Autocracy, Inc - The Dictators Who Want to Run the World


Dictators are Less Interested in Ideological Alliances and More Interested in Helping Each Other Stay Powerful

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. Police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and
maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality.

Nowadays, autocracies are - underpinned not by one dictator, but by - sophisticated networks composed of;

/ Kleptocratic financial structures, / Surveillance technologies, and / Professional propagandists,

- all of which operate across multiple regimes
    from China to Russia to Iran;

  • Corrupt Companies - in one country do business
    with corrupt companies in another.
  • Police - in one country can arm and train
    the police in another.
  • Propagandists - share resources and themes,
    pounding home the same messages about the
    weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance.

The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying
ideology, like communism, but rather a common
desire for
power, wealth, and impunity.

In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

https://amazon.com/Autocracy-Inc-Dictators-Want-World/
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/



The Scariest Thing Dictators Are Doing Now: Working Together

The recent ascendance of global authoritarianism has produced many studies of strongmen, their cults of personality, and the way they use propaganda, violence and other tools of iron rule. Historian and journalist - Anne Applebaum - has long chronicled the devastation of past authoritarian regimes as well as the threats we face in the present, in books such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gulag” (2003) and “Twilight of Democracy” (2020).

Her new book - Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, takes a different approach than most - looking at - the connections among authoritarian regimes that “opportunistically work together toward their common goal: damaging democracies and democratic values, inside
their own countries and around the world.”

Applebaum argues that dictators like those in Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia differ from despots of earlier ages because their partnerships are born less from ideological commonalities than from “a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power.” Applebaum rightly places kleptocratic institutionalized thievery at the center of her analysis. “To stay in power, modern autocrats need to be able to take money and hide it without being bothered by political institutions that encourage transparency, accountability, or public debate,” she writes. “The money, in turn, helps them shore up the instruments of repression.”

The “Inc.” in her title gestures at those financial priorities. “Governance” becomes a source of illicit wealth for ruling elites (as when Putin plunders Gazprom, the state-owned gas giant, and other entities and exfiltrates the money to offshore accounts), and “foreign policy” prioritizes the deals that keep that wealth flowing. In “mafia states” like North Korea and Russia, organized crime — here meaning crime organized by the government — is the primary activity.

The book explores the many ways autocrats collaborate to keep themselves collectively in power. Repression, indoctrination and thievery are the focus of their joint ventures. They often arm one another (Venezuela gets weapons from China, and Russia gets weapons from Iran and Turkey) and collaborate on acts of violence against exiled dissidents. Regimes also work together through mutual propaganda, whether it is China offering a boost to the state-controlled Russia Today or Russian troll farms amplifying the messages of far-right governments and parties abroad. Such networks have resulted in the standardization of talking points about demographic threats from non-White immigrants and Muslims, and the threat posed to tradition by LGBTQ+ individuals. “Antidemocratic rhetoric has gone global,” Applebaum writes.

These intertwined autocratic enterprises collectively aspire to take down the democratic international order, which levies punishments against them that include economic sanctions, anti-corruption legislation, embargoes and International Criminal Court rulings. These practices can restrict state theft, curb trade and travel, and freeze external funding, potentially causing popular unrest at home. Applebaum discusses how China and Russia, in particular, seek to “rewrite the rules of the international system” to discredit threatening ideas promoting human rights and political rights, along with democratic notions of accountability, transparency and solidarity.

These autocrats have adopted the buzzword “multipolarity” to frame the emerging autocratic international order, and the term pervades earnest-seeming talk by Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians and Russians about “the right to development,” “mutual respect,” “sovereignty” and “self-determination.” Multipolarity positions these murderous regimes — even Russia, despite its war of occupation in Ukraine — as crusaders for justice against globalist manipulations and democratic imperialism, with America the ringleader to be defeated.

https://msn.com/...the-scariest-thing-dictators-are-doing-now-working-together/
https://washingtonpost.com/.../autocracy-inc-anne-applebaum-review/
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/


Brothers in Arms or Just Good Friends?

