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The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
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California Technocracy with Starkian Characteristics
source: @Scott_Wiener on X San Francisco State Senator, Scott Weiner, probably gets the most hate from the Right of any California politician besides Gavin Newsom, and perhaps Nancy Pelosi. To conservatives, Scott Weiner epitomizes everything wrong with California liberalism. Some of the online hate targeted at him from the Right has anti-Semitic and homophobic undertones,... Read More
Responding to polls that show that voters are worried and angry about the high cost of housing, both major parties are floating plans to make buying a home more affordable. Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats want to encourage new housing construction and subsidize first-time homebuyers by $25,000, which economists worry would have an... Read More
Blacks are about 13 percent of the population, but occupy just under fifty percent of all American public housing. It’s about the same for Section 8 and other voucher programs, which spread the overflow from public housing. The numbers in different locations bear out the common view that public housing is largely black. Here are... Read More
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Nature might abhor a vacuum, but it apparently loves an analogy—at least of the genetic and behavioral kind. That is, no matter how much humans may wish to be above and separate from the workings of the rest of the animal kingdom, they are constantly acting in ways analogous to those creatures they so look... Read More
Source: @NewsLambert on X Last year, there was a shift in real estate, with markets stronger in the Eastern US but a slowdown in the West. The West rose disproportionately during the tech boom and was hit harder by going remote and tech crashing, as well as Progressives ruining cities. While the Bay Area escaped... Read More
Dimitri Simes Jr.: Hello everyone! This is the New Rules podcast, and this is our very first ever live stream on Rumble. I’m your host, Dimitri Simes Jr., and our guest today is economist Michael Hudson. And we’re going to be talking about the Putin-Xi meeting, the broader changes in the global economy and to... Read More
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There is no greater litmus test for human liberty than the right to decide what kind of community you and your family live in. Since the advent of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the Northeast, California, and Midwest, and later the passing of the Civil Rights and Fair Housing acts, white... Read More
In Ayn Rand’s celebrated novel Atlas Shrugged, the enigmatic pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld said the following about a fictional crook with good public relations: There’s a good bit more where that came from. Although the statement sounds a bit odd, especially given that pirates, too, are quite often fictional crooks with good public relations — including... Read More
Here come the junkies and crack hos. This video is available on Rumble, BitChute, and Odysee. Our country has a mysterious ability to make rules about race that clearly say one thing – don’t discriminate – and then use the same rules to justify racial discrimination, even require it. The famous Civil Rights Act of... Read More
I have never known the Federal Reserve make a good decision. Indeed, disastrous decisions are the Fed’s hallmark. There are many such disasters. Among them the Great Depression, the decade long consequence of the Federal Reserve Board’s failure to prevent the shrinkage of the US money supply. See: In more recent times we had Brooksley... Read More
During the post-war era, a radical change swept across the urban landscape of the city of Melbourne, marking a turning point in its built form. A city comprised overwhelmingly of detached suburban houses began to see the large-scale emergence of a new, very foreign living typology seeking to challenge this hegemony—the flat. Flats, also known... Read More
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[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com] Last Sunday‘s happy celebration of my grandson’s christening left me reflecting, for the umpteenth time, on my own great good fortune in being born when I was (1945). And worrying that Millennials (the generation born circa 1981-1996) just “don‘t have a chance”—to quote Steve... Read More
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The May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd might be likened to a massive geological upheaval —a 9.0 Richter scale earthquake accompanied by volcanic eruptions everywhere. The initial shockwave brought hundreds of destructive riots with aftershocks of black-on-black crime, calls for defunding the police, demands for yet more Critical Race Theory and similar anti-white indoctrination,... Read More
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Veteran immigration patriots will recall Governor Richard Lamm [D-CO] and his famous 2003 speech “I Have a Plan to Destroy America” .He outlined nightmarish proposals that have now become unchallengeable public policy: making America a bilingual country; encouraging multiculturalism instead of assimilation to the Historic American Nation; promotion of divided loyalties; and, perhaps most presciently,... Read More
A False Dichotomy
The debate over urban planning models is now as polarized as any other culture war issue with a strong partisan divide in support for denser walkable development with democrats being much more sympathetic to the idea. Some on the right view denser urban living as part of a leftist or elite sponsored agenda for us... Read More
President Donald Trump is losing the suburbs. A June poll found that 65 percent of suburban voters had a favorable view of Black Lives Matter. A more recent poll reports that most Midwestern voters prefer Joe Biden over President Trump on race relations, protests, and “law and order.” Just 11 percent of suburban white voters... Read More
The judicial activism juggernaut, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), announced that it will be suing the Trump administration to veto new changes the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has implemented to the Fair Housing Act. The alterations were made in the interest of protecting quality of life and staving off multiculturalism in... Read More
