t addressing the Wall Street landlords, hedge funds, and foreign investors who have turned housing into a casino game. He wants poverty out of sight.
Homelessness isn’t an accident. It is the direct result of decades of Reaganomics, deregulation, and policies that turned homes into investment properties for the ultra-rich. Housing costs have skyrocketed because billionaires and corporations hoard properties, driving up prices and forcing millions into an impossible financial squeeze. Meanwhile, Republicans have gutted affordable housing programs, crushed unions, and kept wages stagnant, ensuring that working-class people are priced out of homeownership and trapped in a rental market designed to extract wealth from them.
Other countries have fought back. Canada, New Zealand, and Denmark restrict foreign buyers. Europe invests in public housing. The U.S.? We let billionaires bribe Congress to ensure nothing changes.
Trump’s eviction orders won’t stop people from becoming homeless. They will just make sure no one in power has to look at the consequences of their greed.
The controversy in Baghdad By the Sea is whether the Trump 5 millon visa vs the current EB-5 is better for local development. There are other variations on the theme but the EB-5 program allows participants to obtain a two-year green card and may seek an extension with a shot at applying for U.S. citizenship. Applicants must pledge to invest between $800,000 and $1 million in job-creating projects, and are obliged to pay fees ranging between $100,000 and $200,000 charged by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.
Excellent piece. The international dimensions are particularly important here. Xenophobic reactions are tempting, but common sense policies (as in most of the developed world) are appropriate and sorely needed. Where are the voices in Congress that we need on this issue?
Thank you for this excellent summary of our housing crisis. It is tragic that the American public did not elect the candidate who had actual plans to address this. Are we now too bought out by the billionaires?
Coming to grips with Russia’s agenda and their talking points. Those now emanate from the seat of U.S. power, the White House. Our President acts very suspiciously. Is he fully compromised? Things were clear in my mind, as I wrote in this post. I have little doubt. https://bit.ly/4heWKvb
Excellent analysis of this terrible issue that is worsened yearly by soulless republican jackals and equally soulless corporations. It seems to me that you are again absolutely right about a complex problem that shouldn’t exist here. I wish there were someone in power who could speak like you do about all these issues. Thank you for thoroughly educating me.
In the same way that Musk does not have the authority to fire people, close departments, and have people write emails to him. He gets away with it because people are easily scared, threaten them financially or physically and they fall to their knees and kiss the ring, or try to hide in the background with knees shaking.
Hmm I just described the majority of Congress, including the majority of Democrats.
Along the way, we became a nation where two incomes were necessary to have anything extra. Now it is an absolute necessity for most households to have two people working just to survive.
Heaven help those losing their jobs and medical benefits due to that psychopath Trump and the vile people he has chosen to create further chaos. He's used real estate all his life to wash money, gentrify, and screw-over the contractors doing the work.
Fair market price? What a joke these days! As usual, there will never be norms without regulation, and as usual the Republicans, oligarchs, and corporations will fight them.
Instead of talking to the mayor about solutions for the poor and unhoused, Trump tries to dictate how to cover-up reality---he and his cult specialize in that. The statistics don't lie, but that is ALL HE DOES.
I bought my first house in the early 70's. Lenders, at the time, were prohibited from loaning more than 30% of your income in payments, as it was considered unmanageable. Those were better times. Greed was not yet "Good".
Thanks Thom, I have to admit I didn't know the housing situation was so bad. This greed is another element of America turning into a two class society, the haves and the have nots. Add in the pending destruction of the Civil Service, mass deportations, tariffs, and people in charge of huge government departments whose loyalty to trump being their only qualification ... seems another great recession will be the result. Then the super rich can buy up cheap stock, houses, land and national parks to cement their places in the permanent oligarchy.
"Tragically, there's no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless."
Yes there is. It's called "Congress". It doesn't look like it today, but at one time the government was designed specifically for all the interests of ordinary people, housing included. Now those commitments to our well-being have been relabeled "waste, fraud, and abuse", and are replaced or supplanted by actual waste, fraud, and abuse on behalf of big money.
