03 December 22
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I speak as an old man. Righteous intensity fades with age. We spend too much time wringing our hands over evil. I no longer read stories about What’s-His-Name. There’s nothing more to be learned about narcissism. Fascism is not that fascinating.
I met a guy in the subway not long ago whose headphones I could hear twenty feet away. We were waiting for a downtown train at West 86th Street. He was about fifty, balding on top but with an ambitious ponytail. He wore a Metallica T-shirt, the one with a skeleton performing a brain operation with a fork and knife, eating the patient’s brains. I’d recently had a heart operation to replace a mitral valve with one from a pig and I thought he might like to hear about it but it was hard to make contact. We boarded the train and he turned the music off and I asked him, politely, what he enjoyed about Metallica. He didn’t hear me; I had to speak loudly and clearly. He said, “It’s very beautiful, no matter what people think.” I got off at 42nd to go to the library. He continued on, perhaps to an auto-crushing plant or a crematorium. Someday he’ll achieve deafness, and then perhaps he’ll become a reader and maybe he’ll google Metallica and find this column.
Hello, sir.
A person has a right to enjoy music about hopelessness, but when I look at some lyrics, suddenly the serial killings start to make sense.
Nothing matters, no one else
I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
There is nothing more for me
Need the end to set me free.
The kid who shot up the school in Texas, the night manager at the Walmart store who shot up his coworkers in the break room — it was about suicide and wanting the suicide to get attention. It’s sort of cheesy for millionaire musicians to crank out anthems to hopelessness — this isn’t the blues, it’s angry morbidity. But there it is.
I trust that you, sir, find some serenity in your silence. Perhaps you’ve taken up birdwatching. It’s a long way from thrash metal to thrushes and meadowlarks but the human imagination is capable of great leaps. I hope you’ve found someone to put his/her/their arms around you.
I went to the library that day and sat in the reading room, and I was the oldest in the room by far. Intense young scholars who I imagine may do the work needed to save this planet so that future generations can enjoy fantasies of violence if they wish. If the sea rises faster as the planet heats up, survival will take precedence over amusement. People will lose the liberty to be weird.
Two nights before, I had been in Palm Springs to give a speech and was reminiscing about the past and on an impulse I sang the words, “There are places I remember” and the audience sang the whole song with me. A thousand people knew the words to Lennon-McCartney’s “In My Life,” including the repeated last line with the high notes, “In my life, I love you more.” And then we sang “Silent Night,” all three verses. It brought me to tears, people united with strangers in beautiful works of art.
I wonder if, years from now, a crowd will sing Metallica songs for the pleasure of it.
The apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi, in Macedonia, to fix their minds on what is true and beautiful and I suppose they tried to do that, and eventually their city was destroyed by the Ottoman Empire and now, centuries later, the ottoman is just a footstool. The world changes and takes us with it. But the true and beautiful remains, more compelling than ever. Dystopia and mental distress are very much in fashion now and there seem to be no memoirs about a happy childhood, only trauma and displacement and broken hearts, and so be it. But comedy, which is a charitable deed, lasts longer. Knock knock. Who’s there? Metallica. Metallica who? Metallica doesn’t have a last name, it’s not a human, it’s abandoned.
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Herschel Walker at a rally in March. (photo: Megan Varner/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: 3 Takeaways From the
Big Early Voting Numbers in Georgia's Senate Runoff
Republicans have grown increasingly nervous about an election that reflects larger concerns
The race between Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican challenger Herschel Walker caps a turbulent election season in which voters rejected many inexperienced Republican nominees tied to the former president and his ideas in favor of Democratic incumbents who tried to keep President Biden at arm’s length. Georgia, a purple state expected to factor heavily in the 2024 presidential election, is a final testing ground for these competing forces — and one that has generated plenty of GOP pessimism.
Seth Weathers, a Georgia director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, previously expressed confidence that Walker would win in a runoff. Now, he said, looking at early voting turnout, “I have more concern,” and he is unsure who will prevail.
“Herschel Walker doesn’t have the capacity to land a closing message,” said Ben Burnett, a Republican podcast host in Georgia and former city councilman in Alpharetta, an Atlanta suburb. “And the affiliation and support that he got from Donald Trump … is still a boat anchor around him with the 5 percent of voters that he couldn’t afford to lose.”