COVID-19 has created the ideal medium for a summer of continuous protest. Political protests and demonstrations used to be weekend affairs during which angry leftists shouted at empty government offices before shuffling home Sunday afternoon to gear up for the workweek. With 1 out of 4 workers having filed for unemployment and many more working... Read More
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Trust the late Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would. Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it... Read More
To expatiate on the subject of homelessness in Seattle, Tucker Carlson regularly invites on his Fox News show a Republican liberal who broadcasts out of Seattle. Aside from a pastiche of liberal ideas, Sleepy in Seattle has nothing remotely perceptive or probative to say about homelessness in the Emerald City. Eventually, this young know-nothing will... Read More
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How China’s Urbanization Pays for Itself
San Franciscans unable to afford the $3,600 monthly rental for a one bedroom apartment sleep in the streets and, like most world cities Beijing recently faced a similar problem. Twenty-three million prosperous Beijingers wanted meals from local restaurants but the quarter-million migrant workers who delivered them could not afford the city’s eye-watering rents. Resourcefully, they... Read More
Not to Americans
The housing market is now apparently turning down. Consumer incomes are limited by jobs offshoring and the ability of employers to hold down wages and salaries. The Federal Reserve seems committed to higher interest rates—in my view to protect the exchange value of the US dollar on which Washington’s power is based. The arrogant fools... Read More
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The Hudson Report
Left Out, a podcast produced by Paul Sliker, Michael Palmieri, and Dante Dallavalle, creates in-depth conversations with the most interesting political thinkers, heterodox economists, and organizers on the Left. The Hudson Report is a new weekly series produced by Left Out with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every episode we cover an economic or political... Read More
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The West’s Finance-Capitalist Road
May 5-6, 2018 Lecture Second World Marxism Conference Peking University, School of Marxist Studies Volumes II and III of Marx’s Capital describe how debt grows exponentially, burdening the economy with carrying charges. This overhead is subjecting today’s Western finance-capitalist economies to austerity, shrinking living standards and capital investment while increasing their cost of living and... Read More
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Secretary of the Treasury for the .01%
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doesn’t exactly come across as the guy you’d want in your corner in a playground tussle. In the Trump administration, he’s been more like the kid trying to cop favor with the school bully. That, at least, is the role he seems to have taken in the Trump White House. When... Read More
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As published in Harper’s Magazine. Let’s start with your 2006 Harper’s article. What did you see happening at that point? It was very clear that more and more of everybody’s income had to go to buying a
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SHARMINI PERIES: Just prior to the economic collapse of 2007-2008 there were several economic indicators which could have given us a clue of the impending disaster. If we look at the economic situation today in the US, we find many of these very same indicators. Housing prices are getting very high. Credit card debt has... Read More
I noticed recently that the catastrophe area that was once the great city of Detroit -- bankruptcy, busted neighborhoods, acres of deserted houses, water shutdowns, and now, asTomDispatch regular Laura Gottesdiener reports, an almost biblical foreclosure crisis that could result in tens of thousands of people being thrown out of their homes -- regularly gets... Read More
The Continuing Depopulation of Detroit
Unlike so many industrial innovations, the revolving door was not developed in Detroit. It took its first spin in Philadelphia in 1888, the brainchild of Theophilus Van Kannel, the soon-to-be founder of the Van Kannel Revolving Door Company. Its purpose was twofold: to better insulate buildings from the cold and to allow greater numbers of... Read More
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"Easy Money" Mel Watt Loosens Lending on Mortgages
Here we go again. Last week, the country’s biggest mortgage lenders scored a couple of key victories that will allow them to ease lending standards, crank out more toxic assets, and inflate another housing bubble. Here’s what’s going on: On Monday, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Mel Watt, announced that Fannie... Read More
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A Private Equity Firm, a Missing Pool Fence, and the Price of a Child’s Death
Security is a slippery idea these days -- especially when it comes to homes and neighborhoods. Perhaps the most controversial development in America’s housing “recovery” is the role played by large private equity firms. In recent years, they have bought up more than 200,000 mostly foreclosed houses nationwide and turned them into rental empires. In... Read More
I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my... Read More
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How Private Equity Came to New York’s Rental Market -- and What That Tells Us About the Future
Things are heating up inside Wall Street’s new rental empire. Over the last few years, giant private equity firms have bet big on the housing market, buying up more than 200,000 cheap homes across the country. Their plan is to rent the houses back to families -- sometimes the very same people who were displaced... Read More
One simple phrase electrified the financial world this past week: high-frequency trading. With the publication of his new book, Flash Boys, author Michael Lewis almost singlehandedly transformed the growing practice of high-frequency trading from an obscure form of financial wizardry cooked up in Wall Street's mad laboratories into a fledgling scandal. What's high-frequency trading? It's... Read More
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Government Backing for Toxic Mortgage Securities?
