The Corporate Takeover Of Housing

• by: John P. Ruehl

John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute

07-12-2025 ~ Corporate ownership remains a relatively small percentage of American housing. But a growing number of financial firms, tech platforms, and institutional landlords, alongside a national housing shortage, is making homeownership even less affordable.

The 2025 U.S. housing market presents a paradox. Home sales are down, and there are far more sellers than buyers, yet prices continue to hit record highs. Over the past decade, home values have surged nationwide, including in once-affordable Sunbelt cities.

Policymakers appear ill-equipped to respond to the situation. In a July 2025 interview with the New York Times, 16 U.S. mayors listed housing as one of their top concerns. During her 2024 presidential campaign, former Vice President Kamala Harris proposed tax credits for first-time buyers to alleviate the crisis, while President Donald Trump has renewed calls for interest rate cuts to help lower mortgage rates.

Homeownership remains central to the American dream, and U.S. homeownership rates have typically hovered around 65 percent “from 1965 until 2025,” according to Trading Economics. But the high-water mark came in 2004 when it reached 69 percent, and despite a temporary COVID-19-era spike, the rate has continued to inch downward. Worryingly, even among those who own homes, equity is shrinking. Many homeowners own less than half of their property’s value today, with the balance tied up in debt.

Many of the pressures are structural. Construction costs have soared, labor is in short supply, and tariffs have raised the price of materials. Zoning laws, tax regimes, and anti-density regulations have stifled urban growth, while sprawling development is hitting geographic and environmental limits. Mortgage rates remain high, and the national housing shortfall, now estimated to be more than 4.5 million, continues to worsen.

But the crisis has opened the door for new kinds of investors. A growing cast of corporate actors is moving into residential real estate, lured by the prospect of stable returns in a tightening market. Though they still own a minority of U.S. housing, these firms are often concentrated in key regions and markets. Increasingly capable of setting the terms of access to housing, their rising influence threatens to reverse the post-World War II surge in widespread homeownership.

Buildup
Large-scale corporate ownership of homes and influence over rent prices is a relatively recent development. Before 2008, most institutional investors stuck to apartment buildings and urban areas, as single-family homes were seen as too dispersed and costly to manage. That changed after the housing crash, when a wave of foreclosures flooded the market, leading to the availability of deeply discounted homes in the suburbs. Read more

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Jan Jaap de Ruiter ~ The Ideology of the Dutch Party for Freedom: Geert Wilders Explained 

05-19-2025 ~ The Dutch Party for Freedom (in Dutch: Partij voor de Vrijheid) is centered around one man, its founder and leader, Mr. Geert Wilders. The party has no human members except Mr. Wilders himself, no party office, no scientific institute, and no youth division. Still, it is currently the largest party in the Dutch parliament and also the largest party in the current coalition government. Since its founding in 2006, the party has published little written materials aside from election programs, which were sometimes very brief.

Nevertheless, party leader Geert Wilders and his first deputy, Mr. Martin Bosma, now speaker in the House, have both written a book in which they expound their ideology. This book presents an analysis of the works of both Party for Freedom politicians under several recurring themes, such as the party’s vision of Christianity, Judaism, Israel, left-wing parties, Enlightenment thinking, and particularly of Islam and Muslims.
It is party leader Wilders who claims in his work that Muslims would be better of abandoning their faith so that they too can become partakers of the best culture on Earth: the Western one.
This book explains the many lines of reasoning behind this claim.

Jan Jaap de Ruiter (1959) addresses the ideology of the Party for Freedom in this book. De Ruiter studied Arabic language and culture, he has had a long academic career as an Arabist in Tilburg university (the Netherlands) and he has many publications in Dutch, English, French, and Arabic to his name concerning the various forms of Arabic, as well as about Islam and Muslims in Europe and about populism.
For years, he has been an active participant in the public debate in the Netherlands and beyond on issues such as multiculturalism, Islam and Muslims, and the populist discourse of a party like the PVV, particularly regarding the party’s stance on Muslims.
Additionally, De Ruiter has translated many Arabic literary works into Dutch. For more information, visit www.janjaapderuiter.eu.