Democrats defied historical trends and low approval ratings for Biden to limit losses in the U.S. House, where a narrow GOP majority will take power next year. Their bigger victory was clinching a 50th Senate seat, which assured they would retain control of the chamber, with Vice President Harris empowered to cast tiebreaking votes. Democrats are hoping to expand that narrow majority Tuesday, when the election in Georgia concludes.
Polls show a close race in the runoff, which was triggered because no candidate received a majority of the vote in the Nov. 8 election. A CNN survey released Friday showed Warnock, senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church who won his seat last year, with a narrow edge over Walker, a first-time candidate known for his career as a football star.
Even though control of the Senate is not in the balance as it was in last year’s Georgia runoffs, in which Warnock won a special election, there are still high stakes for both parties, since surprise vacancies are not uncommon and a pair of centrist Democratic senators wield enormous power over their party’s agenda. Democrats also face a difficult 2024 Senate map and need every seat they can muster heading into a challenging cycle.
In the closing stages of the race here in Georgia, Walker’s personal scandals and meandering comments continue to complicate GOP efforts to harness voter frustration with Biden and the direction of the country, some Republicans said. Democrats have also sought to remind voters of Walker’s ties to Trump, who elevated the former running back in the primary with an endorsement, but has recently stayed away from Georgia.
Multiple women have accused Walker of domestic violence. Two former girlfriends have claimed that he encouraged them to get abortions despite his support for strict bans. Walker denies those claims. He also has made false claims about his background — at one point suggesting he worked as an FBI agent — and this week drew scrutiny for stating earlier this year that he lives in Texas. Public records showing he took a tax exemption on a Texas property meant for primary residences have fueled further attacks from critics.
Warnock, who says the race is about “character and competence,” has hammered Walker as unfit for the job, seizing on puzzling comments — among them a viral digression from the campaign trail where Walker compared werewolves and vampires while discussing a movie. “Vampires” and “werewolves” started popping up in word clouds of Georgians’ associations with Walker, according to Democratic strategists, even before Warnock launched an ad in which voters reacted to the comments with disbelief.
Walker’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Surrogates and supporters either dismiss the allegations against him or say they think he’s changed and repented.
“I’m not going to stand up here today and tell you Herschel Walker’s a perfect man,” Georgia pastor George Dillard said Friday at a rally with the candidate, saying Walker “understands forgiveness because he has asked his savior for it, and he has received it, and now he wants to share it.”
Republicans say they are ramping up attacks on Warnock’s character in return. But they are also still framing the race around Biden, calling Warnock a rubber stamp for the president and pitching a vote for Walker as a vote against inflation and the national Democratic agenda. Walker often criticizes Warnock for voting with Biden 96 percent of the time.
“He says to be a senator you have to know some things. Well, what I do know is you haven’t done a good job since you’ve been in Washington,” Walker said at a recent stop in Powder Springs, a suburb of Atlanta. “What I do know is you are a terrible senator … you get an F.”
Warnock has touted Democratic legislative achievements on the trail while also focusing heavily on his opponent and pitching himself to independents and Republicans who are not enthusiastic about the GOP candidate.
“I believe in my soul that Georgia knows that Georgia is better than Herschel Walker,” he told supporters Thursday at a rally with former president Barack Obama, Democrats’ star surrogate as Warnock seeks distance from Biden, who has not visited Georgia during the runoff. “You deserve a senator who cares enough about the people to actually know the issues. You deserve a senator who will tell you the truth. You deserve a senator who actually lives in Georgia.”
Drawing an estimated 5,000 people on his second campaign trip to Georgia this year, Obama said Warnock’s reelection would give the party “more breathing room on important bills” — but echoed other Warnock allies’ efforts to focus on the candidates themselves. “Fifty-one is better than 50 because it means Reverend Warnock will keep representing you in Washington. That’s the best reason,” he said.
Democrats are still facing a challenging political environment and struggled in Georgia on Nov. 8, losing every statewide race aside from the Senate contest, even as they overperformed expectations across the country. “At this point, it’s not even really a question of whose base is more excited,” argued one Republican strategist working on the runoff, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid. “It’s more a question of whose base is less depressed.”
Walker and his allies also have highlighted issues that galvanize the Republican base, with one ad featuring the candidate alongside a former female college athlete who says a transgender woman shouldn’t have been able to compete with her in the NCAA swimming championships. At campaign stops where voters sport University of Georgia Bulldogs gear, Walker gets reliable applause criticizing “gender ideology” in schools and “wokeness” in the military.