...Applebaum fails to make the case that these autocracies are planning a joint confrontation with Western powers, but she does present an eye-opening investigation into the ties that bind them together. The crucial tie is money, hence the book’s title, Autocracy, Inc.

  • Autocrats use state power to extract resources from their own people and from every contract they sign with each other, with the money going into their own private pockets.
  • They collaborate with each other, laundering each other’s dirty money and sheltering ill-gotten gains in each other’s financial institutions.
  • Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another.
  • They sell each other the most advanced technologies of repression in an attempt to control the internet and
    their citizens.

Applebaum’s inventory of these relationships is thorough and revealing, but here too the differences between autocracies are important. Putin has never run a concerted campaign against corruption within his regime. The occasional defenestration of only the most spectacular crooks is his modus operandi. In China, Xi since 2012 has taken on his entire party cadre in his attempts to root out corruption in local and regional party offices. In Russia, corruption is the essence of the regime, while in China it is an abuse which the regime struggles to control.

Western democracies are doing their level best to exploit these divergences and keep the ‘axis of resistance’ divided. Western companies are reducing their exposure to authoritarian markets, and Western governments are repenting at leisure for their role, wittingly or unwitting, in helping authoritarian regimes consolidate their power. Applebaum offers an eloquent indictment of Western collusion in the creation of these autocracies: ‘When Americans condemn Russian, Ukrainian, or post-Soviet corruption, they rarely reckon with the role their fellow citizens have played, or are still playing, in enabling it.’ Instead of achieving ‘change through trade’, as the Germans hoped after 1989, the West’s economic engagement with the emerging autocracies of Russia and China benefited local oligarchs, while entrenching and enriching party bosses. Instead of furthering democracy, capitalism helped fund and consolidate authoritarianism throughout Eurasia. While Western leaders were lecturing Putin about the benefits of democracy, he was pocketing handsome sums from his deals with German businessmen. No wonder, Applebaum writes, the Russian leader sees us as hypocrites: ‘By the time Putin became president, he was well acquainted with the double standards of Western democracies, which preached liberal values at home but were very happy to help build illiberal regimes everywhere else.’

https://literaryreview.co.uk/brothers-in-arms-or-just-good-friends


Former President Donald Trump, at a rally in Chesapeake, Va., praised Russia, China, and North Korea, suggesting a smart president could make these countries thrive. Trump often lauds dictators like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, viewing them as an alliance he would support if reelected. This perspective aligns with his pattern of admiring strongman leaders, whom he believes can be positively influenced by a capable U.S. president.

Historian Anne Applebaum, in her book "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World," explores the rise of modern authoritarian regimes. Applebaum highlights how contemporary dictators differ from their predecessors by prioritizing personal wealth and power over ideological commitments. She argues that these regimes collaborate to undermine democracies globally, using propaganda, violence, and other repressive tools to maintain control. Applebaum's analysis centers on kleptocracy, where autocrats need to siphon and hide money to sustain their power, free from political oversight.

Applebaum's book details how autocrats from countries like Iran, Venezuela, China, and Russia work together to perpetuate their rule. These regimes often assist each other with weapons and collaborate on suppressing dissent, both domestically and internationally. Their mutual propaganda efforts amplify anti-democratic rhetoric and standardize talking points against non-White immigrants, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ individuals. This coordinated effort aims to dismantle the democratic international order that imposes sanctions and restrictions on authoritarian regimes.

The book also examines how these autocracies frame themselves as defenders of justice against globalist manipulation, using terms like "multipolarity" to position themselves against democratic imperialism, with the United States as the primary antagonist. Applebaum acknowledges that while modern autocrats prioritize financial gain, historical examples, such as the collaboration between Italian fascists and Soviet communists, show that profit-driven collusion among dictators is not entirely new. She emphasizes that today's autocracies are supported by transnational networks, yet individual strongmen like Putin still play a crucial role in maintaining these structures.

