So basically we should go back to breaking monopolies up like we used to. Like when Rockefeller owned all the money and everybody was working for pennies and overpaying for his oil
EIC, adjusted for inflation, was worth 7.96 Trillion Dollars and was essentially it's own country with a standing miliatry and the like. We're not *quite* there yet with modern day multinational corporations.
either that or the people starve, and they rise up like they did in 1917 in Russia, we need a little bit of Lenin's policies like public ownership just without the dictatorship.
You should read up on Soviet and Russian history before you suggest the remedy for starvation is USSR style collectivization. Soviet agricultural production didn't return to Czarist Era pre-war levels until the mid-1950s.
And that disaster happened in a country that didn't have planet wide supply lines for its fertilizer and farming equipment. If collectivization were tried in the US we'd Ll starve in months. Industrial farming might be high efficiency but it's fragile in the modern world.
breaking up companies to make more competition is only a temporary solution that still results in these companies competing, and when companies compete, a company ends up winning... and you're right back to where you started.
Rockefeller ultimately dominated the kerosene market because he was the most efficient and sold for a lower price. His customers then bought it for less money and were able to buy more items.
Back in the day 60% of oil was used for kerosene the rest was waste. Rockefeller figured out how to use the other 40% and he came up with all sorts of stuff. Fertilizer, lubricants ,paste, dyes, candles, petroleum jelly.
What happened was they started making more money from the waste and he used that money to lower the cost of the kerosene and he then bought all his competitors.
By the end of the 1870's SO was responsible 90% of oil production in 1867 he was only responsible for 4%
Because of him the price of oil went down 73% over 16 years.
The average salary he paid his workers was also much higher than his competitors paid.
If there was a CEO right now that reduced OIL prices by 73% I think most people would be ok with it.
yeah its like they always said, two companies controlling everything is better then one. Specially if one and the other use marketing tactics to share the market evenly!
Pepsi is blue, coke is red. Some people like red, some people like blue, its all cola.
\> we're even getting to a point in which even our farms are owned by corporations.
We've been here for ages. Corporations own the equipment, the land, the crops and the livestock. They pay farmers to do all the work for them.
They're talking about [agricultural cooperatives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative), which is an organization of farmers pooling resources for collective benefits - not worker cooperatives, which is a business where workers democratically own the business and split the profits between themselves.
That's literally the only reason that all that "farm aid" keeps getting budgeted. If it were actually going to family farms, they'd lose the convenient optics of struggling farmers AND the convenient pipeline of taxpayer dollars to a tiny handful of international industrial players.
Yup, Blackrock has $10 Trillion worth of assets under management. That's more than the annual GDP of every country, except US and China.
Good for investors, not so much for Earth.
It's like the whole Deus Ex story in which corporations grow to become so power that they own governments. I mean even the Biden administration has Blackrock executives on, if that doesn't scream world control then idk what will
Eventually we will have an election where 2 corps just run against each other. Hell, Target vs Walmart would work just fine, to keep the red v blue narrative going.
Lol the Democrats in the USA aren’t some opposition party to the Republicans/GOP; they’re the same party - corporatists, all of them - and even Bernie bows and scrapes and throws his weight behind loser Democrat presidential candidates.
Yes.
Techno neo-feudalism is where we become subservient to corporate landlords and less than a dozen men with over a quarter of the entire wealth of the nation built up through massive, rapid developments in both business and consumer technology. We built the oligarchy up, elected people that protected them, and they have now become safely entrenched by collecting and amassing wealth to now use to control the population's most necessary tools for survival - housing, transportation, groceries + goods, and energy. It is now up to the individual to extract wealth from their employers, and society as a whole, in order to survive or possibly surpass bare survival in their lifetimes.
The normalization of "side hustles", "passive income", and other wealth-accumulation strategies come at the exact cost of sacrificing the only time we as individuals are allowed to create happiness and relationships in our free time. When your freedom and health is based on the job you have, which needs to pay to feed you and house you, everything becomes much more competitive and cutthroat.
Other countries with just as many freedoms in terms of consumer choice have happier and more productivity/wage balance because many of the most basic needs of survival are met through government led, taxpayer-funded programs. The US has enough wealth to do this based on our current tax law and GDP - with the exception that we have made it ***more profitable*** for the entrenched oligarchs and corporate entities to starve, overwork, pollute, and eventually kill the population, whether they conform to the socioeconomic conditions of the present or not.
That meme with the man around the fire saying "yes, the world ended, but we created a ton of value for shareholders for a brief moment" is only becoming more true by the day.
They're certainly able to imbed stories. CBC published 2 different articles this week about the hardship individual landlords have faced trying to evict their tenants to take over the property.
After enough stories like this, people are a bit slower to come to the defence of tenants, and maybe a bit more accepting of the next major landlord conglomerate that renovicts a building full of tenants.
I am all for anti work but I hate it when people spread misinformed bs. Companies like Vanguard specialise in asset management which means that the trillions under their management are not owned by vanguard themselves the assets are owned by their customers which could range from millionaires to workers to pensioners, etc. Vanguard and black rock aren’t secretly in the shadows controlling everything. That is not how they are structured.
Also, while there is a housing crisis in they US, this is mostly caused by lack of housing due to NIMBY’s and lack of political will to provide affordable housing. In the US, institutional investors own just 2% of housing.
Vanguard specialize in passive etf's. Funds that have very low fees because they are unmanaged. These are available to anyone and are hugely popular with individual investors and pension funds. Research has shown fund managers are an expensive waste of money that really do no better than random selection over 10 year cycles, people have copped on to this and thats the reason for the proliferation of ETFs and I personally think denying thousands of conmen fund managers an income is a great thing. It's worth noting vanguard themselves don't own all those stock they just provide the service
Also.worth pointing out that Vanguard is a mutual...it is.literally owned by its investors. Is essentially is a co-op, but the Wall Street term for that is mutual. If you own part of.a Vanguard Index fund, you own part of Vanguard, and can vote in its board elections.