134 pag.
ISBN 978 90 361 0799 0

Paperback 130 x 200 mm.
Euro 15,90

The e-book version will be released soon.

The book can be ordered by sending an email to this address: aukevdberg@gmail.com – At the moment, we don’t have any fancy forms to order our books. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Please provide your address and the desired number of copies.

The Igbo Concept Of Mother Musicianship

• by: Meki Nzewi

Music is a ‘woman’, and intuitive creative management of life is more of a feminine attribute. Music is a communion, a social communion that nourishes spirituality, and manages socialisation during public events. These are some of the philosophical and concrete rationalizations that guided the indigenous categorization of an extraordinary performance-composer irrespective of gender or age as a mother musician as per indigenous terminological evidence in Africa. A composer gestates and gives birth to sonic phenomena.

Musical meaning has been discussed from the indigenous perspective as being based on the factors of musical sense, psychical tolerance and musical intention. The practice of performance-composition has also been identified as processing the realisation and approval of musical meaning as per context. Central to the philosophy of musical meaning as a society’s conceptualization of creative genius are the creative personalities who interpret and extend the musical factors as well as the musical facts of a culture. Such specialists are sensitive to the socio-musical factors contingent on a musical context at the same time as they are the repositories of the theory of composition in a musical arts tradition. Socio-musical factors here categorize those non-musical circumstances of a music-making situation that inform the architecture of a performance-composition; while musical facts are the essential elements of creative configurations that furnish musical arts theory.

Read more

Decades Of Neoliberalism Entrenched US Inequality. Trump’s Budget Made It Worse

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Prof.dr. Robert Pollin – University of Massachusetts Amherst

07-12-2025 ~ Factoring in tariffs, the lowest 20 percent of income earners may lose $300; the top 1 percent will be $58,000 richer.

Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which was signed into law last week, has been described as a monstrous piece of legislation. In this exclusive interview for Truthout, world-renowned progressive economist Robert Pollin provides an overview of this “disgraceful” federal budget bill. Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

CJ Polychroniou: Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” has now become law, achieving what ultra-conservatives have been fighting for decades, which are huge tax breaks and major cuts to social safety net programs. Of course, there is a lot more reactionary stuff included in this megabill, such as hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to Trump’s anti-immigration agenda and derailing the green transition by taking an axe to clean energy and boosting, in turn, fossil fuel production. In sum, I think Ed Kilgore’s claim that this 940-page bill “is, in fact, the single most sweeping piece of legislation in American history” is quite accurate, although some of its effects won’t be felt for some time. Can you discuss specifically the economic and social repercussions of Trump’s megabill, especially in light of the view that the U.S. is the most unequal high-income country in the world?

Robert Pollin: Trump’s federal budget bill is disgraceful along multiple dimensions. We can start with its egregious distributional impacts. The bill will make the rich still richer through tax cuts while attacking the living standards, including the health and food security, of working people and the poor.

Trump and company claim that people at all income levels will benefit from the bill’s tax cuts. There is a tiny sliver of truth in this. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the Trump tax provisions will deliver an average of $40 in savings to the lowest 20 percent of income earners in 2026. Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent will end up $66,000 richer. This recalls the famous observation by Anatole France in 1894 that, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

But even these figures do not conclude the story. ITEP also notes that, once we also account for the impact of Trump’s tariffs — with these tariffs being a tax on imported products — those in the lowest 20 percent income bracket will not keep their $40 in benefits, but rather end up worse off by about $300. Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent are still better off by about $58,000.

Much more punishing still for lower-income people are the spending cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program that now covers 85 million low-income and disabled people, along with other health funding cuts. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that, through the Trump measure, at least 17 million people will lose their coverage by 2034. In addition, cuts to the federal food security program (SNAP), on which 42 million people now depend, could eliminate this support for up to 5 million people.