I am always astounded at the way republican voters put their heads in the sand and ignore the real life problems created by republican policies. It's as though there is some kind of mass hypnosis that prevents republican voters from seeing the inestimable damage that is done to society by the republican politicians. I am at a loss to understand why anyone--other than a billionaire or a corporatist--would ever vote for a republican, for any office. It makes no sense whatsoever. No wonder we are rapidly becoming a third world country.
On inflation: Most of the world has adopted a fractional reserve banking system. Which means that all money's, especially in America and Europe, are created out of debt (all debts public, private corporate including and especially credit cards). No debt means no money,no money and we have a depression, raise interest rates and you decrease the demand for debt, decrease the demand for debt, and you decrease the money supply, and voila a recession, severe enough and you have a depression. this is what the Fed monitors, Per Title 12 US Code it has but one function, to monitor and control the credit of the nation.
I lived in Panama from 75 to 78, virtually no inflation, despite the fact that their currency was the US Dollar and the Bank of Panama was an Edge Act created branch of Citibank.
Then Citicorp set about a massive propaganda campaign, selling Panamanians on credit cards, and boy did they, and so did inflation. The once very affordable Panama is now plagued with state side inflation.
And the only way to oust him is via a counter coup, and the counter coup will have to come from within, and that will take time for the forces to build, because that which made America great is our productivity, our productivity is a function of our national morale.
Trump and his co President (the Geta and Caracola of America) has driven a stake through the heart of our national morale. They kicked Humpty morale off the wall, and nothing can put it back together again.
The fate that has befallen the homeless will soon extend into the great countryside as the ripple effect of his policies are felt in the hearth,home and economy of this nation.
The GDP will plunge, unemployment will rise, evictions will rise, peoples once saved by insurance and even Medicare will die, families will be over burdened, prices will soar, the stock market will fall, but we won't know any of that because Trump has shut down the departments that collect and report statistics.
Wall Street, the billionaires, the oligarchs the plutocrats will know though, but maybe they don't care, after all wealth is relative.
The automobiles that we call classic like the Cord, the Auburn, the Packard, Cadillac were built and sold during the depression, while 25% of America was standing in soup lines, or working for the Civilian Conservation Corps, or building the Hoover Dam.
And I have to remind myself that had not Prescott Bush, Henry Ford, Fritz Thyssen and the likes not financed the National Socialist German Workers Party, there would have been no Adolph Hitler as Der Fuhrer
I have read Feathers of Hope, and it requires 9 Republicans to join with all Democrats, there are three possibles, we need six more, but no one has identified the possible six, and as importantly how to persuade them
Gold Standard: Does anyone know whtat the gold standard is or what it entails?
The USSR had a 100% gold standard. The ruble was valued at .981 grams fine gold, and only enough rubles were printed to be covered by the gold on hand, Result a perpetual depression. The citizen couldn't demand gold for rubles, but a foreigner could at the NordBank in Paris. Smuggling rubles out of Russia was a capital offense. Customs agents scoured incoming luggage for printed material, little else, and outgoing luggage for rubles.
There isn't enough gold in the world to act as a gold standard.
Gold merely replaced government securities, demand deposits and corporate bonds,as the reserve base.
The Reserve base is used to create money out of debt. If there isn't enough gold in the vaults, then the ability to loan money (create money out of debt) is limited and we wind up with a shortage of money, and that is a depression or recession.
To be able to use gold as money, there has to be a strong central government, which can define the worth of a gram of gold, or nano gram, and that puts it at odds with the market, because in the market the value of gold fluctuates with its supply.
People don't realize that there have been gold and silver inflation's.
The discovery of America and the exploitation of Mexico and Peru caused gold inflations, and the slilver mines of Potosi, Bolivia and the Comstock load caused silver inflation's.
Even Rome had the problem when they conquered Dacha and the silver mines of Dacha rell into their hands.
China can own all the worlds gold, but unless a world body declares it as the standard for issuance of a medium of exchange, They simply have their hands on a massive supply of a metal that makes a super conductor and heat sink.