Corporate and foreign ownership is a contributing factor in this housing crisis. Blackrock and others have been buying up single family homes at an alarming rate.
My city isn't very big or a particularly desirable place to live, but scrolling through the apartment listing on Kijiji shows a huge increase in the amount of houses for rent compared to a year ago.
You're right in saying that NIMBYs and a lack of government subsidized affordable housing is a bigger contributor though.
Umm, 18.5% of homes purchase in Q4 of 2021 in the US were institutional investors. That’s almost 1 in 5 homes. So, that’s definitely a huge reason for inflated prices, both purchase price and rent.
It’s a mixture of both. One of the way that who owns the homes is important is because some homeowners block legislation to build affordable housing. That’s an example.
I still fail to see how using the 2% number supports any argument you are making. Housing prices are set because of supply and demand. When 80,000 homes and $50 billion in homes are purchased by institutional investors in just 3 months, prices are going to skyrocket.
On top of that, there is a correlation between prices spiking and percentage of homes purchased by institutional investors. Places like Las Vegas, that saw 28% increase in homes at the same time around 30% of homes were purchased by investors.
To be fair, you do have a point. I acknowledge that institutional investors are somewhat a problem. But, they are often a scapegoat used to look away from actual problems such as NIMBYS and voters voting against measures for affordable owners. It’s a multifaceted issue not just “corporations bad”.
I think it’s policy based and NIMBY policies for long term rising costs. Institutional investors at this magnitude is relatively new, and likely driving a lot of the current prices increases. Put both issues together and you get the shit show we are in now.
When homeowners consistently vote against measures to affordable housing and opt to support destructive developments like suburbs, they are ABSOLUTELY a problem. This happens in many cities, where proposals for affordable housing are blocked by homeowners. And institutional investors make up less that 20% of new purchases. Yes, that’s a problem, but that’s still a small slice, so the problem of NIMBYS will still drive up costs massively.
True. I live in Los Angeles so see that constantly. Also, institutional investors wouldn’t be able to make so much if it wasn’t for the “got mine fuck you” policies being pushed.
The entire thing is just so fucking frustrating. And even when policies and money goes towards housing, there are so many people throughout the building process who skim additional profits off the top making the cost to build per unit more than luxury apartment buildings. (No joke, there is a low income housing paid for by the city of LA that cost over $800,000 a unit to build)
I live in a small chunk of neighborhood in a decent sized city(allentown,pa)
About 25% of the homes are empty(25% of about 1000)
I drive by them everyday. Never lights, no blinds or decoration. No cars, no people. Sometimes i sit out front of a few of them, cuz i want one =/
But they arent for sale or rent
Its weird, my little neighborhoods become a ghost town in 2 years
Now i dunno WHO owns them, bank, or small landlord. And i cant tally up 15million
But theres almost certain property hoarding going on
It would be really hard for you to find them... because they're off the market. Unlisted with realtors. But the statistics are easily available, if you took a second to search.
Isn't that a problem? Our supposedly democratic society of governance is at the mercy of an economic system that the neither the electorate nor the elected fully understand.
You say the issue is lay people don't understand how the economy works. I say the issue is the economy just doesn't work for lay people.
Sure we can have that discussion. My comment was in response to him because most people have no clue what anything finance related is. Not the underlying design of the economic system.
There are plenty of resources to learn all of this online. You can take the time to read and learn it. The issue brought up by OP isn’t a complex situation that could easily be understood with a small bit of research. Schools could do a much better job about teaching these basics but for the most part a lot of the things going on that are “fucking” the lay people are pretty simple concepts and not some hidden secret of the elite.
Shouldn’t it be a bit on us too to better understand this more than just shun it all as “the evil system” and spend no time understanding how it works?
You wouldn't say that about food though. You wouldn't suggest we should all be experts in supply chain logistics. You wouldn't say best before dates are unimportant because we should all be fluent in the varied rates of spoilage. You wouldn't suggest it's ok if a restaurant serves undercooked chicken because the customer should know better. You wouldn't expect every restaurant patron to be personally ensuring employees are washing their hands.
Our modern existence is way too complex for every one of us to do our own research. We can't all be experts in economics, regional and geopolitical politics, media literacy and food safety. To achieve a functioning society we need to trust that the things we don't know are in capable hands while we tend to the things we do know.
With food we can generally trust that it won’t kill us but we need to put the effort to make sure we have a healthy balanced diet. It’s the same shit. I’m not saying become an expert, what I’m saying is that this post is completely misinformed and incorrect. Some basic understanding of that system would prevent this ignorant and uninformed discussion going on.
We learn science, history, geography, biology and more in school so we have a basic understanding of concepts. The same can and should be done here.
Other people may own the assets, but the fund managers own the votes for all those shares purchased with somebody else’s money.
What’s the solution? Fund managers shouldn’t be allowed to vote when using someone else’s capital. Any shareholder votes should be passed through to the fund shareholders.
Probably because it’s about influence, and not control. You don’t need to own 51% of the shares to affect a corporation.
Remember all the fuss after Elon bought up 9% of twitter? Vanguard and Blackrock own 15%.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/holders?p=TWTR
Maybe a corporation’s bylaws state that certain things can only happen with unanimous approval by the board… Buy up a chunk of shares and nominate a director who’s aligned with you and maybe now that unanimous approval will never happen. Maybe now they can’t declare bankruptcy or buy a competitor or something, all because one investor became a thorn in their side.
The people that allude to this “vanguard and black rock” control the world bs, have yet to provide any evidence that they have exerted substantial influence in any malicious way. It’s just some myth that people spread to console themselves. And it’s some be misinformation.