The leaders of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), released a draft bill on Sunday that would provide explicit government guarantees on mortgage-backed securities (MBS) generated by privately-owned banks and financial institutions. The gigantic giveaway to Wall Street would put US taxpayers on the hook... Read More
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Get a load of this chart from DataQuick’s National Home Sales Snapshot. It’ll tell you everything need to know about housing. (Note: MSA=metropolitan statistical area) As you can see, prices are flatlining or drifting lower while sales are sinking like a stone. That’s the whole ball of wax, isn’t it? Sure, sales will increase in... Read More
NY Fed's Dudley Warns that "Firesales" Could Trigger Another Financial Crisis
Ask your average guy-on-the-street ‘what caused the financial crisis’, and you’ll either get a blank stare followed by a shrug of the shoulders or a brusque, three-word answer: “The housing bubble”. Even people who follow the news closely are usually sketchy on the details. They might add something about subprime mortgages or Lehman Brothers, but... Read More
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Plunging Sales in SF, LA, Vegas and Phoenix cast doubt on Housing Recovery
Higher rates, higher prices and weak fundamentals have sent home sales crashing in last year’s hottest markets casting doubt on the sustainability of housing recovery. In the San Francisco Bay Area, home “sales plunged to a six-year low”…. while prices dropped 4.3 percent from a month earlier. (Los Angeles Times) Additionally, sales of new and... Read More
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The Tipping Point
-John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money It’s too bad Keynes isn’t around today to see how the toxic combo of financial engineering, central bank liquidity and fraud have transformed the world’s biggest economy into a hobbled, crisis-prone invalid that’s unable to grow without giant doses of zero-rate heroin and mega-leverage... Read More
Every so often, the journalists who cover Washington, D.C., and its maze of federal departments and commissions and bureaus receive a strange sort of invitation. Calling you a "thought leader" or some similarly flattering form of corporate jargon, an agency urges you to attend a briefing about a particular issue -- healthcare, the bank bailout,... Read More
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If You Want to Play Doctor, Don’t Hire an Insurance Company as Your Receptionist
Health care isn't the first boon that President Obama tried to give us through a public-private partnership. When he took office, more than 25% of U.S. home mortgages were underwater -- meaning that people owed more on their houses than they could get if they tried to sell them. The president offered those homeowners debt... Read More
When Americans travel abroad, the culture shocks tend to be unpleasant. Robert Locke’s experience was different. In buying a charming if rundown house in the picturesque German town of Goerlitz, he was surprised – very pleasantly – to find city officials second-guessing the deal. The price he had agreed was too high, they said, and... Read More
While Housing Sales Slow
10-year Treasuries veered into the danger zone on Friday as yields broke through the crucial 3 percent barrier signaling a slowdown in housing sales due to higher mortgage rates. Fixed rate mortgages are expected to edge higher even though the rate on the 30-year loan increased to 4.48 percent just days earlier. The Fed’s announcement... Read More
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How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme -- Again
You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing. Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds... Read More
“One shitty deal.” “Shitty deal.” “Shitty.” The date was April 27, 2010, and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) was pissed as he launched into a rant with those pungent quotes in it. As part of a Senate subcommittee investigation into the causes of the financial meltdown, Levin was grilling Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and several... Read More
"4,594,000 Mortgages Going Unpaid in the United States."
Buying a house is a lot like buying a car. If you don’t look under the hood, you could wind up with a lemon. Only with housing, it’s not as simple as checking the dipstick or looking for oil under the rear axle. No, smart home buyers check the data to see what’s really going... Read More
Another Slump Ahead
“Slumping asset prices show a recession is probably on its way. … Stocks tend to fall more frequently and further than property values, so they are better recession-predictors.” - IMF research paper by economists John C. Bluedorn, Joerg Decressin and Marco E. Terrones.Bloomberg News The fact that stock prices have been drifting lower, doesn’t prove... Read More
Bernanke's Smoke and Mirrors
Mortgage rates are rising and the housing market is getting weaker. In May of 2013, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 3.59%. Today it is 4.71%, more than a full percentage point higher. That means that the payment on a $200,000 loan is 15 percent more than it would have been just two months ago.... Read More
A Giant Sucking Sound
According to a report by Goldman Sachs, approximately 57 percent of the homes that were purchased in the first quarter of 2013 were all-cash deals. In 2005, the peak of the bubble, all cash buyers represented a mere 19 percent of all transactions. The amount of investor capital pouring into housing is unprecedented. Moneybag speculators... Read More
Time to Run Up the Red Flags!
The mood on Wall Street has changed dramatically since the Fed announced it planned to scale-back QE by the end of 2013. Although the Central Bank continues to purchase $85 billion of US Treasuries (UST) and Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) per month (as it has since the program was launched nearly a year ago), the expectation... Read More
Topic Classics
Housing Up, Home Ownership Down
Alan Greenspan, Homewrecker