Moreover, this purposeful Trump project to shower money on the rich while depriving lower-income people of health care and food arrives after nearly 50 years of neoliberal policy dominance had already skewed income and wealth inequality to extreme levels. For example, the average wage for non-supervisory workers as of 2023 was roughly equal, at about $28 an hour, to where it was in 1972 (controlling for inflation), even though average worker productivity had increased two-and-a-half-fold over this period. Meanwhile, the average CEO’s pay was 30 times higher than the average worker in 1972, but exploded to 290 times higher by 2023. In other words, the average worker’s annual income remained roughly constant at around $50,000 per year over this 50-year span, while the average CEO’s pay skyrocketed from $1.5 million to nearly $15 million. Read more

New Report Documents Racist Rot At The Core Of The Petrochemical Industry

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Michael Ash – UMass Amherst

07-09-2025 ~ Economist Michael Ash shares new data on racial disparities in the industry — a major purveyor of environmental racism.

A recent study published by Ecological Economics reveals that the petrochemical industry, well known for creating pollution and health risks to predominantly poor and Black communities near its plants, also perpetuates stark racial disparities across its workforce, reflecting what can only be described as institutional racism.

In the exclusive interview for Truthout, one of the co-authors of the study, University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Michael Ash talks about what goes on in the employment practices of the petrochemical industry. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

C.J. Polychroniou: The petrochemical industry creates huge amounts of pollution and is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Many petrochemical plants are also located on former slave plantation lands, such as those along the Mississippi River. These petrochemical plants affect predominantly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities as they are exposed to high risks of cancer and respiratory ailments from the pollutants emitted by these facilities. However, a growing body of literature also reveals sharp racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce. A recent study you co-authored supports such findings. Can you talk about these racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce? How pervasive are they, and are they confined to certain geographical locations, or is it a widespread phenomenon across the United States?

Michael Ash: First, I really can’t discuss this study without reference to the struggle for academic freedom that our study has engendered for the lead author, Kimberly Terrell. Until June 11, Terrell was a research scientist and director of community engagement at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University. Our study discusses disparities in employment and access to high-quality jobs in the petrochemical industry in Louisiana and elsewhere; and the governor of Louisiana made it clear to the administration of Tulane University that this type of research, no matter how objective and scientific, would not be tolerated. The Tulane administration, to its grave discredit, bent to this pressure and attempted to gag Terrell’s communication with the public and with the media and to impede her scientific research on economic and environmental disparities. With the survival of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic at stake, Terrell chose to resign and will carry on her research under other auspices.

The makeup of the petrochemical workforce is tightly bound with the political influence and pollution effluents of the petrochemical industry. Petrochemical employment is concentrated in the U.S., a product of both geographic and technological imperatives and industrial planning. Petrochemical jobs have historically been good jobs in the sense of offering a pay premium above similar work in other industries — made possible by capital-intensive production, monopoly profits, and an organized workforce.

The employment disparities in petrochemical employment are widespread in the U.S., but they are especially notable in Louisiana because the African American share of the workforce is so high; the environmental risks and harms disproportionately imposed on African Americans are so great; and the representation of African Americans in jobs in the petrochemical industry, especially in good jobs, is so poor.

An account from my friend and colleague Jim Boyce illustrates the disconnect between who suffers environmental harms and who benefits from employment. When visiting African American frontline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” along the Mississippi River, Jim asked, “Well, the chemical plants and refineries and paper mills obviously bring pollution, but don’t they also bring at least some good jobs? The reply came: ‘No, none of us work there. It’s all white guys who come in their pickup trucks from Baton Rouge.’” Read more

The Frontier Research Of Michael Levin’s Biology Lab

• by: Marjorie Hecht

Michael Levin – Tufts University

07-08-2025 ~ The laboratory of developmental biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University, with its dozen or so postgrads, is a hub of ideas, experiments, and discoveries. Most exciting is the focus on cognition as a process involving the entire human organism—not just the brain—and what this implies for new ways to cure cancer and other diseases.