Applebaum calls for a united front among democratic nations to combat autocratic behaviors, emphasizing the need to enforce sanctions, counter propaganda, and address the complicity of democratic countries in enabling these regimes. She points out that wealth managers, lawyers, and PR firms in democracies, especially in the U.S. and Britain, facilitate kleptocratic activities. Trump, while not the main focus of her book, represents the transactional mentality of these autocrats, suggesting that his re-election could further entrench autocratic influences in America.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/14/autocracy-inc-anne-applebaum-review/


Book Excerpt - The Introduction
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.

This is not to say that there is some secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor is our conflict with them a black-and-white, binary contest, a “Cold War 2.0.” Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.

Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them. They also share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth. Unlike the fascist and communist leaders of the past, who had party machines behind them and did not showcase their greed, the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals but through deals—deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.

Autocracy, Inc., also collaborates to keep its members in power. Alexander Lukashenko’s unpopular regime in Belarus has been criticized by multiple international bodies—the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe—and shunned by its European neighbors. Many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the United States or the EU. The national airline, Belavia, cannot fly to European countries. And yet, in practice, Belarus is not isolated at all. More than two dozen Chinese companies have invested money in Belarus, even building a China-Belarus Industrial Park, modeled on a similar project in Suzhou. Iran and Belarus exchanged high-level diplomatic visits in 2023. Cuban officials have expressed solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN. Russia offers markets, cross-border investment, political support, and probably police and security services too. In 2020, when Belarusian journalists rebelled and refused to report a false election result, Russia sent Russian journalists to replace them. In return, Belarus’s regime has allowed Russia to base troops and weapons on its territory and to use those assets to attack Ukraine.

Venezuela is also, in theory, an international pariah. Since 2008, the United States, Canada, and the European Union have ramped up sanctions on Venezuela in response to the regime’s brutality, drug smuggling, and links to international crime. Yet President Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans from Russia, which also invests in Venezuela’s oil industry, as does Iran. A Belarusian company assembles tractors in Venezuela. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers and security technology to its counterparts in Caracas. Chinese-made water cannons, tear-gas canisters, and shields were used to crush street protesters in Caracas in 2014 and again in 2017, leaving more than seventy dead, while Chinese-designed surveillance technology is used to monitor the public too. Meanwhile, the international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime, along with their entourages and families, well supplied with Versace and Chanel.

The Belarusian and Venezuelan dictators are widely despised within their own countries. Both would lose free elections, if such elections were ever held. Both have powerful opponents: the Belarusian and the Venezuelan opposition movements have been led by a range of charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have inspired their fellow citizens to take risks, to work for change, to come out onto the streets in protest. In August 2020, more than a million Belarusians, out of a population of only ten million, protested in the streets against stolen elections. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans repeatedly participated in protests across the country too.

If their only enemies had been the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime or the brutal, ugly Belarusian regime, these protest movements might have won. But they were not fighting autocrats only at home; they were fighting autocrats around the world who control state companies in multiple countries and who can use them to make investment decisions worth billions of dollars. They were fighting regimes that can buy security cameras from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they were fighting against rulers who long ago hardened themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity.

The conviction, common among the most committed autocrats, that the outside world cannot touch them—that the views of other nations don’t matter and that no court of public opinion will ever judge them—is relatively recent. Once upon a time the leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the twentieth century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system, and they objected when it was criticized. They at least paid lip service to the aspirational system of norms and treaties set up after World War II, with its language about universal human rights, the laws of war, and the rule of law more generally. When the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev stood up in the United Nations and banged his shoe on the table, as he famously did in the General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate said that Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe had been “deprived of political and civil rights” and “swallowed up by the Soviet Union.” Khrushchev felt it was important to object. Even in the early part of this century, most dictatorships hid their true intentions behind elaborate, carefully manipulated performances of democracy.

Today, the members of Autocracy, Inc., no longer care if they or their countries are criticized or by whom. Some, like the leaders of Myanmar and Zimbabwe, don’t stand for anything beyond self-enrichment and the desire to remain in power, and so can’t be embarrassed. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela treat criticism from abroad as evidence of the vast imperial plot organized against them. The leaders of China and Russia have spent a decade disputing the human rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many around the world that the treaties and conventions on war and genocide—and concepts such as “civil liberties” and “the rule of law”—embody Western ideas that don’t apply to them.

Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats feel no shame about the use of open brutality. The Burmese junta does not hide the fact that it has murdered hundreds of protesters, including young teenagers, on the streets of Rangoon. The Zimbabwean regime harasses opposition candidates in plain sight during farcical fake elections. The Chinese government boasts about its destruction of the popular democracy movement in Hong Kong and its “anti-extremist” campaign—involving mass arrests and concentration camps for thousands of Muslim Uighurs—in Xinjiang. The Iranian regime does not conceal its violent repression of Iranian women.

At the extremes, such contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic has called the “Maduro model” of governance, after the current leader of Venezuela. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to see their country enter the category of failed states,” he says—accepting economic collapse, endemic violence, mass poverty, and international isolation if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Like Maduro, Presidents Bashir al-Assad in Syria and Lukashenko in Belarus seem entirely comfortable ruling over collapsed economies and societies. These kinds of regimes can be hard for the inhabitants of democracies to understand, because their primary goal is not to create prosperity or enhance the well-being of citizens. Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or—following in the footsteps of their predecessors—even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.

In the twentieth century, the autocratic world was no more unified than it is today. Communists and fascists went to war with each other. Sometimes communists fought communists too. But they did have common views about the political system that Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, referred to sneeringly as “bourgeois democracy,” which he called “restricted, truncated, false, and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.” “Pure democracy” he wrote, was “the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers.” As the leader of what was originally a tiny political faction, Lenin was, unsurprisingly, dismissive of the idea of free elections too: “Only scoundrels and simpletons can think that the proletariat must first win a majority in elections carried out under the yoke of the bourgeoisie…. This is the height of stupidity.”

The founders of fascism, although bitterly opposed to Lenin’s regime, were equally dismissive about their democratic opponents. Mussolini, the Italian leader whose movement coined the words “fascism” and “totalitarianism,” mocked liberal societies as weak and degenerate. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” he predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” He also flipped the definition of “democracy,” defining the Italian and German dictatorships as “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today.” Hitler’s critique of liberalism followed the same pattern. He wrote in Mein Kampf that parliamentary democracy is “one of the most serious signs of decay in mankind” and declared that it is not “individual freedom which is a sign of a higher level of culture but the restriction of individual freedom,” if carried out by a racially pure organization.

As early as 1929, Mao Zedong, who later became the dictator of the People’s Republic of China, also warned against what he called “ultra-democracy,” because “these ideas are utterly incompatible with the fighting tasks of the proletariat”—a statement later reproduced in his Little Red Book. One of the founding documents of the modern Myanmar regime, a 1962 memo titled “The Burmese Way to Socialism,” contains a tirade against elected legislatures: “Burma’s ‘parliamentary democracy’ has not only failed to serve our socialist development but also, due to its very inconsistencies, defects, weaknesses and loopholes, its abuses and the absence of a mature public opinion, lost sight of and deviated from the socialist aims.”

Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual founders of modern radical Islam, borrowed both the communist belief in a universal revolution and the fascist belief in the liberating power of violence. Like Hitler and Stalin, he argued that liberal ideas and modern commerce posed a threat to the creation of an ideal civilization—in this case, Islamic civilization. He built an ideology around opposition to democracy and individual rights, crafting a cult of destruction and death. The Iranian scholars and human rights activists Ladan and Roya Boroumand have written that Qutb imagined that an “ideologically self-conscious, vanguard minority” would lead a violent revolution in order to create an ideal society, “a classless one where the ‘selfish individual’ of liberal democracies would be banished and the ‘exploitation of man by man’ would be abolished. God alone would govern it through the implementation of Islamic law (shari’a).” This, they write, was “Leninism in Islamist dress.”

Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy. That enemy is us.

To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own, internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them. These include the notion that the law is a neutral force, not subject to the whims of politics; that courts and judges should be independent; that political opposition is legitimate; that the rights to speech and assembly can be guaranteed; and that there can be independent journalists and writers and thinkers who are capable of being critical of the ruling party or leader while at the same time remaining loyal to the state.