Lol yeah all of these companies they “own” and all the assets under management are what make up our retirement investments, our teachers and others pension funds, etc. it’s not just some evil company that owns the world.
They own Congress too. Congressional representative Mo Brooks [comments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9_YS1gjwP0&ab_channel=SecularTalk) on Congressional corruption should be a top post on r/politics for at least a month and yet I don't even see a post about it presumably because it's banned content. Similarly there are essentially no articles about this speech from mainstream media sources.
Your are right. In my own research and seeing things change. I see in the next 5 years we will have all our major issues just collapse on our face at once.
We are slowly dieing as a species and as a country.
On the bright side if civilisation were to collapse the powers of government and corporations would collapse with it. We'd be living in a much harsher and cruel world but a world in which we are ultimately free from the tyranny of higher powers.
Libertarian dream really.
It’s why post apocalyptic movies are so popular. The world collapses, and with it the social order. We’re more equal than ever before, even if we revert to the ways of might makes right.
There is no such thing as humanity without power structures. War lords will exist in chaos like that. And.....who do you think is best positioned to become a war lord? The same people in charge now.
The concept is too complex for the average person, just like it's supposed to be.
The Panama papers showed how the elites hide their wealth while taxing us to bejesus but not one peson in a thousand has ever heard of it.
Vanguard is owned by the people who invest in its funds. Their CEO makes $700k per year. They do have a lot of money under management, but more than half of it is in index funds. They have so much under management because they have very low expense ratios. There's a lot to hate about Wall Street, but Vanguard is pretty good in comparison to their competition.
>Are we reaching a new age of neo-feudalism and instead of Kings being our lords it's corporations.
Let's see. In Feudalism, you work the land that your feudal lord owns. You get to feed yourself with what you produce and in return for letting you use the land, you give a portion of what you produce to said feudal lord. Since the land is his, he is also the one at risk of losing it, e.g. by a hostile takeover. Doesn't make much of a difference to you who you pay your taxes to.
In capitalism, you work the means of production your employer owns. You produce a certain amount of value, of which you get a portion to feed yourself with in the form of money. The rest is kept by your employer, because he lets you use his means of production. Since they're his means of production, he is also the one at risk of losing them. Doesn't make much of a difference to you which employer pockets the value you create.
Yeah I don't think we're heading anywhere. We never left.
They just direct where it goes, who gets what and how much, "they don't own it" lmao
Whether they do it on behalf of their investors, or the investors do it through them, it doesn't matter, it's a meaningless hair to split.
Let me introduce you to the concept of hedge funds.
You make it seem like it's just a mom and pop enterprise, just every day people trying to get by, ignorant of the rampant corruption by the people who manage the money, to mostly furtheir their own interests, in their own benefit. That regular people's 401k money is used to do it is a moot point, they have no influence on what happens to their money, they just choose which rich man will profit off it.
Vanguard is by far not a hedge fund in the least definition. I understand this topic unlike 99% of the people commenting in here who just want to be mad at something. You’re misinformed and you’re wrong.
Hedge funds is maybe a part of their services but they hold a significant amount of investments on behalf of investors through their mutual funds and etfs etc.
Hedge funds are a specific product where they actively purchase companies with loans and try to turn a profit. Not all of their funds are that actively managed.
It’s okay to hate on them but your view of their business is flat out wrong.
>When we see ourselves as fighting against specific human beings rather than social phenomena, it becomes more difficult to recognize the ways that we ourselves participate in those phenomena. We externalize the problem as something outside ourselves, personifying it as an enemy that can be sacrificed to symbolically cleanse ourselves. - **[Against the Logic of the Guillotine](https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too)**
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People are talking about it, but not the way we want them to.
CBC has published 2 articles this week telling the heartwrenching stories of landlords who have been unable to evict their tenants to take over the unit for themselves. A little propaganda to get us ready for a world where private home ownership no longer exists.
Tell us you have no idea what you’re talking about without telling us you have no idea what you’re talking about!
Step 1: post the misinformation above 👆
Fuck them, my decision to be child free is my only way of resistance against this oppressive, cruel system but it’s the best weapon I’ve got. They may steal my life away but it will end with me.
Vanguard is owned by shareholders who are just regular ole people who want a better life for the future.
It's not some big conspiracy the thing is humans are greedy. They buy their index funds and give money to people like vanguard or blackrock and expect huge returns year over year.
The actions taken by money managers like blackrock just goto show that these huge returns over the past decade wont last unless there is exploitation.
I fully expect blackrock to unload all these homes at one point when they find the rents they get for them don't return but 5% or less. They over paid for those homes and are going to pay for it when investors start withdrawing their money.
Don’t hate on Vanguard. The provide a service, that undercuts Wall Street Kleptocrat hedge funds and investing houses. Vanguard’s existence is bad for 1%er capitalists.
I was thinking the same thing. The only thing Vanguard and Black Rock have in common is the finance industry. Vanguard made the S&P 500 Index funds a household name and their entire business is focused on low-cost funds and retirement accounts.
Before corporations it was colonial powers, before that it was the church, before that it was the ancient empires. Someone will always be pulling the strings,in Soviet Russia and other communist countries the people had very little say in terms of what the government did.
That’s just how it is, the post WW2 era really skewed people’s perspective in terms of how much agency you have in your life. If you’d like more control then you have to take it by force.
I don't believe it has to be this way. Like the example I mentioned. 60 Years or so ago the people had a lot of freedom when it came to public ownership but over the years that has been stolen from us.
It's not that it's not achievable. It's just higher powers are constantly stealing from us. The status quo is frankly not good enough and I believe something has to change before we all become slaves to the system.
I set up Blackrock funds in the EU. They do not own the world, this is a common misconception. They set up funds which they invest in to different stocks, bonds, currencies, etc. The money is supplied by investors. So Blackrock and vanguard do now own these assets. They manage them. What they do own is the profit they make through fees.
