Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
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Absolutely no right-wing jokes. This includes "Anarcho"-Capitalist concepts.
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This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
No shaming people for being anti-electoralism. This should be obvious from the above point but apparently we need to make it obvious to the turbolibs who can't control themselves. You have the rest of lemmy to moralize.
Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
Blackstone. Everyone blames BlackRock, but it's Blackstone doing this. BlackRock is maybe a little bit evil, but mostly they sell ETFs, so ways for retail investors to invest in the stock market indexes. They make a fee off that, and at their size that's a huge amount of money already. Blackstone is more active about what it invests in, it strategically buys up neighborhoods so they can unilaterally raise rents. Among all kinds of other morally dubious investments.
Does BlackRock own a lot of real estate?
Yes, BlackRock is one of the largest real estate investors in the world, with over $60 billion in total real estate assets under management.
https://bestrealestatemarket.com/real-estate-does-blackrock-own/
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$60 billion
That figure itself is likely wrong, because this is a 3rd party website with very weird grammar, other sources (including Blackrock's website) point towards more like 30 billion or less. It's also tiny compared to Blackstone.
Blackstone has 300 billion in AUM in their real estate funds and 600 billion as their global real estate portfolio and according to themselves, 42% of it is homes they rent out
BlackRock's public statement is also that they do not buy single family homes in the US. They finance construction and mortgages, though, so they still profit off it, but not from rent.
Also, BlackRock's CEO has been advocating for the importance of ESG (Environmental, Sustainability, Governance) in investment funds to the point that multiple red states refused to do business with BlackRock. Fink was on good terms with Obama and was going to be Clinton's treasury secretary if she'd won.
Meanwhile, Blackstone's CEO is a longtime friend of Donald Trump and compared Obama's carried interest tax hike plans Hitler invading Poland.
They're both gigantic corporations and no billionaire is your friend, but there's one that's trying to be about as good as you can be while still being a bloodsucking billionaire running a trillion dollar megacorp, whereas the other also actively wants to make the world a worse place. And the former always gets the attention for what the latter is doing, because the name is more famous.
Maybe not directly but they buy REIT shares. They also own iShares that have number of REIT ETFs. Blackrock is one of the biggest Blackstone shareholder https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BX/holders/
Different compqny same people running it.
Source? Or do you just mean (((same people)))?
Blackstone also ventured into other businesses, most notably investment management. In 1987 Blackstone entered into a 50โ50 partnership with the founders of BlackRock, Larry Fink (current CEO of BlackRock), and Ralph Schlosstein (CEO of Evercore). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone_Inc.
In 1995, Blackstone sold its stake in BlackRock to PNC Financial Services for $240 million. Between 1995 and 2014, PNC reported $12 billion in pretax revenues and capital gains from BlackRock. Schwarzman later described the selling of BlackRock as his worst business decision ever.
That's like 4 paragraphs later lol
^ this guy chans
I do not, but some of these conspiracy theories do have their roots in antisemitism. Of course, Israel has done wonders to legitimize antisemitism and the CEOs of both companies support Israel to one degree or another, so at this rate we may as well say that the zionists control the world, much like conspiracy theorists used to say it about Jews in general.
Saint Luigi, hear our prayer. May justice rain upon the parasitic real estate holdings firms.
You become a Saint once you get into heaven. You sort of have to die before you can get to heaven, and Luigi is still alive.
My mother was actually thinking about selling my grandparents house to them.
I'm not sure if I changed her mind, but I straight up told her the second she mentioned them that I would burn the house down before the sale went through and would be chilling in a cell with a smile on my face for it.
She decided not to sell to a company.
Does that make me unhinged? Maybe. But that's one less house going to a rental company and one more family getting a house they'll live in.
You did the right thing. They would have just used it as currency anyways.
Make a secondary house all but impossible to own via property tax, and make it illegal for corporations to own property. Watch housing cost plummet through the floor.
and make it illegal for corporations to own property.
You are asking to make corporations illegal which I am admittedly in favor of but don't think that's what you were going for
It wasn't intentional, but I believe that my subconscious knows what's up, so I'll stick with it.
100%. Right now you can write your empty property off on your taxes as a loss in most places*
*In the US
It's insanity. Should be the complete opposite. If there's no renter in it? More tax!
Oh not only can you, it's encouraged. I see libs talking on Reddit about how it's actually better than renting because you take on a risk when renting and an empty house builds value and doesn't run the chance of damage.
This is of course why private property sucks, but if the general populous can't stomach that, I'd be willing to settle for georgism.
The people that would write these laws are the ones profiting off the exploits in the system. The politicians literally get legal bribes to allow the behaviour.
The issue is that they're already doing this with HOAs. They don't care if they owne your house, but they own the dirt under it and can evict you for bullshit reasons. Make corporate HOAs illegal too
I mean a lot of what BlackRock sells is index funds like vanguard etc.
That's a lot of people's retirements more than it's private equity.
I think you'll have more luck changing the rules of the game rather than chasing the players. If black rock disappeared tomorrow all that money would just move to another ETF manager and you would instantly have another BlackRock.
Also I think BlackRock (which is far from blameless in a whole lot of affairs) gets confused with black stone. It was the latter more directly investing in real estate iirc.
Also what i find very interesting about this topic is how demographics plays into this
i personally think that the UN predictions about how the population numbers are going to evolve are utter bullshit. it is well known that the population pyramid looks something like this:
and it's going to get thinner and thinner at the bottom as time progresses.
anyways, i think a lot of organizations that could build housing are a bit reluctant mostly for that reason. a company thinks "if i build a house today, there's a good chance that there won't be demand for that house in 30 years, so it might not pay off". and municipalities, i'm afraid, are way too under-invested in building social housing in general because that would be communism or sth.
after a quick search on the internet, about 1.6 million people live in public housing in the US in 2024. that's about 0.5 percent. Source
Meanwhile in Europe, about 9.3% (45 million people) people live in public housing according to this article, with some countries like Austria having 24%. (8% of EU according to this OECD study).
I used to dream of owning a small shack to live in but now I truly don't give a fuck, I'm soon to be homeless and no longer care about society