As I've told you about 50 times, Feathers of Hope the Congressional targets are the 22 senators and dozens of house members.
I also identified the 3 amigos here, all Cuban Americans, 2 of 3 who were Dem. I also identify the 20 Republican members in districts with Dem majorities.
The odds may not be great, but this is what we have available.
I am constructing a list of Reps and Senators who have shown spines
If I knew who they were I would add the names of persuadable Reps that could call to impeach As you know Senators don't impeach only convict and remove.
I be looking for the day when the average guy gets the breaks they deserve and the big guy on the block gets the bill they deserve. This month of March 2025 is going to be a big one. God bless
Mr. Hartmann, I appreciate this article. But I must mildly disagree with one important concluding statement you make "it's the direct result of government policies."
I would say it's the eventual result of capitalism. Our non-responsive government is doing nothing to stop this trend. but is encouraging it.
The U.S. is no longer a capitalist system which is described in the out-of-touch elementary Economics textbooks. We are now well into an inevitable transition from a capitalist economy to a rentier-based feudal economy.
The largest and newest part of our economy is now a rentier economy. I am referring to the high tech-digital economy which trades primarily in bits of information, trillions of bits of information. It is not an exaggeration to say that information is the new 21st century version of raw materials. The consuming public does not "own" this information, the consuming public rents it. The huge digital companies "own" the information and they rent it to us. There are tens of millions of apps which one can buy online. The entrepreneurs who design these apps and sell them online pay about 40% of their retail price to the small number of immense digital companies like Amazon and Google, etc. who market the apps to the consuming public.
This is a rentier economy which has a structure almost identical to the rentier-feudal economy of medieval Europe. The entrepreneurs who design the apps and pay a rent to Amazon for the right to marked their products are equivalent to medieval peasants who paid rent to the landed aristocrats on whose land they held the right, or permission, to farm. Amazon, Google and their owners are the modern versions of the medieval aristocrats who owned the landed estates and collected a rent from peasant-farmers. This rent was in effect a private tax paid by the peasant to the aristocrat.
This model has inevitably spread to things like housing, and there is no reason to believe any government program will reverse this powerful, one-way historical trend. Government is only another commodity, owned by the wealthy elite.
The U.S. economy flourished for two and a half centuries because of all the readily available natural resources, including land and all that was in it, water, wood, crops, hematite, copper, petroleum, bauxite, tin, etc. You can find a good list of these non renewable natural resources in the publications of the Club Of Rome's LIMITS TO GROWTH books.
During that two and a half centuries of economic activity in the U.S., the economy was capitalist with three components to it:
1)raw materials
2) labor
3) markets
The owners generated their wealth by lowering the wages paid to their labor force, raising their prices for their products and services, and using a tax-funded military to guarantee a reliable access to raw materials, labor, and markets anywhere in the world they could be found. This activity is still going on, but it is now, obviously being replaced by the new rentier economy, which is treating information as a raw material, and taking away the opportunity for a middle class to own anything of value. People now live in a rented house [if they can afford it], increasingly rent cars, they rent apps, they rent entertainment, and so on.
If the new aristocrats could figure out way to rent to us food, air, and sunshine, they would do it.
Elephantiasis of the ego diffuse into pandemonium of a greed which sadism only attempts to describe. Our 21st century proudly roosts upon a mantel of an utterly profane trajectory.
Some called it the GOP. Some called it Trump. None of them were wrong. But they weren't exactly precise. What animates these monsters posing as humans?
Evil. Pure and simple, evil. There's a reason that term exists. We should have used it more often.
I used to say the plight of the homeless should never be an issue in the US. If we truly wanted to solve it we would. Now, however, as we move to being a something less than a 3rd world country, the plight of the homeless could very well be all of our situations. our chief felon and his crony billionaires truly don’t give a shit about people, although they talk like they do. They lie so well that their voters believe them, only to be left standing in the street without a job.
