Of Course He Did

It's no surprise that Donald Trump has announced that he will block a popular and bipartisan housing bill unless Congress makes it illegal for Black and Brown people to vote.

OK, "Illegal," is a bit of hyperbole.  He just wants to make it as difficult as is humanly possible.

What does the "Save America" Act have to do with housing?  Nothing at all.

Despite rare and overwhelming bipartisan support, a US bill aimed at lowering the cost of housing for Americans is being held hostage by Donald Trump.

The president said he won’t sign the 21st Century Road to Housing Act until the Senate meets his demand to pass the Save America Act, which would dramatically change voting regulations by requiring proof of citizenship at voter registration and significantly curtail mail-in voting.

The housing bill, which was passed with large majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives after months of negotiations, represents one of the biggest efforts in decades to increase the supply of housing and reduce prices. On Wednesday morning, however, Trump claimed it was of “minor importance”.

Trump is trying not to spend the rest of his life in prison, so the voter suppression bill, and the ballroom, and the f%$#ing reflecting pool, are all that he cares about.

Down Another Rabbit Hole

More research on the Ger/Yurt tonight, so light posting.

I'm trying to get information about what sort of heating was used in period.  Today, in Mongolia at least, there are a lot of coal stoves made from fabricated steel. 

I'm gonna make myself a Yurt/Ger one day. 

F%$# Gavin Newsom

I've noted previously that Gavin Newsom is not progressive in any way, shape, or form.

Now, we are seeing him embrace his inner fascist, not only using state agencies to clear homeless encampments from state land without any other housing being available, but now he threatening to defund municipalities that do not clear homeless encampments as well.

I get that the recent Supreme Court decision (City of Grants Pass v. Johnson) allows for communities to exile homeless people, but the unholy glee that Newsom shown in response is awful:

After personally participating in the forced displacement of homeless people in a Los Angeles encampment, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to withhold funding from counties that don't sufficiently crack down on the unhoused.

Buoyed by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court's recent City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson ruling—which was welcomed by Newsom and other Democratic leaders like San Francisco Mayor London Breed who filed amicus briefs in the case—the governor issued an executive order last month directing officials to clear out homeless encampments, which have proliferated amid rampant economic inequality and stratospheric housing prices in the nation's most populous state.

After taking part in a Thursday sweep of an encampment in Mission Hills in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, Newsom declared: "I want to see results... If we don't see demonstrable results, I'll start to redirect money." 

Newsom praised leaders like Breed and Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for reducing the number of people sleeping on their cities' streets and directed his ire mostly toward county governments.

"This is a sincerely held belief that we need local government to step up," the governor added. "This is a crisis. Act like it." Newsom has made—and followed through on—similar promises in the past. Last month, his office redirected a $10 million grant for San Diego County to buy so-called "tiny homes" for the unhoused because officials there "could not move with the urgency the housing and homelessness crisis demands."

University of California, Los Angeles sociology professor and homelessness expert Chris Herring told The Guardian following Newsom's executive order that the directive is "giving a green light to a harsher approach" to tackling California's unhoused crisis, which critics say criminalizes people for being poor.

The cruelty is the point.

We as a society, and politicians as individuals, should be judged by how they treat the least of us.

Gavin Newsom has failed.

Maybe Ireland if Trump Wins

Only about 15 km off the coastIreland is offering as much as $92,000.00 to entice people to make a home on sparsely populated islands off their west coast.  

It looks like a lovely place, but you have to restore an abandoned home, and it is a bit remote, only having ferry access.

I also imagine that finding kosher food there would be a bit of a chore:

Ireland announced a new scheme offering generous cash grants to people willing to move to approximately 30 islands of the country's wild west coast. But some prerequisites have to be met to receive the funds.

The "Our Living Islands" scheme offers up to €84,000 (about $92,000) to people who want to move to the beautiful, sparsely populated islands on the Atlantic coast — which are not connected to the mainland by bridges and cut off by the tides.

Options include Inis Mór, which was used as a filming location for the recent hit film "The Banshees of Inisherin," as well as Árainn Mhór, a "rich and vibrant" island off the coast of Donegal.

………

The goal is to refurbish vacant or derelict buildings on islands into long-term homes as part of a broader initiative to revitalize life and the community on the islands, and increase the population, the government said.

Vacant Home Officers will identify empty and derelict properties on our island.

"As a result of delivering this policy, we will see more people living on the islands and more people working on our islands, with good career prospects, regardless of where their employer is headquartered," Minister for Rural and Community Development, Heather Humphreys, said in a statement to receive any funding. However, a person must own property on one of the islands built before 1993 that has been vacant for at least two years.

 I wonder if I could telecommute from there.

I Hate Reruns

Here it is, just 15 years after the last time, and we are back at the the housing market crashing again.

This sucks like a thousand [Herbert] Hoovers all going at once:

The slump in US home prices is becoming more widespread, with the share of markets seeing declines at the highest in over a decade.

According to a National Association of Realtors report Tuesday, 31% of US housing markets experienced declines. That's the highest in 11 years and up from 11% of markets that saw price declines in the fourth quarter.

It turns out that the people who addressed this problem over a dozen years ago, I'm looking you, Obama and Geithner, took their cues from the Bourbon Restoration.

To quote not Tallyrand, "They have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing." 

It took 70 years to erase the lessons of the Great Depression, it only took 15 to erase the lessons of the Great Recession, if they had ever been taken to heart.

Can we start jailing banksters?

Damn. That is Harsh

It appears that everyone's favorite racist minority anchor baby, Michelle Malkin, has been banned from Airbnb, because they have a limit on the amount of racist douche-baggery that they can tolerate:

Far-right columnist and white nationalist ally Michelle Malkin has been booted from Airbnb after attending the white nationalist organization American Renaissance's gathering in Nashville last November.

“Consistent with our policies, if we become aware of users who are members of or are actively affiliated with hate groups, we remove them from Airbnb,” company spokesperson Ben Breit told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. The site also banned Malkin’s husband, she wrote, since her trips were often booked from his account.

It sucks to be Michelle Malkin, but it always sucks to be her.

She is, after all, so pro white supremacist, that the Brownshirt wannabees at Young Americans for freedom cut ties with her. 

When you are too awful for YAF, you have really hit bottom.

This Does Not Sound Like Progress

Tennessee Ernie Ford says it all

Elon Musk's latest "disruptive innovation" is to return to the days of the company town and the company store, where if you lose your job, they kick you out of your house:

Tesla's Nevada-based Gigafactory could be undergoing a massive expansion which has the potential to include on-site accommodations for employees, reports the Las Vegas Review Journal. In a recent conversation with Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval at the state's first annual technology summit, CEO Elon Musk discussed the automaker's plans to hire more than 20,000 new workers for its manufacturing facility.

Currently, the manufacturing facility, coined Gigafactory 1, employs around 7,000 workers and produces the bulk of battery cells and packs found in Tesla vehicles. Despite producing an annual energy storage capacity output of 20 GWh, Tesla has acknowledged the need for batteries is virtually insatiable in order to meet the increasing demand for electric vehicles.

………

“The biggest constraint on growth here is housing and infrastructure." said Musk according to the Review, "We’re looking at creating a housing compound on site at the Gigafactory, using kind of high-quality mobile homes."

So, you live in a company town, and if you try to unionize, you get tossed out, and end up homeless, and your kid is kicked out of the company school, etc., just like in the 1890s.

Why does the Silicon Valley model of "Innovation" sound so much like the worst excess of the Gilded Age?