Democrats have long outspent Republicans on ads in the race, as Walker — one of the GOP’s better fundraisers in key Senate races — struggles to match Warnock’s record-breaking hauls. But the gap has widened in the runoff period as Walker gets less help from outside groups. Democrats are spending about twice as much on ads in this final phase, according to the tracking firm AdImpact, and this week said they are pouring an additional $11 million into get-out-the-vote efforts for Warnock.
Trump talks regularly with Walker and might hold a tele-rally for him but does not plan to campaign for him in person, according to Trump advisers, who said teams for Trump and Walker agreed it wouldn’t be productive. Walker has not mentioned Trump at recent rallies.
Democratic victories in midterm battlegrounds against Trump-aligned candidates have spurred more efforts to highlight the influence of the 45th president, who recently announced he is running for the White House again in 2024. Democratic strategists have said they believe swing voters are turned off by some of the extreme positions and combative rhetoric the former president and his allies espouse. Warnock’s campaign debuted an ad during the runoff centered on Trump’s praise for Walker.
In Georgia and beyond, GOP infighting has intensified over the past couple of weeks, complicating efforts to present a unified front and message in the runoff. There have been numerous rounds of finger-pointing over what many in the party see as disappointing midterm results. Some have openly blamed Trump for the outcomes.
Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican, declared himself unable to vote for either Walker or Warnock.
“When there’s division in the locker room, there’s finger-pointing. It’s usually kind of the hallmark sign of a losing season,” said Duncan, who has been highly critical of Walker. He drew derision from other Republicans this week after he said he stood in line to vote but left without casting a ballot.
“We’ve been asked to be team players as Republicans for too long,” added Duncan, who also has criticized Trump’s grip on the party. “We’re done being team players. If we want to win, we need team leaders.”
Allies and advisers to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — long at odds over midterm strategy — have fought openly during the runoff, trading barbs about the source of Republicans’ shortfalls and each party’s investments in the final stretch. Scott unsuccessfully challenged McConnell for Senate GOP leadership after the election. The Florida Republican recently aired more public complaints about the party’s direction.
Early voting in the runoff has smashed daily records, with more than 300,000 people casting ballots Tuesday, according to Gabriel Sterling, an official with the secretary of state’s office. Democrats are encouraged by a relatively high share of African American voters, who tend to support them.
Republicans said the data shows strong Election Day turnout can push them to victory — but some lamented that Democratic strongholds got a jump-start by opening earlier for voting and said they have grown worried about their base’s growing preference for casting ballots on the last day possible.
Overall, Democratic operatives said they have grown more confident than they were heading into the general election, when Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was caught on a hot mic in late October fretting that “we’re going downhill” in Georgia.
“We’re cautiously optimistic,” said J.B. Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC, a group aligned with Schumer.
Michael Thurmond, chief executive of DeKalb County and a Democrat, said he’s encouraged by early turnout numbers but noted there was also strong early voting in some GOP-dominated counties — something Walker’s campaign has highlighted. Thurmond said he thinks many of Walker’ controversies have energized his supporters and even helped drive up their enthusiasm.
“It’s going to be a very close and tight race, and I don’t think anyone should take anything for granted,” Thurmond said.
Both sides are pouring millions of dollars into voter persuasion efforts, focusing on the roughly 200,000 people who voted for Gov. Brian Kemp (R) but not Walker in the general election. A Warnock ad features one such voter; a Kemp ad for Walker says he is voting for someone who won’t be “another rubber stamp for Joe Biden.”
Kemp kept his distance from Walker on the campaign trail in the run-up to Nov. 8, but has played a more direct role since securing his own reelection. Early in the runoff, the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with McConnell, announced a $2 million investment to repurpose Kemp’s turnout operation for the runoff, with more than 100 paid canvassers.
Democrats have seized on Walker’s strict stance on abortion amid anger over the end of Roe v. Wade and its federal protections for abortion. They believe such efforts helped propel them to victory in competitive races across the country.
Georgia’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy was reinstated last week after a court battle. Walker has endorsed that law and suggested early on that he opposes exceptions to such bans, though he later backtracked.
Martha Zoller, a conservative talk show host in Georgia, said the race should hinge on opposition to Biden and argued that controversies like the latest scrutiny of Walker’s residency will have little sway on the race. Zoller stressed the importance of denying Democrats a 51st seat in the Senate, but added that it’s a more complicated message than fighting to retake the majority.