The “ethical imperative” to find the cause of—and relieve—pain and disease is a guiding concept for the lab’s biomedical work. Underpinning all Levin’s work is the remarkable idea that some form of cognition (thinking) is the “glue” that allows cells to communicate bioelectrically. This concept expands the study of cognition from a brain-only approach to one that extends to every cell in the body. Expanding the notion of consciousness to all living cells helps researchers at the lab to discover new things about humans and about whatever else exists or can be created.

Using AI (artificial intelligence) in the quest for new therapies, the lab has released frog skin cells from their two-dimensional confinement into a three-dimensional water container to study their behavior. The new entities, called Xenobots, are tiny robots used to help understand the general laws that govern both human and synthetic behavior. Once freed from being two-dimensional skin cells, the Xenobots exhibit new types of behavior. For example, they can swim in different directions and figure out how to get through a maze.

Professor Levin directs both the Allen Discovery Center and the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University in Massachusetts. His lab is unusual for the field of biology, a fact that Levin, writing on the lab’s website, attributes to his training as a computer engineer and his “deep interest in the philosophy of mind.”

The concept of intelligence as being ubiquitous has proved to be a fruitful research approach, but it is far from mainstream biology. I interviewed Levin for Human Bridges and asked what the response of other scientists was to this idea. He replied that “there is a community of scientists who work on this (the diverse intelligence community). But there is resistance from the mainstream, reductionist/mechanist camp, who expect everything to be handled at the molecular level, with no need for cognitive tools.”

His response to the reductionists helps to understand what is special about the Levin lab’s work. “To them I say that we are currently in biology where computer science was in the 1950s—programming by rewiring the hardware. A good start, but the reason we have these amazing information technologies is that we understood the magic of reprogramming and software: We don’t operate our laptop with a soldering iron anymore, and we don’t communicate with humans and animals by reaching in and tweaking their synaptic proteins. We use communication interfaces to reprogrammable or (in the case of life) agential materials.” Read more

The Dark Side Of Ecotourism: When Green Travel Exploits People And The Planet

• by: Kate Petty

06-29-2025 ~ As luxury eco-retreats and voluntourism surge, experts warn that without systemic reform, the industry may be doing more harm than good.

Ecotourism is often hailed as a sustainable alternative to traditional travel—an opportunity to explore unique environments while supporting local communities and conservation efforts. Yet beneath its green image lies a more complex and often troubling reality. When poorly managed, ecotourism can inflict more harm than good, undermining the very ideals it seeks to uphold.

The ecotourism industry has emerged as one of the fastest-expanding sectors within global travel. According to the Global Ecotourism Network, in 2023, eco-travel accounted for an estimated 20 percent of the international tourism market, with projections indicating continued double-digit annual growth. In 2023 alone, the global ecotourism market was valued at over $200 billion. Economic predictions estimate that the market could reach between $759 billion by 2032 and $945 billion by 2034.

Despite this rapid growth and economic promise, ecotourism enterprises have faced significant criticism from conservationists and researchers. In a 2020 Architectural Review article titled “Outrage: The Ecotourism Hoax,” Smith Mordak, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), asserted that “As long as the underlying principle behind tourism is to bring growth-stimulating inward investment, tourism cannot be made ‘eco.’”

The Ecotourism Paradox
Mordak’s remarks expose the deeper contradictions within many so-called “sustainable” initiatives, drawing attention to the pervasive issues of greenwashing and bluewashing. Just as corporations may falsely brand themselves as environmentally friendly or socially responsible to appeal to conscious consumers, ecotourism companies often mask exploitative or unsustainable practices behind the veneer of conservation. Ultimately, without a fundamental shift in the economic principles that underpin ecotourism, efforts to make the industry sustainable risk becoming performative, focusing on marketing rather than achieving meaningful impact.