Autocrats hate these principles because they threaten their power. If judges and juries are independent, then they can hold rulers to account. If there is a genuinely free press, journalists can expose high-level theft and corruption. If the political system empowers citizens to influence the government, then citizens can eventually change the regime.

Their enmity toward the democratic world is not merely some form of traditional geopolitical competition, as “realists” and so many international relations strategists still believe. Their opposition rather has its roots in the very nature of the democratic political system, in words like “accountability,” “transparency,” and “democracy.” They hear that language coming from the democratic world, they hear the same language coming from their own dissidents, and they seek to destroy them both. Their own rhetoric makes this clear. In 2013, as Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo known, enigmatically, as Document Number Nine or, more formally, as the “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” listed the “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Western constitutional democracy led the list, followed by “universal values,” media independence and civic participation, as well as “nihilist” criticism of the Communist Party. The now-infamous document concluded that “Western forces hostile to China,” together with dissidents inside the country, “are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere.” The document went on to instruct party leaders to push back against these ideas and to control them in public spaces, above all on the internet, wherever they found them.

Since at least 2004, the Russians have focused on the same set of threats. In that year, Ukrainians staged a popular revolt, known as the Orange Revolution—the name came from the orange T-shirts and orange flags of the protesters—against a clumsy attempt to steal a presidential election. The angry intervention of the Ukrainian public into what was meant to have been a carefully manipulated, orchestrated victory for Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian candidate directly supported by Putin himself, profoundly unnerved the Russians, especially since a similarly unruly protest movement in Georgia had brought a pro-European politician, Mikheil Saakashvili, to power the year before. Shaken by those two events, Putin put the bogeyman of “color revolution” at the center of Russian propaganda. Civic protest movements are always described as “color revolutions” in Russia and as the work of outsiders. Popular leaders are always said to be foreign puppets. Anticorruption and pro-democracy slogans are linked to chaos and instability. In 2011, a year of mass protest against a manipulated election in Russia itself, Putin evoked the Orange Revolution with real bitterness, describing it as a “well-tested scheme for destabilizing society” and accusing the Russian opposition of “transferring this practice to Russian soil,” where he feared a similar popular uprising intended to remove him from power.

He was wrong; there was no “scheme” that was “transferred.” Public discontent in Russia, like public discontent in China, simply had nowhere to express itself except through street protest. Putin’s opponents had no legal means to remove him from power. Critics of the regime talk about democracy and human rights in Russia because it reflects their experience of injustice, and not only in Russia. The protests that led to democratic transitions in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, Myanmar, and Mexico; the “people’s revolutions” that washed across central and Eastern Europe in 1989; the Arab Spring in 2011; and the Hong Kong protests of 2019–20 were all begun by people who had experienced injustice at the hands of the state.

This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, the first full-scale kinetic battle in the struggle between Autocracy, Inc., and what might loosely be described as the democratic world. Russia plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo. The invasion was planned in that spirit. Putin hoped not only to acquire territory, but also to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer hold.

From the very first days of the war, Putin and the Russian security elite ostentatiously demonstrated their disdain for the language of human rights, their disregard for the laws of war, their scorn for international law and for treaties they themselves had signed. They arrested public officials and civic leaders: mayors, police officers, civil servants, school directors, journalists, artists, museum curators. They built torture chambers for civilians in most of the towns they occupied in southern and eastern Ukraine. They kidnapped thousands of children, ripping some away from their families, removing others from orphanages, gave them new “Russian” identities, and prevented them from returning home to Ukraine. They deliberately targeted emergency workers. Brushing aside the principles of territorial integrity that Russia had accepted in the United Nations Charter and the Helsinki Accords, Putin announced, in the summer of 2022, that he would annex territory that his army did not even control. Occupying forces stole and exported Ukrainian grain and “nationalized” Ukrainian factories and mines, handing them over to Russian businessmen close to Putin, making a mockery of international property law as well.