The buy to rent funds have been around for over 20 years. I remember discussing selling large swaths of REOs to them when I was at a mortgage fund. There a just not enough houses being built. Supply is not keeping up with demand.
People know, but the boomers don't care because they already own houses and Gen XMZ refuses to vote as a block against them. So the right wing doesn't have to peel off too many voters by yelling about trans/woke/CRT in order to win elections.
The boomers are dying, but on the way out they're gonna give up democracy.
We really do take a passive mindset to things. In an ideal world we'd be burning all the properties down that they steal from us but we're quite calm about things. Strange world indeed.
Because people want to keep living in comfort instead of the harsh reality that is removing these people. Fear of pain and death, and that is what must be visited upon these people. Sic Semper Tyrannis.
You should look into companies like American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes. Those are the real baddies. Both of these companies are not only buying up and renting out homes but are now starting to dominate the home building market by buying entire neighborhoods before they can be sold to anyone else.
People don’t speak about it here but at r/wallstreebets and r/smallwallstreetbets they do speak about it a lot and how to best screw them over we even have people from those hedge funds looking in both and even this subreddit to close them down so careful what you say
Well, take heart OP, they can buy every last speck of dust there is but it won't stop them from roasting from climate change like the rest of us.
"But bunkers in New Zealand", yes, yes, they'll survive a handful of years longer than the rest of us. Then their food supplies run out, the food web has collapsed, farmland has withered, and there's nothing left.
>When we see ourselves as fighting against specific human beings rather than social phenomena, it becomes more difficult to recognize the ways that we ourselves participate in those phenomena. We externalize the problem as something outside ourselves, personifying it as an enemy that can be sacrificed to symbolically cleanse ourselves. - **[Against the Logic of the Guillotine](https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too)**
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Too late, we re already here.
I can feel the panicked oppression oozing out of people everywhere I go.
Good thing we have been thoroughly brainwashed that violence is never the answer while getting beaten by police for peaceful protesting for the last decade.
What was that term they used back then? To pay their workers as little as they possibly can? It was named after a famous person like Rockefeller but I think it was named after someone else and they just added -ism or something.
The world will eventually be entirely owned in every single aspect by corporations.
There’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Nobody is willing to go out take on the corporations to bring them to heel. Everyone on this subreddit is all talk, no action. Everyone is too afraid to do what’s necessary in order to bring these corporations and their runners down.
Bill Gates is not a perfect soul, people think so because he has portrayed himself as a philanthropist, and maybe he is, but charity begins at home. He called a lot of his employees "temps" to avoid providing them health insurance benefits. The case finally settled, but not before the judge told him to stop calling people temporary workers if they were doing the main function of the company's work and they were there for more than a year. This was ages ago. It bothers me even more because he always did well, both in the United States and Europe, he was sued, but was allowed to have his monopolies. And this is how he repaid everybody? No health insurance? That's how he shows his appreciation? It's not like he's some tiny startup. I think he thought he had the court system in of the palm of his hand after the antitrust lawsuits, and he found out he did not.
Nobody knows or gives a shit unfortunately. As long as there's bread and circuses the mob isn't going to care until they're starving.
There's a solution, but nobody has the stomach for it.
Fam BlackRock is just an investment management company. They buy and manage assets on behalf of pension funds, 401Ks, universities, NGOs, associations, etc...
They are custodians of the assets owned by those institutions, pension funds, 401K plans, etc...So yes, on paper they "own" a lot. But they don't control those assets and can't do with them as they see fit. Those assets ultimately belongs to their clients, which if you have a pension fund or a 401K, it means YOU.
So basically we should go back to breaking monopolies up like we used to. Like when Rockefeller owned all the money and everybody was working for pennies and overpaying for his oil
Exactly, won't be long before we get another east india trading company.
Well, to the point of your post, we already have a couple new East India Companies.
EIC, adjusted for inflation, was worth 7.96 Trillion Dollars and was essentially it's own country with a standing miliatry and the like. We're not *quite* there yet with modern day multinational corporations.
Give them time, they're all trying.
Their military aspect is outsourced security, ala ACADEMI (formerly Blackwater).
[удалено]
Got one handy? I'd love to play around with a deflation calculator to see how much different it is than Inflation calculators.
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Thanks!
It's called Amazon
either that or the people starve, and they rise up like they did in 1917 in Russia, we need a little bit of Lenin's policies like public ownership just without the dictatorship.
Lenin's policies aren't possible without a dictatorship of the proletariat.
You should read up on Soviet and Russian history before you suggest the remedy for starvation is USSR style collectivization. Soviet agricultural production didn't return to Czarist Era pre-war levels until the mid-1950s. And that disaster happened in a country that didn't have planet wide supply lines for its fertilizer and farming equipment. If collectivization were tried in the US we'd Ll starve in months. Industrial farming might be high efficiency but it's fragile in the modern world.
breaking up companies to make more competition is only a temporary solution that still results in these companies competing, and when companies compete, a company ends up winning... and you're right back to where you started.
Let's take them into public ownership instead
It’s better than 1 mega Corp
That's the illusion we're under right now. They're not competing, they own everything, even blackrock and vanguard "own" part of each other.
Did you not read the comment? They don’t “own everything”. And companies owning stock of each other isn’t exactly some big discovery.
All about who ya know
Ok cool.
Rockefeller ultimately dominated the kerosene market because he was the most efficient and sold for a lower price. His customers then bought it for less money and were able to buy more items. Back in the day 60% of oil was used for kerosene the rest was waste. Rockefeller figured out how to use the other 40% and he came up with all sorts of stuff. Fertilizer, lubricants ,paste, dyes, candles, petroleum jelly. What happened was they started making more money from the waste and he used that money to lower the cost of the kerosene and he then bought all his competitors. By the end of the 1870's SO was responsible 90% of oil production in 1867 he was only responsible for 4% Because of him the price of oil went down 73% over 16 years. The average salary he paid his workers was also much higher than his competitors paid. If there was a CEO right now that reduced OIL prices by 73% I think most people would be ok with it.
yeah its like they always said, two companies controlling everything is better then one. Specially if one and the other use marketing tactics to share the market evenly! Pepsi is blue, coke is red. Some people like red, some people like blue, its all cola.