According to UKGBC’s Mordak, “Like everything else nurtured in the agar jelly of capitalism, noble intentions soon become corrupted, and the ‘eco’ prefix amounts to little more than a greenwashing rebrand.”

Ecotourism is built on a dual promise—to protect natural environments and to share them with visitors—yet fulfilling one often puts the other at risk. In April 2025, I interviewed Dave Blanton, founder of  Friends of the Serengeti. He started the organization in response to a proposed commercial highway through Serengeti National Park, a development that would have fragmented the ecosystem and destroyed critical migratory routes. He explained the paradox: “On one hand, the growth of tourism in the Serengeti-Mara region will generate government revenue and create jobs. On the other hand, it will increase environmental pressure and diminish the traveler experience.” Read more

Trump Is Setting The US Economy Up For Another Great Financial Crisis

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Prof.dr. Gerald Epstein

06-26-2025 ~ Trump and tech capitalists like Elon Musk are trying to become kingpins of a largely unregulated financial system.

The financial system of the United States has always been prone to instability and crises. Now, however, under the new Trump administration, which is pushing for major cuts in regulation, including in the cryptocurrency sector in which the Trump family has a major financial stake, the financial system has become more vulnerable than ever, posing serious risks to the wider economy. Of course, this matters very little to Donald Trump, his family, and his billionaire friends. For Trump, the actual meaning of “America First” is “self-enrichment.”

In the interview that follows, progressive economist Gerald Epstein, a leading expert in finance and banking, talks about the changing nature of the U.S. finance system under Trump 2.0. He argues that Trump is turning the entire financial system into “a Wild West of unregulated institutions and markets,” thus potentially setting the stage for a financial crisis of unprecedented proportions. Epstein is professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us.

C.J. Polychroniou: The U.S. financial landscape is always evolving, but not necessarily in a desirable direction. Financial technology (fintech), artificial intelligence (AI), the shadow banking system, and deregulation are raising concerns about financial instability and even warnings of another financial crisis. Indeed, just recently, even The Economist — a champion of free markets, deregulation, and financialization — ran an article titled, “American finance, always unique, is now uniquely dangerous.” Can you briefly address the evolving nature of the U.S. financial system since the 2007-08 financial crisis and whether concerns about an increase in financial stability risks are valid?

Gerald Epstein: The Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2009 hurt millions of Americans and was costly to countless others elsewhere. Americans lost their jobs, their homes, and saw public services — such as resources for schools, health care, and subsidized child care — experience major cuts. As I show in Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us, the roots of the GFC stem from radical financial deregulation by both Democratic and Republican administrations, and also joined by European governments, that permitted megabanks and their top personnel to take on huge risks and win large payoffs. And when the markets collapsed, they were bailed out by central banks and governments without penalty to themselves or their banks. More specifically, bankers and other operatives in the financial system, such as credit rating agencies, were able to profit from massive conflicts of interest; huge and often hidden levels of debt (leverage); deliberately overly complex and opaque financial products that their customers, and often themselves, did not understand; large-scale fraud and corruption that went largely unpunished; and, in the end, massive government bailouts that saved them and their institutions but came at the expense of the taxpayers and the overall economy, as the work of the late James Crotty has shown.

The financial reform laws, in the United States known as Dodd-Frank, were hard-fought but ended up with only moderate improvements in the financial regulations. These reforms promised to make banking less risky by reducing leverage and by increasing bank capital and liquidity; they also promised to make banking activities less opaque by increasing regulatory monitoring of the largest banks. But the effectiveness of these rules eroded over time. This erosion occurred partly because, under Trump 1.0, they were rolled back and weakened in some important respects. And the rules became less effective because the financial markets innovated around them. These changes were well described in the Economist article and included increasing the size of the less regulated areas, increasing the roles of private credit, including asset management firms like BlackRock, hedge funds, and private equity funds, thereby increasing the financial footprint of relatively unregulated credit institutions. Read more