Partly because Dems seldom called out Republican propaganda of the previous forty plus years, thinking that average Americans were not that gullible, and too well-informed to believe Republican misinformation - but Himmler and the Nazis would have the last laugh.
Dems couldn't do much...
No homelessness until the mental hospitals were emptied in the early 70's, aggravated and exasperated by Reagan policy.
Where I live, we have seasonal "campers," because we have good weather. Some people released from commitment in northern states are given a one way ticket to Florida.
On the west coast, same with Alaska. Alaska has the highest crime rate of any state, ships the criminals southward.
As Thom says, we definitely also have self inflicted housing crises -- but not in all states.
My home town has a thirrd world cost of living in a nothern state. As a rule of thumb 1 house in a city like NY or DC or LA can yield 10-15 similar homes in my home town. LOCATION x3.
Unlike us the Democrats, like yes even Bernie Sanders, knew that the propaganda was -well - propaganda and they had access to the truth of what damage the Republicans could do to the rest of us - yes the people; after all we voted them in to be public servants believing our government "by the people, for the people."
How could they think that average Americans were not that gullible???? too well informed??? Where on earth would they have gotten the detailed information required to assess what damage Republicans would cause. Only a Ross Perot chart with all the history that Thom has provided could make the average voter understand the inevitable consequences.
Richard,so true. The Dems just don't like confrontation,they like to talk,Oh.let's have a cup of coffee and see if we can work this out. The Republicans say,I going to " cut your tongue out" intimidate Dems so they become impotent.
That is such BS.
So true,the Nazi's are having the last laugh,seems we are not that well informed.
Every government facility Trump and his damn minions empty should be used to house the homeless and poor.
Your will/way conclusion is partly true, Gene, but we KNOW which party has the will and we KNOW which party has stopped the ways we can get it done.
The military has the capacity to build fabricated housing...
Been in a few of those.
Natl Guard personnel help in disasters, and that is exactly what this has become across the nation. We have the means, and most military folks love those missions and a good challenge.
Trump’s solution to homelessness isn’t to fix the problem. It’s to erase the evidence by evicting people from public spaces and cutting federal housing funds. He isn’t addressing the Wall Street landlords, hedge funds, and foreign investors who have turned housing into a casino game. He wants poverty out of sight.
Homelessness isn’t an accident. It is the direct result of decades of Reaganomics, deregulation, and policies that turned homes into investment properties for the ultra-rich. Housing costs have skyrocketed because billionaires and corporations hoard properties, driving up prices and forcing millions into an impossible financial squeeze. Meanwhile, Republicans have gutted affordable housing programs, crushed unions, and kept wages stagnant, ensuring that working-class people are priced out of homeownership and trapped in a rental market designed to extract wealth from them.
Other countries have fought back. Canada, New Zealand, and Denmark restrict foreign buyers. Europe invests in public housing. The U.S.? We let billionaires bribe Congress to ensure nothing changes.
Trump’s eviction orders won’t stop people from becoming homeless. They will just make sure no one in power has to look at the consequences of their greed.
The controversy in Baghdad By the Sea is whether the Trump 5 millon visa vs the current EB-5 is better for local development. There are other variations on the theme but the EB-5 program allows participants to obtain a two-year green card and may seek an extension with a shot at applying for U.S. citizenship. Applicants must pledge to invest between $800,000 and $1 million in job-creating projects, and are obliged to pay fees ranging between $100,000 and $200,000 charged by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.
Much of the housing in Miami was developed this way. "Overall, there appears to be little appetite in South Florida for eliminating EB-5 in favor of the gold card." https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/03/10/trumps-5-million-gold-citizenship-card-what-south-florida-wealth-advisers-say-about-the-plan/
A lot of the "low cost" housing funded this way IMHO is a scam. Development may have a few low cost units but the rest are not.
Excellent piece. The international dimensions are particularly important here. Xenophobic reactions are tempting, but common sense policies (as in most of the developed world) are appropriate and sorely needed. Where are the voices in Congress that we need on this issue?
