I work in the title industry and see houses being bought by LLCs and trusts with cash and then sold weeks later for $100,000 more with only curb appeal modifications or no repairs at all. It’s pretty common.

You can absolutely buy a house and sell it for a higher price, and do nothing to it or very minimal modifications. I work in the title industry and see it literally every day. LLC or trust buys house with cash, turns around and sells house a couple weeks later for like $100,000 more, while doing nothing to it or very minimal repairs or aesthetic/curb appeal changes.

Not so subtle reminder that YOU are not immune to propaganda.

Yes, 100% agree. Thanks for the additional insight.

It would be very good and cool under a socialist state, but not in the US currently and I’ll explain my reasoning. In the US, nationalization represents the transfer of an enterprise from a single capitalist firm to the capitalist class as a whole via the state. Nationalization can bring benefits to both the working and capitalist classes, but ultimately the workers are still being exploited by the state for private profits instead of social ends. When an enterprise is nationalized by a capitalist state, the former owners are usually generously compensated with state bonds bearing a fixed rate of interest; this enables them to continue to exploit the workers involved at a rate of profit now guaranteed by the state. The class struggle continues, but but it is now necessary for the workers to struggle not against a single private management but against the capitalist state in its entirety. This is one of the reasons why Mussolini and Hitler heaped praise on FDR for his New Deal policies. They did a lot of good for people during the depression, but they also were market interventionist in a way that put a lot of corporate control in the hands of the capitalist state.

Might be worth your while to look into Locals in your area that aren’t necessarily IT focused unions. Some unions (like the Teamsters and others) will still help you organize under their union even though they typically represent workers in a specific industry. I don’t have an office workers union local in my neck of the woods, but I’ve been giving it some thought as well.

Shawn Fain (United Auto Workers president) has been calling for unions across every industry to align their contracts to end at the same time on May 1st, 2028 (International Labor Day), specifically so that we can prepare for a general strike. Gives the already organized unions time to build up a strike fund and non-organized folks time to get organized.

This argument that Palestinians should be peaceful when confronted with literal genocide and ethnic cleansing is so fucking dumb. Would you say this to the people involved in the Warsaw ghetto uprising?

Israel is literally committing genocide and ethnic cleansing on the daily. Even before October 7th, they have been illegally settling for decades. There are numerous government ministers and Knesset members that have called publicly for said genocide and ethnic cleansing. Some have said there is no such thing as a Palestinian civilian. Some were giving speeches at a rally with an org that was planning how to re-establish settlements in Gaza.

The onus should not be on Egypt to take in refugees. The onus should be on Israel to stop its genocidal actions and ethnic cleansing campaign. You know… The thing that’s causing the Palestinians to be in a position where they would need to flee to Egypt in the first place.

There are socialist third party candidates already running. Claudia/Karina from PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) and Cornell West. I think it would make more sense to throw support behind one of them.

Option #4: Organize with your coworkers and form a union and collectively bargain for higher wages and better benefits.

Just to add to this, it’s not just investment firms. I do title searches for a living and a lot of them are also bought by trusts and IRAs by people living in more well-off areas. It’s basically a retirement plan for them. That should be included in the ban. There basically should be a ban on buying homes you don’t plan on living in or doing significant rehabilitation work to (and with that second stipulation, we should actually inspect and ensure that the house flippers are actually doing much needed work to make the house liveable, not just slapping new paint on the bricks and installing faux shutters to the outside for a quick flip).

I mean, some Texans might think so. Maybe even Texan politicians. However, Texas tried it already. It was one of the slave states that seceded and got its ass kicked in the civil war. Generally, that’s the legal precedent that people refer to when they argue whether or not a state has the right to secede. The answer is war/no. That doesn’t mean it would have to result in that in the future, but I think the only way they could get it to work without violence would be by starting some devolution movement and getting the US constitution amended to allow Texas in particular to secede and that would require a constitutional convention and the consent of the majority of the other states. Otherwise, they’d have to win a war against the US.

I’m not like a US civil war scholar or anything, but there’s at least a glimmer of precedence to be found there with what happened to average folk living in the Confederate States when those states seceded. Babies born in the Confederacy were considered US citizens because the US (the Union) never recognized the Confederacy as independent and legally considered it US territory still. As for adults, it was similar… The US treated them as if they had never lost US citizenship and either punished or pardoned people for treason and war related crimes after the war. So I guess the answer would depend on whether Texas wins or loses the inevitable war that the US would fight to keep Texas from seceding/declaring independence in the first place.

At the end of the day they’re still using that capital to exploit people by being landlords. Even if they earned that initial capital through hard work, the moment they invest some of it into a down payment on a house and begin to extract profit/equity via someone else’s labor, it becomes exploitation.

Probably because they don’t have the capital necessary to become a landlord in the first place. If you have enough money, being a landlord requires literally no work at all.

It’s not the best we can do, though. The best we could do would be for workers to own the means of production.

Not much of a “punishment” to the business to have socialized losses. Oh you’ve mismanaged your ginormous business and it’s going to cause a huge, negative ripple effect on the economy and impact everyone else? Here’s some free money, courtesy of working class taxpayers! Also we’re going to break you up and place no restrictions on how big you can get so that one of your smaller entities can inevitably get enough market share to be in a position to do the same thing a decade later! Huh? Punishment? Oh… Uh… Don’t do that again please, Mr. Business, sir 🥺

You could always sell it at a low enough price to break even and just refuse to sell it to anyone besides someone who plans on actually living in it. You’re allowed to do that. Real estate agent might look at you like you’re crazy, but fuck em. It’s your house right now.