“There’s the old saying, if you’re explaining, you’re losing,” she said.
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Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
Joe Biden’s betrayal of railworkers is a case study in everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party: a party that talks about workers’ rights while governing in the interests of capital.
Roughly twenty-four hours later, the initiative duly died its expected death and fell eight votes short of the necessary threshold. Parallel legislation to impose a contract on railworkers meanwhile passed by a whopping margin of eighty to fifteen. Never let anyone tell you that bipartisanship is dead.
As Joe Biden’s various statements illustrate, the line from senior Democrats leading up to yesterday’s critical Senate vote was a classic Democratic sleight of hand. From labor and transportation secretaries Marty Walsh and Pete Buttigieg to outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, powerful Democrats have lazily gestured in the direction of support for the insertion of paid sick time into the deal while variously buck-passing, rhetorically spinning their wheels, or refusing to comment altogether. The act was hardly convincing but clearly served its intended purpose. By declaring their nominal endorsement of the rail unions’ key demand while simultaneously doing the bidding of the US Chamber of Commerce in working to prevent a strike at all costs, Democratic leaders, as ever, got to have their cake and eat it too.
Yesterday’s outcome was not inevitable. By requesting earlier this week that Congress step in and impose a contract, the administration clearly indicated where its real priority lay. Nonetheless, following the well-deserved backlash this move elicited, Biden and other senior Democrats might have changed course and actively tried to whip votes for paid sick days (something, incidentally, that Biden vociferously promised he would offer all workers while running for president). As the New Republic’s Prem Thakker quite rightly wrote:
The paid sick leave bill, given to Biden on a platter by progressives, offered the president a second chance at getting it right for rail workers. After every single present Democrat — 218 of them — voted in support of the measure, Biden could have expressed excitement at the prospect of giving rail workers paid sick leave, blasted the 207 Republicans who voted against it, and even pressured the Senate to follow the House’s suit. After all, numerous Republican senators, including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, have expressed noncommittal support for rail workers. Biden could have turned the tables and forced them and other Republicans to put up or shut up. It would have been good politics, and morals too.
The only reasonable conclusion to draw here is that the Democratic leadership is much more concerned about the prospect of getting angry calls from America’s rail company executives than it is about the horrendously exploitative conditions facing those who actually work on its railways. Attempting to rally the necessary Senate votes for paid sick days might have failed, but it at least would have had the virtue of basic political and moral consistency.
And the truth is that sixty votes were never the real prerequisite for winning them to begin with. By threatening to withdraw their labor — and, if necessary, go on strike — more than 100,000 railworkers already had the potential means at their disposal to force their employers’ hands. With the explicit support of the Biden White House, a Democratic-led Congress instead intervened to deprive them of this right — and, in doing so, signaled to big employers everywhere that they can count on the political class to step in when workers become too unruly.
Say one thing, do another; wield power but feign powerlessness; rhetorically come down on the side of basic justice while actively working against it in practice. From start to finish, this week’s wranglings have been a tour de force of liberal hypocrisy and also a case study in everything wrong with the Democratic Party. Perhaps no one put it more starkly than Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib, who remarked:
If the rail industry wants to avert a national rail strike, then they should provide their employees with guaranteed paid sick leave. As for the Democratic Party, if we are going to be the party of the working class, we need to stand with workers every time.
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A Starbucks barista. (photo: USA TODAY)
The Starbucks Reserve Roastery store officially voted to unionize in April and the election was certified by the NLRB in May.
But since July, Starbucks has continued to challenge the election without producing any new evidence. The store has also refused to negotiate with and recognize the union, violating labor laws, the NLRB said.
The federal agency ordered Starbucks to cease and desist its failure to recognize the union and to bargain with union representatives.
Within 21 days of receiving the notice, Starbucks must file a form with local NLRB officials attesting to the steps it has taken to comply with the order.
Employees at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood voted 38-27 to join Workers United, which is affiliated with Service Employees International Union.
The store joined more than 250 Starbucks locations that have unionized in the past couple of years, part of a new movement spreading rapidly at stores across the U.S.
Starbucks has pushed back aggressively to the efforts, and union representatives have accused the coffee giant of union busting.
A store in Memphis, Tenn., was ordered to reinstate seven employees in August after a judge found the company illegally retaliated against them for joining a union.