Thank you for this excellent summary of our housing crisis. It is tragic that the American public did not elect the candidate who had actual plans to address this. Are we now too bought out by the billionaires?
Coming to grips with Russia’s agenda and their talking points. Those now emanate from the seat of U.S. power, the White House. Our President acts very suspiciously. Is he fully compromised? Things were clear in my mind, as I wrote in this post. I have little doubt. https://bit.ly/4heWKvb
22 Republican senators and dozens of Republican House members voted to fund Ukraine. Get them on the record.
5 Million Patriots --- bring five million citizens to Washington until MUSK is expelled; and, TRUMP and VANCE are impeached.
5MillionPatriots.blogspot.com
Feathers of Hope. https://jerryweiss.substack.com/p/remove-impeach-impeach
Presssure Congressional Republicans. Call. Write. Picket. Sit in.
Excellent analysis of this terrible issue that is worsened yearly by soulless republican jackals and equally soulless corporations. It seems to me that you are again absolutely right about a complex problem that shouldn’t exist here. I wish there were someone in power who could speak like you do about all these issues. Thank you for thoroughly educating me.
Re "Trump ordered Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser to evict homeless people from various parts of Washington DC. "
Trump doesn't have the authority to make such an order. Congress does, but not Trump. They should just ignore the order as being illegal.
In the same way that Musk does not have the authority to fire people, close departments, and have people write emails to him. He gets away with it because people are easily scared, threaten them financially or physically and they fall to their knees and kiss the ring, or try to hide in the background with knees shaking.
Hmm I just described the majority of Congress, including the majority of Democrats.
William,you are so right. Whatever happened to the Democrats will be an a question for the ages?
Along the way, we became a nation where two incomes were necessary to have anything extra. Now it is an absolute necessity for most households to have two people working just to survive.
Heaven help those losing their jobs and medical benefits due to that psychopath Trump and the vile people he has chosen to create further chaos. He's used real estate all his life to wash money, gentrify, and screw-over the contractors doing the work.
Fair market price? What a joke these days! As usual, there will never be norms without regulation, and as usual the Republicans, oligarchs, and corporations will fight them.
Instead of talking to the mayor about solutions for the poor and unhoused, Trump tries to dictate how to cover-up reality---he and his cult specialize in that. The statistics don't lie, but that is ALL HE DOES.
Keep teaching, Thom.
I bought my first house in the early 70's. Lenders, at the time, were prohibited from loaning more than 30% of your income in payments, as it was considered unmanageable. Those were better times. Greed was not yet "Good".
Thanks Thom, I have to admit I didn't know the housing situation was so bad. This greed is another element of America turning into a two class society, the haves and the have nots. Add in the pending destruction of the Civil Service, mass deportations, tariffs, and people in charge of huge government departments whose loyalty to trump being their only qualification ... seems another great recession will be the result. Then the super rich can buy up cheap stock, houses, land and national parks to cement their places in the permanent oligarchy.
"Tragically, there's no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless."
Yes there is. It's called "Congress". It doesn't look like it today, but at one time the government was designed specifically for all the interests of ordinary people, housing included. Now those commitments to our well-being have been relabeled "waste, fraud, and abuse", and are replaced or supplanted by actual waste, fraud, and abuse on behalf of big money.
I am always astounded at the way republican voters put their heads in the sand and ignore the real life problems created by republican policies. It's as though there is some kind of mass hypnosis that prevents republican voters from seeing the inestimable damage that is done to society by the republican politicians. I am at a loss to understand why anyone--other than a billionaire or a corporatist--would ever vote for a republican, for any office. It makes no sense whatsoever. No wonder we are rapidly becoming a third world country.
agreed.
On inflation: Most of the world has adopted a fractional reserve banking system. Which means that all money's, especially in America and Europe, are created out of debt (all debts public, private corporate including and especially credit cards). No debt means no money,no money and we have a depression, raise interest rates and you decrease the demand for debt, decrease the demand for debt, and you decrease the money supply, and voila a recession, severe enough and you have a depression. this is what the Fed monitors, Per Title 12 US Code it has but one function, to monitor and control the credit of the nation.