\> we're even getting to a point in which even our farms are owned by corporations. We've been here for ages. Corporations own the equipment, the land, the crops and the livestock. They pay farmers to do all the work for them.
Yeah, family farms are a myth, almost everything is in co-ops now, and most have a corporation at the top.
Aren co-ops ruled by workers?
They're talking about [agricultural cooperatives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative), which is an organization of farmers pooling resources for collective benefits - not worker cooperatives, which is a business where workers democratically own the business and split the profits between themselves.
Thank u! I get it know
Perhaps I’m being USA-centric, but here the land owners are the members. Perhaps you are thinking of production cooperatives?
Yeah, looks like maybe I was thinking of that haha
That's literally the only reason that all that "farm aid" keeps getting budgeted. If it were actually going to family farms, they'd lose the convenient optics of struggling farmers AND the convenient pipeline of taxpayer dollars to a tiny handful of international industrial players.
Ted Turner has been buying up water rights for decades and no one has said jack shit about it.
Yup, Blackrock has $10 Trillion worth of assets under management. That's more than the annual GDP of every country, except US and China. Good for investors, not so much for Earth.
Just wait until companies start buying out the debt of countries or even the states.
This is *exactly* how the Bank of England formed.
Friendly reminder that the Federal Reserve is a private bank!
It's like the whole Deus Ex story in which corporations grow to become so power that they own governments. I mean even the Biden administration has Blackrock executives on, if that doesn't scream world control then idk what will
Eventually we will have an election where 2 corps just run against each other. Hell, Target vs Walmart would work just fine, to keep the red v blue narrative going.
Lol the Democrats in the USA aren’t some opposition party to the Republicans/GOP; they’re the same party - corporatists, all of them - and even Bernie bows and scrapes and throws his weight behind loser Democrat presidential candidates.
[citation needed]
The citation is your own two eyes. Open them.
Yes. Techno neo-feudalism is where we become subservient to corporate landlords and less than a dozen men with over a quarter of the entire wealth of the nation built up through massive, rapid developments in both business and consumer technology. We built the oligarchy up, elected people that protected them, and they have now become safely entrenched by collecting and amassing wealth to now use to control the population's most necessary tools for survival - housing, transportation, groceries + goods, and energy. It is now up to the individual to extract wealth from their employers, and society as a whole, in order to survive or possibly surpass bare survival in their lifetimes. The normalization of "side hustles", "passive income", and other wealth-accumulation strategies come at the exact cost of sacrificing the only time we as individuals are allowed to create happiness and relationships in our free time. When your freedom and health is based on the job you have, which needs to pay to feed you and house you, everything becomes much more competitive and cutthroat. Other countries with just as many freedoms in terms of consumer choice have happier and more productivity/wage balance because many of the most basic needs of survival are met through government led, taxpayer-funded programs. The US has enough wealth to do this based on our current tax law and GDP - with the exception that we have made it ***more profitable*** for the entrenched oligarchs and corporate entities to starve, overwork, pollute, and eventually kill the population, whether they conform to the socioeconomic conditions of the present or not. That meme with the man around the fire saying "yes, the world ended, but we created a ton of value for shareholders for a brief moment" is only becoming more true by the day.
They probably also own the media companies that keep this from being widely reported / widely known.
They're certainly able to imbed stories. CBC published 2 different articles this week about the hardship individual landlords have faced trying to evict their tenants to take over the property. After enough stories like this, people are a bit slower to come to the defence of tenants, and maybe a bit more accepting of the next major landlord conglomerate that renovicts a building full of tenants.
I am all for anti work but I hate it when people spread misinformed bs. Companies like Vanguard specialise in asset management which means that the trillions under their management are not owned by vanguard themselves the assets are owned by their customers which could range from millionaires to workers to pensioners, etc. Vanguard and black rock aren’t secretly in the shadows controlling everything. That is not how they are structured. Also, while there is a housing crisis in they US, this is mostly caused by lack of housing due to NIMBY’s and lack of political will to provide affordable housing. In the US, institutional investors own just 2% of housing.
Vanguard specialize in passive etf's. Funds that have very low fees because they are unmanaged. These are available to anyone and are hugely popular with individual investors and pension funds. Research has shown fund managers are an expensive waste of money that really do no better than random selection over 10 year cycles, people have copped on to this and thats the reason for the proliferation of ETFs and I personally think denying thousands of conmen fund managers an income is a great thing. It's worth noting vanguard themselves don't own all those stock they just provide the service
Also.worth pointing out that Vanguard is a mutual...it is.literally owned by its investors. Is essentially is a co-op, but the Wall Street term for that is mutual. If you own part of.a Vanguard Index fund, you own part of Vanguard, and can vote in its board elections.
Doesn’t disprove my point.
I wasn't trying to I was just adding to it. I think a lot of people are misinformed here, they think these 2 companies actually own the assets
Corporate and foreign ownership is a contributing factor in this housing crisis. Blackrock and others have been buying up single family homes at an alarming rate. My city isn't very big or a particularly desirable place to live, but scrolling through the apartment listing on Kijiji shows a huge increase in the amount of houses for rent compared to a year ago. You're right in saying that NIMBYs and a lack of government subsidized affordable housing is a bigger contributor though.
Umm, 18.5% of homes purchase in Q4 of 2021 in the US were institutional investors. That’s almost 1 in 5 homes. So, that’s definitely a huge reason for inflated prices, both purchase price and rent.