Earlier this month, Starbucks employees at more than 100 stores went on strike on Red Cup Day, typically one of the busiest times of the year when the company hands out free reusable cups to customers for the holidays.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who returned to lead the corporation in April but is stepping down from the top spot next year, has called the unionization efforts a “new outside force that’s trying desperately to disrupt our company.”
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"Three Democratic House members from California - Reps. Ro Khanna (pictured), Katie Porter, and Mark Takano - introduced the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act." (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Lawmakers say it’s needed even if it doesn’t fix the housing supply shortage.
On the one hand, we’re told investors are buying up more housing than ever. In 2021, they bought nearly one in seven homes sold in the 40 largest US metropolitan areas, the most in at least two decades, according to Redfin data analyzed by the Washington Post. In the first quarter of 2022, investors comprised between one-quarter and one-third of home sales in Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Miami. The US House Financial Services Committee reported in June that corporate ownership of single-family rental homes has grown 3 percent annually since 2010, “with the third quarter of 2021 posting the fastest year over year increase in 16 years.”
These trends are worrying, researchers and advocates stress, because there’s evidence that corporate landlords, under pressure to deliver big profits to their shareholders, are more likely to evict their tenants, raise rents more aggressively, and shirk responsibility for basic maintenance and repairs. There’s also evidence that some investors have been targeting homes in Black neighborhoods at disproportionate rates, accelerating gentrification and putting homeownership for some families further out of reach.
On the other hand, housing owned by large corporate investors makes up a much smaller percentage of the nation’s overall housing stock than is often suggested by headlines. Institutional investors, referring to entities that purchase 100 or more properties, accounted for under 3 percent of home sales in 2021 and 2022, according to Freddie Mac. So-called “mom-and-pop” investors, who own fewer properties, are growing at faster rates, and according to the National Rental Home Council, only 1.16 percent of single-family rental homes were owned by rental companies. Americans for Financial Reform estimated that as of June 2022, private equity firms owned about 3.6 percent of apartments and 1.6 percent of rental homes.
Defenders of the sector point to research showing that most people moving into single-family rentals are poorer, younger, have worse credit, have larger families, and are more likely to be single parents than their home-owning counterparts. One study published last year estimated that 85 percent of single-family rental residents would not qualify for a mortgage. Taking away these rental options, advocates warn, would just take away more spacious living arrangements for younger families who can’t yet afford to own, or might not want to even if they could.
Others say the focus on Wall Street investors is largely a scapegoat to avoid wrestling with the real culprit of the housing crisis: the dearth of available units. Sam Khater, the chief economist of Freddie Mac, cited labor shortages, land use regulations, zoning restrictions, political opposition to new housing, lack of developers and lack of land as root causes of the housing shortage. And economic research published this summer found that remote work has also increased US aggregate home prices by 15.1 percent since late 2019.
Still, with damning press and congressional investigations into corporate housing abuses, political pressure has mounted on lawmakers to step in. In August, senators heard testimony from people like Laura Brunner, the president and CEO of the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority. Brunner detailed how institutional investors have upended their local housing market, and dramatically hiked rents in the process. “We’ve been told by institutional investors that they only own about 1 percent of single-family homes; however ... this could mean 50 percent of the houses on a single street,” she testified. “When the geographical impact is so concentrated, it has a game-changing effect on what it means to live in that neighborhood.”
In late October, three Democratic House members from California — Reps. Ro Khanna, Katie Porter, and Mark Takano — introduced a new bill, the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act, to address these growing concerns. Senators have also been getting involved, holding listening sessions with renters and housing policy experts. A spokesperson for Sen. Sherrod Brown told me that Brown is focused on “predatory investors and landlords — particularly deep-pocketed investors taking advantage of new technologies” that price out families from homes and leave tenants with unsafe living conditions. Brown is currently working on “legislative steps to protect families and address these predatory practices,” the spokesperson said.
Khanna said he doesn’t see his new bill as a comprehensive housing solution, and stresses that lawmakers need to stay focused on fighting barriers to new housing construction, increasing housing supply, and expanding down-payment assistance. “But we don’t need to be subsidizing institutional investors to go buy up housing in working-class neighborhoods and holding them for appreciation and turning them into Airbnbs,” he told me. “You could make an argument that it was necessary to subsidize Wall Street investors after the 2008 financial crisis when the market collapsed, but that certainly now has run its course.”