I lived in Panama from 75 to 78, virtually no inflation, despite the fact that their currency was the US Dollar and the Bank of Panama was an Edge Act created branch of Citibank.
Then Citicorp set about a massive propaganda campaign, selling Panamanians on credit cards, and boy did they, and so did inflation. The once very affordable Panama is now plagued with state side inflation.
As to what is happening in America. Trump has pulled off a self coup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup#:~:text=A%20self%2Dcoup%2C%20also%20called,of%20themselves%20or%20their%20supporters.
And the only way to oust him is via a counter coup, and the counter coup will have to come from within, and that will take time for the forces to build, because that which made America great is our productivity, our productivity is a function of our national morale.
Trump and his co President (the Geta and Caracola of America) has driven a stake through the heart of our national morale. They kicked Humpty morale off the wall, and nothing can put it back together again.
The fate that has befallen the homeless will soon extend into the great countryside as the ripple effect of his policies are felt in the hearth,home and economy of this nation.
The GDP will plunge, unemployment will rise, evictions will rise, peoples once saved by insurance and even Medicare will die, families will be over burdened, prices will soar, the stock market will fall, but we won't know any of that because Trump has shut down the departments that collect and report statistics.
Wall Street, the billionaires, the oligarchs the plutocrats will know though, but maybe they don't care, after all wealth is relative.
The automobiles that we call classic like the Cord, the Auburn, the Packard, Cadillac were built and sold during the depression, while 25% of America was standing in soup lines, or working for the Civilian Conservation Corps, or building the Hoover Dam.
And I have to remind myself that had not Prescott Bush, Henry Ford, Fritz Thyssen and the likes not financed the National Socialist German Workers Party, there would have been no Adolph Hitler as Der Fuhrer
1. As I keep sayin' we have the capacity to oust him....Feathers of Hope.
2."fractional reserve banking system." China, which is the "C" in BRIC, is advocating a return to a gold standard and is buying it on world markets.
3. We've had great historical periods of relocation. IMHO we've been undergoing one to the sunbelt where costs of living are generally lower.
I have read Feathers of Hope, and it requires 9 Republicans to join with all Democrats, there are three possibles, we need six more, but no one has identified the possible six, and as importantly how to persuade them
Gold Standard: Does anyone know whtat the gold standard is or what it entails?
The USSR had a 100% gold standard. The ruble was valued at .981 grams fine gold, and only enough rubles were printed to be covered by the gold on hand, Result a perpetual depression. The citizen couldn't demand gold for rubles, but a foreigner could at the NordBank in Paris. Smuggling rubles out of Russia was a capital offense. Customs agents scoured incoming luggage for printed material, little else, and outgoing luggage for rubles.
There isn't enough gold in the world to act as a gold standard.
Gold merely replaced government securities, demand deposits and corporate bonds,as the reserve base.
The Reserve base is used to create money out of debt. If there isn't enough gold in the vaults, then the ability to loan money (create money out of debt) is limited and we wind up with a shortage of money, and that is a depression or recession.
To be able to use gold as money, there has to be a strong central government, which can define the worth of a gram of gold, or nano gram, and that puts it at odds with the market, because in the market the value of gold fluctuates with its supply.
People don't realize that there have been gold and silver inflation's.
The discovery of America and the exploitation of Mexico and Peru caused gold inflations, and the slilver mines of Potosi, Bolivia and the Comstock load caused silver inflation's.
Even Rome had the problem when they conquered Dacha and the silver mines of Dacha rell into their hands.
China can own all the worlds gold, but unless a world body declares it as the standard for issuance of a medium of exchange, They simply have their hands on a massive supply of a metal that makes a super conductor and heat sink.
As I've told you about 50 times, Feathers of Hope the Congressional targets are the 22 senators and dozens of house members.
I also identified the 3 amigos here, all Cuban Americans, 2 of 3 who were Dem. I also identify the 20 Republican members in districts with Dem majorities.