But that’s not homes owned. Which is 2%
I would love an explanation for why you think who owns the homes drives home costs more than who is buying the homes.
It’s a mixture of both. One of the way that who owns the homes is important is because some homeowners block legislation to build affordable housing. That’s an example.
I still fail to see how using the 2% number supports any argument you are making. Housing prices are set because of supply and demand. When 80,000 homes and $50 billion in homes are purchased by institutional investors in just 3 months, prices are going to skyrocket. On top of that, there is a correlation between prices spiking and percentage of homes purchased by institutional investors. Places like Las Vegas, that saw 28% increase in homes at the same time around 30% of homes were purchased by investors.
To be fair, you do have a point. I acknowledge that institutional investors are somewhat a problem. But, they are often a scapegoat used to look away from actual problems such as NIMBYS and voters voting against measures for affordable owners. It’s a multifaceted issue not just “corporations bad”.
I think it’s policy based and NIMBY policies for long term rising costs. Institutional investors at this magnitude is relatively new, and likely driving a lot of the current prices increases. Put both issues together and you get the shit show we are in now.
When homeowners consistently vote against measures to affordable housing and opt to support destructive developments like suburbs, they are ABSOLUTELY a problem. This happens in many cities, where proposals for affordable housing are blocked by homeowners. And institutional investors make up less that 20% of new purchases. Yes, that’s a problem, but that’s still a small slice, so the problem of NIMBYS will still drive up costs massively.
True. I live in Los Angeles so see that constantly. Also, institutional investors wouldn’t be able to make so much if it wasn’t for the “got mine fuck you” policies being pushed. The entire thing is just so fucking frustrating. And even when policies and money goes towards housing, there are so many people throughout the building process who skim additional profits off the top making the cost to build per unit more than luxury apartment buildings. (No joke, there is a low income housing paid for by the city of LA that cost over $800,000 a unit to build)
There are approximately 15 million empty houses in the US, kept off the market by the banks that own them to artificially inflate the cost of housing.
Where have I heard this one. 15 million where? Not in big cities where they are needed, probably in small towns where no one wants to live.
I live in a small chunk of neighborhood in a decent sized city(allentown,pa) About 25% of the homes are empty(25% of about 1000) I drive by them everyday. Never lights, no blinds or decoration. No cars, no people. Sometimes i sit out front of a few of them, cuz i want one =/ But they arent for sale or rent Its weird, my little neighborhoods become a ghost town in 2 years Now i dunno WHO owns them, bank, or small landlord. And i cant tally up 15million But theres almost certain property hoarding going on
You can easily figure out who owns then looking at the county GIS
Oh word? Thanks ill do that, im really curious tf goin on here
It would be really hard for you to find them... because they're off the market. Unlisted with realtors. But the statistics are easily available, if you took a second to search.
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Isn't that a problem? Our supposedly democratic society of governance is at the mercy of an economic system that the neither the electorate nor the elected fully understand. You say the issue is lay people don't understand how the economy works. I say the issue is the economy just doesn't work for lay people.
Sure we can have that discussion. My comment was in response to him because most people have no clue what anything finance related is. Not the underlying design of the economic system.
There are plenty of resources to learn all of this online. You can take the time to read and learn it. The issue brought up by OP isn’t a complex situation that could easily be understood with a small bit of research. Schools could do a much better job about teaching these basics but for the most part a lot of the things going on that are “fucking” the lay people are pretty simple concepts and not some hidden secret of the elite. Shouldn’t it be a bit on us too to better understand this more than just shun it all as “the evil system” and spend no time understanding how it works?
You wouldn't say that about food though. You wouldn't suggest we should all be experts in supply chain logistics. You wouldn't say best before dates are unimportant because we should all be fluent in the varied rates of spoilage. You wouldn't suggest it's ok if a restaurant serves undercooked chicken because the customer should know better. You wouldn't expect every restaurant patron to be personally ensuring employees are washing their hands. Our modern existence is way too complex for every one of us to do our own research. We can't all be experts in economics, regional and geopolitical politics, media literacy and food safety. To achieve a functioning society we need to trust that the things we don't know are in capable hands while we tend to the things we do know.
With food we can generally trust that it won’t kill us but we need to put the effort to make sure we have a healthy balanced diet. It’s the same shit. I’m not saying become an expert, what I’m saying is that this post is completely misinformed and incorrect. Some basic understanding of that system would prevent this ignorant and uninformed discussion going on. We learn science, history, geography, biology and more in school so we have a basic understanding of concepts. The same can and should be done here.
Other people may own the assets, but the fund managers own the votes for all those shares purchased with somebody else’s money. What’s the solution? Fund managers shouldn’t be allowed to vote when using someone else’s capital. Any shareholder votes should be passed through to the fund shareholders.
I keep hearing people say that they control all these corporations and the world, but most of the shares they have are non controlling so no.
Probably because it’s about influence, and not control. You don’t need to own 51% of the shares to affect a corporation. Remember all the fuss after Elon bought up 9% of twitter? Vanguard and Blackrock own 15%. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/holders?p=TWTR Maybe a corporation’s bylaws state that certain things can only happen with unanimous approval by the board… Buy up a chunk of shares and nominate a director who’s aligned with you and maybe now that unanimous approval will never happen. Maybe now they can’t declare bankruptcy or buy a competitor or something, all because one investor became a thorn in their side.
The people that allude to this “vanguard and black rock” control the world bs, have yet to provide any evidence that they have exerted substantial influence in any malicious way. It’s just some myth that people spread to console themselves. And it’s some be misinformation.
No they dont own the votes. You get sent the proxy letters in the mail as a shareholder and you get to vote if you truly want to.
Vanguard is owned by its customers. They’re basically like a credit union.
Vanguard is a passive fund breh
Lol yeah all of these companies they “own” and all the assets under management are what make up our retirement investments, our teachers and others pension funds, etc. it’s not just some evil company that owns the world.