The Stop Wall Street Landlords Act, explained
The stated goal of the new House bill is to deter future institutional investments into single-family homes. It would try to do this in a few ways, including by barring corporate investors from claiming certain tax breaks like the mortgage interest deduction, and imposing a transfer tax on the sale value of new single-family home purchases.
The legislation also would bar the government-sponsored mortgage companies — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae — from assisting certain large investors in financing, and would establish a new tax credit to help affordable housing developers build and rehab homes in low-income areas.
Groups representing institutional investors, unsurprisingly, have come out strongly against the bill. A spokesperson for the American Investment Council, which represents private equity companies, told Vox that “this politically motivated legislation completely misses the mark and won’t help address the real challenges in today’s housing market.”
David Howard, executive director of the National Rental Home Council, told the Mercury News he believes the bill “will only reduce the availability of single-family rental housing while making it more expensive — ultimately hurting the very people for whom access to affordably priced rental housing is so essential.”
Kristin Siglin, vice president at the National Community Stabilization Trust, a nonprofit that transfers foreclosed and abandoned properties to local housing groups, praised the bill’s inclusion of the neighborhood homes tax credit, which was also included in the Build Back Better bill the House approved last year.
Siglin told me the coalition she leads to promote the tax credit was “really pleased” to see the measure included, and commended the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act for not only including sticks in the form of ending tax preferences for corporate investors, but also carrots, like the tax credit, to increase the supply of homes to sell to owner-occupants. Right now, large corporate investors are often the only entities available with the financing capabilities to make repairs on homes. The neighborhood homes tax credit, Siglin says, can help to fill this gap, and keep more properties out of Wall Street hands.
Khanna’s office said they worked with experts including the Urban Institute to develop their bill. The Urban Institute’s government affairs manager, Victoria Van de Vate, told me she hasn’t read the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act and said her think tank does not suggest bill language or take official positions on legislation. “A team of housing researchers and I met earlier [in November] with Rep. Khanna and his team to discuss policy alternatives to increase rates of black homeownership and the role of institutional investors in the housing market,” she said. “It was a good conversation, and we always welcome the opportunity to share our research, answer questions, and provide evidence-based recommendations about policy.”
Laurie Goodman, the founder of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, told me separately that she sees Khanna’s legislation as a very “punitive bill” that would deter institutional investors from buying properties in a way that would be unhelpful. The single-family rental industry does a lot of good things, she added, “all of which are ignored by the critics.” Goodman was not familiar with the neighborhood homes tax credit but argued that institutional investors play an important role in financing repairs that prospective homeowners can’t afford.
Dan Immergluck, a professor of urban studies at Georgia State University who has researched the history of institutional investors on housing markets, told me that while he hasn’t had time to closely read the bill, he does not support allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help finance large-scale single-family rental operations unless there were “serious strings” attached, like affordability requirements. Immergluck said he’s less convinced simply making it more expensive for single-family rental operators to do business through measures like excise taxes will be effective, “because in places where they already have market power, they could pass those costs onto tenants.”
Where the corporate housing sector is likely going
What about inflation and the much-discussed housing construction slowdown sparked by rising interest rates? Increased building costs have already led to a slowdown in investor homebuying — a decline of 30 percent in the third quarter of 2022, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. Redfin also just closed its own home-flipping business, following Opendoor Technologies, another online house flipper, which just posted record losses.
Khanna told me he thinks his bill would help stabilize some of the rising rents by decreasing demand from institutional investors, which still accounted for 17.5 percent of all home sales in the third quarter of 2022. Even if institutional investors only buy up a small percentage of total housing, their presence in the bidding wars can still lead to higher costs for all buyers. And even though investor sales growth has slowed, experts expect their share of purchases to rise again soon, as builders with unsold homes look to sell to rental landlords. Plus a widely expected recession could raise unemployment and make it even harder for traditional buyers to compete with corporate bidders.
While investment firms began purchasing foreclosed homes after the housing crash, investors more recently have been pouring billions of dollars into new build-to-rent communities in more than 25 states. The National Association of Home Builders reported 13,000 such homes were started in the first quarter of 2022, up 63 percent from a year before. In November the CEO of Tricon Residential, a Canadian real estate company, said on an earnings call Tricon has nearly $3 billion it plans to use to buy and build new homes.
