The Death of the American Dream

Predatory private equity firms buying up neighborhoods only to rent homes at a premium hints at the real meaning of the World Economic Forum’s “sharing economy.” Americans never voted for this, but their bribed leaders are loving it.

Owning a home is no longer feasible for Americans coming of age in the 21st century, as they should stop worrying about whether they can afford a house.

In other words, better ignore the asset-stripping investment vultures, and just embrace the depressing reality of lifelong debt peonage under the rule of those same private equity giants.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, the feudalistic character of this glorious new “sharing economy” is reflected in one increasingly popular “solution” for the generation currently facing the steep uphill climb to pay off their student loans.

Under this scheme, known as Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLAB’s), students are invited to essentially indenture themselves to some corporation, paying off their debts by selling off a percentage of every paycheck they subsequently receive until the balance is zero. Any questions?

With multi-trillion-dollar asset managers such as BlackRock, Blackstone Group, State Street, and Vanguard flaunting their bottomless pockets, ordinary mom-and-pop landlords looking to buy an extra property or two to open up a guaranteed income stream don’t have a chance in such a rigged market – and neither do their tenants.

Just as they did after the 2008 mortgage implosion, giant corporations are sprouting up everywhere, snatching for-sale homes off the market sight unseen, paying a hefty premium to do so, then turning around and charging fee-laden premiums to the new tenant for what, in pre-“new-normal” times, would have been considered the landlord’s responsibility.

But even with the dark truths of the so-called “sharing” or “stakeholder” economies on display for all to see, Smith sees absolutely nothing wrong with this model, indeed suggesting Americans should be grateful for the opportunity to submit to this shiny neo-feudalism.

Smirking at the idea of a required revision of the American dream of home-ownership that is, dispensing with the idea of dreaming of a better life altogether – Smith quipped that “this country was always more about new frontiers than comfortable settlements, anyway.”

Renting from disinterested private equity giants such as BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and Vanguard, its privately owned counterpart, is putting oneself at the mercy of a faceless slumlord with vanishingly little financial interest in fixing what’s broken in any given apartment they own.

Tenants have complained to the media about spurious rent hikes, evictions without notice, and delayed or never-completed repairs – and the problem is by no means limited to the USA, or even North America, according to a United Nations working group.

The practice of buying homes at jacked-up prices only to turn around and rent them to people who can barely afford the cost of the home itself, let alone the heaps of spurious fees tacked on, is not new, but it’s been growing rapidly over the past decade, turning asset managers into some of the country’s biggest landlords.

Blackstone subsidiary Invitation Homes was buying entire neighborhoods at a clip just a few years after the 2008 mortgage crisis sent home-ownership into a death spiral.

Helping that death spiral along, it treated its new tenants with all the warmth and benevolence of a hungry saber-toothed tiger.

Between the specter of 2008 repeating itself and the flood of near-worthless paper exiting the money printer over the past year, it’s hard to imagine the US pulling itself up out of this particular financial hole any time soon.

Especially with events unfolding religiously in line with the path financial institutions took in 2008, the phenomenon of “regulatory capture” ensures history will repeat itself over and over again.

The private equity vultures’ controlling stakes in the most influential media organizations explain why there are so many trite headlines downplaying the activities of beasts like BlackRock instead of calling it what it really is.

And that is a shadow Federal Reserve, capable of foisting debts incurred through risky trading on the average citizen’s savings, but never ever allowing the ordinary citizen to share in the spoils of victory.

We are staring down at the corpse of the American Dream, tied like a trophy hunter’s kill to the roof of our new electric vehicles (leased, never owned!), unaware that what we are looking at is our own future.

Efforts to present this atrocity as either “new” or “normal” have been found wanting over the past year, and it seems all but impossible that that element of the New Normal will be achieved – but humans are adaptable creatures, and we can con ourselves into pretty much anything.

RT. com / ABC Flash Point Corruption News 2021.