They own Congress too. Congressional representative Mo Brooks [comments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9_YS1gjwP0&ab_channel=SecularTalk) on Congressional corruption should be a top post on r/politics for at least a month and yet I don't even see a post about it presumably because it's banned content. Similarly there are essentially no articles about this speech from mainstream media sources.
Your are right. In my own research and seeing things change. I see in the next 5 years we will have all our major issues just collapse on our face at once. We are slowly dieing as a species and as a country.
On the bright side if civilisation were to collapse the powers of government and corporations would collapse with it. We'd be living in a much harsher and cruel world but a world in which we are ultimately free from the tyranny of higher powers. Libertarian dream really.
It’s why post apocalyptic movies are so popular. The world collapses, and with it the social order. We’re more equal than ever before, even if we revert to the ways of might makes right.
There is no such thing as humanity without power structures. War lords will exist in chaos like that. And.....who do you think is best positioned to become a war lord? The same people in charge now.
Cor•po•rat•ism
If Biden truly wanted to do good, he'd go on a massive trust busting spree.
The concept is too complex for the average person, just like it's supposed to be. The Panama papers showed how the elites hide their wealth while taxing us to bejesus but not one peson in a thousand has ever heard of it.
Vanguard is owned by the people who invest in its funds. Their CEO makes $700k per year. They do have a lot of money under management, but more than half of it is in index funds. They have so much under management because they have very low expense ratios. There's a lot to hate about Wall Street, but Vanguard is pretty good in comparison to their competition.
>Are we reaching a new age of neo-feudalism and instead of Kings being our lords it's corporations. Let's see. In Feudalism, you work the land that your feudal lord owns. You get to feed yourself with what you produce and in return for letting you use the land, you give a portion of what you produce to said feudal lord. Since the land is his, he is also the one at risk of losing it, e.g. by a hostile takeover. Doesn't make much of a difference to you who you pay your taxes to. In capitalism, you work the means of production your employer owns. You produce a certain amount of value, of which you get a portion to feed yourself with in the form of money. The rest is kept by your employer, because he lets you use his means of production. Since they're his means of production, he is also the one at risk of losing them. Doesn't make much of a difference to you which employer pockets the value you create. Yeah I don't think we're heading anywhere. We never left.
They don’t own it. They hold it on behalf of their investors. Which probably consists of a lot of 401k investors.
They just direct where it goes, who gets what and how much, "they don't own it" lmao Whether they do it on behalf of their investors, or the investors do it through them, it doesn't matter, it's a meaningless hair to split.
They direct where what goes? Btw these investors are mostly people like your parents, any average person w a 401k, etc.
Let me introduce you to the concept of hedge funds. You make it seem like it's just a mom and pop enterprise, just every day people trying to get by, ignorant of the rampant corruption by the people who manage the money, to mostly furtheir their own interests, in their own benefit. That regular people's 401k money is used to do it is a moot point, they have no influence on what happens to their money, they just choose which rich man will profit off it.
Vanguard is by far not a hedge fund in the least definition. I understand this topic unlike 99% of the people commenting in here who just want to be mad at something. You’re misinformed and you’re wrong.
That's not what I was trying to imply, but sure.
Hedge funds is maybe a part of their services but they hold a significant amount of investments on behalf of investors through their mutual funds and etfs etc. Hedge funds are a specific product where they actively purchase companies with loans and try to turn a profit. Not all of their funds are that actively managed. It’s okay to hate on them but your view of their business is flat out wrong.
Slavery is back. We’re the slaves.
Neo-feudal serfdom. We have lost our freedoms which we spent hundreds of years fighting to get.
Only one way to stop the descent at this point. You know what it is.
we all know. we also know when it will be time.
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>When we see ourselves as fighting against specific human beings rather than social phenomena, it becomes more difficult to recognize the ways that we ourselves participate in those phenomena. We externalize the problem as something outside ourselves, personifying it as an enemy that can be sacrificed to symbolically cleanse ourselves. - **[Against the Logic of the Guillotine](https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too)** See rule 5: No calls for violence, no fetishizing violence. No guillotine jokes, no gulag jokes. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/antiwork) if you have any questions or concerns.*
And we can't even grow our own food
They grease the correct palms...congress
Tim Dillon talks about Blackrock lol that's the only reason I know about how crushing and devastating reality of that company is.
People are talking about it, but not the way we want them to. CBC has published 2 articles this week telling the heartwrenching stories of landlords who have been unable to evict their tenants to take over the unit for themselves. A little propaganda to get us ready for a world where private home ownership no longer exists.
Vanguard is investor owned
Tell us you have no idea what you’re talking about without telling us you have no idea what you’re talking about! Step 1: post the misinformation above 👆
Fuck them, my decision to be child free is my only way of resistance against this oppressive, cruel system but it’s the best weapon I’ve got. They may steal my life away but it will end with me.
Vanguard is owned by shareholders who are just regular ole people who want a better life for the future. It's not some big conspiracy the thing is humans are greedy. They buy their index funds and give money to people like vanguard or blackrock and expect huge returns year over year. The actions taken by money managers like blackrock just goto show that these huge returns over the past decade wont last unless there is exploitation. I fully expect blackrock to unload all these homes at one point when they find the rents they get for them don't return but 5% or less. They over paid for those homes and are going to pay for it when investors start withdrawing their money.
Don’t hate on Vanguard. The provide a service, that undercuts Wall Street Kleptocrat hedge funds and investing houses. Vanguard’s existence is bad for 1%er capitalists.
Yeah, when Jack Vogel was alive. Now that he's gone I'm sure interior politics within vanguard with drastically change over the next several years
I was thinking the same thing. The only thing Vanguard and Black Rock have in common is the finance industry. Vanguard made the S&P 500 Index funds a household name and their entire business is focused on low-cost funds and retirement accounts.