The Stop Wall Street Landlords Act will not tackle the housing shortage, Khanna acknowledged, but maintained it’s a necessary part of the legislative puzzle. “We need to massively increase housing supply, we need to figure out creative programs for first-time homeowners, and we need my new bill, which will stop the financialization of housing.”
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"Created in the early 2010s, Wagner Group is a paramilitary mercenary group composed mostly of former Russian military personnel that trains local forces, conducts combat advising, and provides direct-action services." (photo: Creative Commons)
US State Department says it ‘will not stand by’ in the face of a crackdown on religious freedoms.
“Around the world, governments and non-state actors harass, threaten, jail, and even kill individuals on account of their beliefs,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on Friday.
“The United States will not stand by in the face of these abuses.”
The Wagner Group was being designated for alleged involvement in abuses in the Central African Republic, where nearly 10 years of bloodshed has had religious overtones.
The Russian mercenary group has also been involved in Mali and has been accused of rights violations in Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
Cuba and Nicaragua were both newly designated as “Countries of Particular Concern” under the annual determinations, meaning the two leftist-led states – already under US sanctions – could face further measures.
Nicaragua’s increasingly authoritarian president, Daniel Ortega, has clamped down on the Catholic Church since accusing it of supporting 2018 anti-government protests, which were crushed at the cost of hundreds of lives.
The designation of Cuba is the latest sign of pressure on the island by the administration of President Joe Biden, which has largely shunned previous Democratic President Barack Obama’s effort to seek an opening with the lifelong US nemesis.
In its latest annual report on religious freedom issued in June, the State Department pointed to violence and arrests of Cuban religious figures over purported roles in rare public protests as well as restrictions on non-recognised Protestant churches.
“These actions represented a shift to engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing egregious violations of religious freedom, which is the basis for the designation,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez rejected the US blacklisting, calling it “arbitrary” and “dishonest”.
“It is known that in Cuba there is religious freedom,” Rodriguez tweeted.
Blinken kept on the blacklist all Countries of Particular Concern from 2021 – China, Eritrea, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
No action on emerging allies
As expected, no action was taken against India, seen by the United States as a key emerging ally.
The decision ignores a recommendation by the autonomous US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which said the treatment of minorities was “significantly” worsening under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
The Commission said in a statement it was “outraged” that Blinken failed to list India or Nigeria despite the State Department’s own reporting showing “severe religious freedom violations” in both countries.
India had already voiced anger over the State Department’s annual report, which documented incendiary comments by Indian officials and accounts of discrimination against Muslims and Christians.
CAR, Vietnam on watchlist
Blinken added the Central African Republic to a watchlist, meaning it will be designated among Countries of Particular Concern without progress.
Also newly put on the watchlist was Vietnam, where the State Department report said the communist authorities harassed non-recognised religious groups, including Christian house churches, independent Buddhists, and members of the century-old Cao Dai movement.
Algeria and Comoros remained on the watchlist from 2021.
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A Florida panther and her cubs. (photo: Carlton Ward Jr./Guardian UK)
The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would provide $1.3bn annually for wildlife and could speed up completion of a crucial wildlife corridor in one US state
This tract of ranchland and wilderness was recently acquired as part of the Florida Forever state conservation programme, which buys, or pays landowners to preserve, parcels of land rich in natural resources or habitat critical to the survival of threatened wildlife species. It is a small but crucial piece in the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a 17.7m-acre network of interconnecting landscapes that allows many of the state’s 131 imperilled animals, including panthers and bears, to roam freely.
Lindsay Stevens, Florida director of land protection at the Nature Conservancy, a non-profit involved in the project, says: “It’s important for panthers and other wildlife to have a protected corridor so that they can move and have genetic diversity to ensure the long-term survival and health of their species, and Chaparral Slough is a really important piece of the puzzle.”
Linking two much larger areas of preserved land to the north and south, the story of Chaparral Slough is also symbolic of a wider, undeniable truth: large-scale conservation takes time and money. Taxpayers paid $10.6m (£8.8m) for the land, with the owner – a ranching, cattle and timber company called Lykes Brothers – working alongside the Nature Conservancy to maintain it with guaranteed protections against its sale or development.
The negotiations, however, took eight years, and due to the fickle way Florida Forever is funded, using varying amounts of dollars allocated each year at the whim of the state’s legislature, the agreement remained uncertain until the moment it was signed.