The odds may not be great, but this is what we have available.
22 Senators and "dozens" of house members does us no good
We need names Daniel. Who are these people that are vulnerable.
I am assuming that those 22 senators are Republicans, and the dozens of House members are as well.
We really do need names. We really do need to identify potential allies, otherwise all are foes.
Actually, I've published them several times, even my MAGA sebator who sent me a letter castigating Putin....
If I were the Dems, I'd offer Mike Turner, R. Ohio, the House Intelligence committee.
Thje only issue we have in common with most of them is the Putin take over......
I am constructing a list of Reps and Senators who have shown spines
If I knew who they were I would add the names of persuadable Reps that could call to impeach As you know Senators don't impeach only convict and remove.
Represenatives
Al Green
AOC
Ilhan
Pressley
Jamie Rasskin, not sure about him
Senators
Tammy Baldwin
Chris Murphy
Jeff Merkley
Bernie Sanders
I be looking for the day when the average guy gets the breaks they deserve and the big guy on the block gets the bill they deserve. This month of March 2025 is going to be a big one. God bless
Mr. Hartmann, I appreciate this article. But I must mildly disagree with one important concluding statement you make "it's the direct result of government policies."
I would say it's the eventual result of capitalism. Our non-responsive government is doing nothing to stop this trend. but is encouraging it.
The U.S. is no longer a capitalist system which is described in the out-of-touch elementary Economics textbooks. We are now well into an inevitable transition from a capitalist economy to a rentier-based feudal economy.
The largest and newest part of our economy is now a rentier economy. I am referring to the high tech-digital economy which trades primarily in bits of information, trillions of bits of information. It is not an exaggeration to say that information is the new 21st century version of raw materials. The consuming public does not "own" this information, the consuming public rents it. The huge digital companies "own" the information and they rent it to us. There are tens of millions of apps which one can buy online. The entrepreneurs who design these apps and sell them online pay about 40% of their retail price to the small number of immense digital companies like Amazon and Google, etc. who market the apps to the consuming public.
This is a rentier economy which has a structure almost identical to the rentier-feudal economy of medieval Europe. The entrepreneurs who design the apps and pay a rent to Amazon for the right to marked their products are equivalent to medieval peasants who paid rent to the landed aristocrats on whose land they held the right, or permission, to farm. Amazon, Google and their owners are the modern versions of the medieval aristocrats who owned the landed estates and collected a rent from peasant-farmers. This rent was in effect a private tax paid by the peasant to the aristocrat.
This model has inevitably spread to things like housing, and there is no reason to believe any government program will reverse this powerful, one-way historical trend. Government is only another commodity, owned by the wealthy elite.
The U.S. economy flourished for two and a half centuries because of all the readily available natural resources, including land and all that was in it, water, wood, crops, hematite, copper, petroleum, bauxite, tin, etc. You can find a good list of these non renewable natural resources in the publications of the Club Of Rome's LIMITS TO GROWTH books.
During that two and a half centuries of economic activity in the U.S., the economy was capitalist with three components to it:
1)raw materials
2) labor
3) markets
The owners generated their wealth by lowering the wages paid to their labor force, raising their prices for their products and services, and using a tax-funded military to guarantee a reliable access to raw materials, labor, and markets anywhere in the world they could be found. This activity is still going on, but it is now, obviously being replaced by the new rentier economy, which is treating information as a raw material, and taking away the opportunity for a middle class to own anything of value. People now live in a rented house [if they can afford it], increasingly rent cars, they rent apps, they rent entertainment, and so on.
If the new aristocrats could figure out way to rent to us food, air, and sunshine, they would do it.
Elephantiasis of the ego diffuse into pandemonium of a greed which sadism only attempts to describe. Our 21st century proudly roosts upon a mantel of an utterly profane trajectory.
Some called it the GOP. Some called it Trump. None of them were wrong. But they weren't exactly precise. What animates these monsters posing as humans?
Evil. Pure and simple, evil. There's a reason that term exists. We should have used it more often.