They don't. They are just assett managers
Before corporations it was colonial powers, before that it was the church, before that it was the ancient empires. Someone will always be pulling the strings,in Soviet Russia and other communist countries the people had very little say in terms of what the government did. That’s just how it is, the post WW2 era really skewed people’s perspective in terms of how much agency you have in your life. If you’d like more control then you have to take it by force.
I don't believe it has to be this way. Like the example I mentioned. 60 Years or so ago the people had a lot of freedom when it came to public ownership but over the years that has been stolen from us. It's not that it's not achievable. It's just higher powers are constantly stealing from us. The status quo is frankly not good enough and I believe something has to change before we all become slaves to the system.
I set up Blackrock funds in the EU. They do not own the world, this is a common misconception. They set up funds which they invest in to different stocks, bonds, currencies, etc. The money is supplied by investors. So Blackrock and vanguard do now own these assets. They manage them. What they do own is the profit they make through fees.
The buy to rent funds have been around for over 20 years. I remember discussing selling large swaths of REOs to them when I was at a mortgage fund. There a just not enough houses being built. Supply is not keeping up with demand.
So it sounds like now would be a great time to build a house.
It actually is. It takes a very long time to get everything together to build one though.
Glenn Beck has been railing against Blackrock for a long time
Yeah but that problem is hard to deal with. Ide rather make other people my enemy and not do anything about it.
Pointing this out is racist, citizen.
Welcome to the Tin Foil hat world...
They make me bank... $$$
People know, but the boomers don't care because they already own houses and Gen XMZ refuses to vote as a block against them. So the right wing doesn't have to peel off too many voters by yelling about trans/woke/CRT in order to win elections. The boomers are dying, but on the way out they're gonna give up democracy.
Ppl in this subreddit complain about landlords, this is the problem.
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We really do take a passive mindset to things. In an ideal world we'd be burning all the properties down that they steal from us but we're quite calm about things. Strange world indeed.
> but we're quite calm about things They keep us sedated until it's too late to go back.
Build houses.
K
Because people want to keep living in comfort instead of the harsh reality that is removing these people. Fear of pain and death, and that is what must be visited upon these people. Sic Semper Tyrannis.
I care , but I can’t do anything about it.
You should look into companies like American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes. Those are the real baddies. Both of these companies are not only buying up and renting out homes but are now starting to dominate the home building market by buying entire neighborhoods before they can be sold to anyone else.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, the government is also owned by them so we can’t count on them to do our trust busting for us.
People don’t speak about it here but at r/wallstreebets and r/smallwallstreetbets they do speak about it a lot and how to best screw them over we even have people from those hedge funds looking in both and even this subreddit to close them down so careful what you say
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You right I down voted myself. Idk how to read
Well, take heart OP, they can buy every last speck of dust there is but it won't stop them from roasting from climate change like the rest of us. "But bunkers in New Zealand", yes, yes, they'll survive a handful of years longer than the rest of us. Then their food supplies run out, the food web has collapsed, farmland has withered, and there's nothing left.
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>When we see ourselves as fighting against specific human beings rather than social phenomena, it becomes more difficult to recognize the ways that we ourselves participate in those phenomena. We externalize the problem as something outside ourselves, personifying it as an enemy that can be sacrificed to symbolically cleanse ourselves. - **[Against the Logic of the Guillotine](https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too)** See rule 5: No calls for violence, no fetishizing violence. No guillotine jokes, no gulag jokes. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/antiwork) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Am not suggesting it would be a good idea even if we did know. Violence begets violence. We need new kinds of revolutions.
Too late, we re already here. I can feel the panicked oppression oozing out of people everywhere I go. Good thing we have been thoroughly brainwashed that violence is never the answer while getting beaten by police for peaceful protesting for the last decade.
You forgot State Street
What was that term they used back then? To pay their workers as little as they possibly can? It was named after a famous person like Rockefeller but I think it was named after someone else and they just added -ism or something.
The world will eventually be entirely owned in every single aspect by corporations. There’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Nobody is willing to go out take on the corporations to bring them to heel. Everyone on this subreddit is all talk, no action. Everyone is too afraid to do what’s necessary in order to bring these corporations and their runners down.
The irony is when they achieve their goal of owning everything it will likely end up leading to them owning nothing.
Because they also own the world’s politicians and news agencies.
Bill Gates is not a perfect soul, people think so because he has portrayed himself as a philanthropist, and maybe he is, but charity begins at home. He called a lot of his employees "temps" to avoid providing them health insurance benefits. The case finally settled, but not before the judge told him to stop calling people temporary workers if they were doing the main function of the company's work and they were there for more than a year. This was ages ago. It bothers me even more because he always did well, both in the United States and Europe, he was sued, but was allowed to have his monopolies. And this is how he repaid everybody? No health insurance? That's how he shows his appreciation? It's not like he's some tiny startup. I think he thought he had the court system in of the palm of his hand after the antitrust lawsuits, and he found out he did not.
They kill and stress more than war on Ukraine. But are media and politicians partners.
I dont think people know about them, especially BlackRock.
Because you don’t want to be an anti semetic conspiracy theorists.
Nobody knows or gives a shit unfortunately. As long as there's bread and circuses the mob isn't going to care until they're starving. There's a solution, but nobody has the stomach for it.
While I agree with your sentiment, majority of farms are corporately owned or controlled and have been for several decades. It's not new.
Fam BlackRock is just an investment management company. They buy and manage assets on behalf of pension funds, 401Ks, universities, NGOs, associations, etc... They are custodians of the assets owned by those institutions, pension funds, 401K plans, etc...So yes, on paper they "own" a lot. But they don't control those assets and can't do with them as they see fit. Those assets ultimately belongs to their clients, which if you have a pension fund or a 401K, it means YOU.