Fewer than 250 of Florida’s panthers remain in the wild. So far this year, 25 have been killed, the vast majority in collisions with vehicles. And while the mechanisms of government slowly turn, their survival becomes ever more perilous.
It is one reason wildlife advocacy groups in Florida are welcoming a potentially gamechanging conservation bill: the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. Currently making its way through Congress with bipartisan support, the bill could become law before the end of the year.
Supporters have called it the most significant piece of wildlife legislation since the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA). If passed, it would allocate $1.3bn annually to help implement states’ official wildlife action plans (Swaps). A recent report highlighted that the ESA has been hampered by inadequate resources, despite more than 1,300 species of plant and animal in the US being endangered or threatened.
Florida wildlife officials don’t yet know how large a slice the state is likely to receive, but some unfunded land-acquisition projects, similar to Chaparral Slough, are included in the Swap, and are therefore eligible for the money.
Stevens says it can’t come soon enough: “It was in 2014 that we first proposed the Chaparral Slough project to the state using Florida Forever funds and, like many things in the conservation arena it just takes time and patience and tenacity to have these projects fall together.
“The Nature Conservancy has been working at this for several decades now, to help build a contiguous panther corridor so they can move from south Florida, where they live on protected lands that the state and federal government and other partners have established, and disperse up to the central part of Florida.”
The hope is that extra money from the federal government can speed up parts of the Florida Forever programme, which has so far acquired 352,000 hectares (870,000 acres) since it was established in 2001.
It may also help smooth the piecemeal approach, which is born out of necessity. Most panther lands are privately owned, largely agricultural – and not every landlord wants to sell.
“If the puzzle to your left doesn’t work, in terms of the piece of property, and the landowner isn’t interested in working with you, then you swerve and go to the right, and with enough tenacity and patience, the pieces start to fall into place,” Stevens says.
Lykes Brothers is an enthusiastic partner. It is one of Florida’s oldest and biggest landowning companies, with a diverse portfolio including: cattle and other farming; forestry; hunting; and managing water resources across 151,000 hectares of ranchland. It is also among the state’s largest citrus producers.
“We proceed with respect for family and community values, and respect for the land, and we’re in our fifth generation now, which is pretty phenomenal,” says Cari Roth, vice-president of governmental and regulatory affairs at Lykes. “With Chaparral Slough, I think the folks involved with Florida Forever always saw it as a place that merited permanent conservation measures. It was really more about the availability of funds and the legislature, the governor and the cabinet which needs to approve all the Florida Forever purchases.”
Roth says she has seen more enthusiasm from the state in recent years and more dollars spent, but overall the programme is still unpredictable, impacting smaller landowners who are willing to sell.
“A person from Tallahassee would come and say, ‘Hey, we’d like to buy your land, but sometime in the future because I don’t really have the money right now.’ And, you know, that doesn’t recognise the economic pressures on landowners in rural Florida,” she says.
“Lykes is a big landowner and we perhaps don’t have the same kinds of pressures, but farming, and agriculture of any sort, is hard. The margins are not big. If the desire is there but not money, then interest sort of wanes.”
Funding has been a common conundrum in almost all of Florida Forever’s negotiations. The programme began with a fanfare and an annual $300m allocation, largely from property stamp taxes, but economic headwinds evolved into a recession and slump in real estate values, and politicians decided taxpayers’ dollars were needed elsewhere.
“As Florida’s economy recovered from that economic downturn, the funding for this programme didn’t,” says Meredith Budd, regional policy director at the Florida Wildlife Federation. Her group is one of the state’s loudest voices advocating for panthers and other threatened species, including the Florida black bear, burrowing owl, American eagle, eastern indigo snake, gopher tortoise, various herons and other wading birds and birds of prey.
“The funding has been abysmal. Historically, it’s been $300m per year under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In 2019, we received around $30m, and in 2020 around $90m. Our entire state budget is over $92bn. So it seems that the legislature has forgotten about Florida Forever,” she says.
It is a charge that Florida’s recently re-elected Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, denies. “Acquiring lands for conservation and recreation is a top priority for my administration,” DeSantis said in August, as he announced the $56m acquisition of 8,000 hectares across seven properties, the state’s largest in several years.
Stevens is hopeful about the future if the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act passes. “We have a scientifically based land-protection priority list that’s been developed through the [Florida Forever] programme, so the vehicle is there.
“The projects are there, they’re prioritised already. The funding will just help us, you know, make hay while the sun shines.”
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