These acts were not collateral damage or accidental side effects of the war. They were part of a conscious plan to undermine the network of ideas, rules, and treaties that had been built into international law since 1945, to destroy the European order created after 1989, and, most important, to damage the influence and reputation of the United States and its democratic allies. “This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order,” said Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, soon after the war began. “The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.”

Putin thought that he would get away with these crimes and win quickly, both because he knew very little about modern Ukraine, which he believed would not defend itself, and because he expected the democracies to bow to his wishes. He assumed that the deep political divisions in the United States and Europe, some of which he had actively encouraged, would incapacitate the leaders. He reckoned that the European business community, some of which he had long courted, would demand a resumption of Russian trade.

Decisions taken in Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and Warsaw—not to mention Tokyo, Seoul, Ottawa, and Canberra—in the wake of the 2022 invasion initially proved Putin wrong. The democratic world quickly imposed harsh sanctions on Russia, froze Russian state assets, and removed Russian banks from international payment systems. A consortium of more than fifty countries provided arms, intelligence, and money to the Ukrainian government. Sweden and Finland, both countries that had maintained political neutrality for decades, decided to join NATO. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, declared his country had come to a Zeitenwende, a “turning point,” and agreed to contribute German weapons to a European war for the first time since 1945. The American president, Joe Biden, described the moment during a speech in Warsaw as a test for America, for Europe, and for the transatlantic alliance.

“Would we stand up for the sovereignty of nations?” Biden asked. “Would we stand up for the right of people to live free from naked aggression? Would we stand up for democracy?”

Yes, he concluded, to loud applause: “We would be strong. We would be united.”

But if Putin had underestimated the unity of the democratic world, the democracies also underestimated the scale of the challenge. Like the democracy activists of Venezuela or Belarus, they slowly learned that they were not merely fighting Russia in Ukraine. They were fighting Autocracy, Inc.

Xi Jinping had signaled his support for Russia’s illegal invasion before it began, issuing a joint statement with the Russian president on February 4, less than three weeks before the first bombs fell on Kyiv. Anticipating American and European outrage, the two leaders declared in advance their intention to ignore any criticism of Russian actions, and especially anything that resembled “interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.” Although Xi never shared the Russian leader’s obsession with the destruction of Ukraine, and although the Chinese seemed eager to avoid nuclear escalation, they refused to criticize Russia directly as the war dragged on. Instead, they profited from the new situation, bought Russian oil and gas at low prices, and quietly sold defense technology to Russia too.

They were not alone. As the war progressed, Iran exported thousands of lethal drones to Russia. North Korea supplied ammunition and missiles. Russian client states and friends in Africa, including Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Mali, and the Central African Republic, backed Russia at the UN and elsewhere. From the very early days of the war, Belarus allowed Russian troops to use its territory, including roads, railway lines, and military bases. Turkey, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, all illiberal states with transactional ties to the autocratic world, helped the Russian defense industry evade sanctions and import machine tools and electronics. India took advantage of lowered prices and bought Russian oil.

By the spring of 2023, Russian officials had become more ambitious. They began to discuss the creation of a Eurasian digital currency, perhaps based on blockchain technology, to replace the dollar and diminish American economic influence around the world. They also planned to deepen their relationship with China, to share research into artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. The ultimate purpose of all this activity was never in doubt. A leaked document describing these discussions summed them up by echoing Lavrov’s words: Russia should aim “to create a new world order.”

That goal is widely shared. Shored up by the technologies and tactics they copy from one another, by their common economic interests, and above all by their determination not to give up power, the autocracies believe that they are winning. That belief—where it came from, why it persists, how the democratic world originally helped consolidate it, and how we can now defeat it—is the subject of this book.

More, Chapter 1 excerpt here;
https://penguinrandomhouse.com/...autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum/
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/

Housing Sector Industrial Complex

Why Is Housing So Expensive?

The historical price growth seen in the U.S. housing market is a result of several factors. Political, economic, and other societal changes have combined to result in consistent price increases. Below are the main factors when asking why are houses so expensive:

1 - Lower Interest Rates
2 - Increase In Local Zoning Regulations
3 - Higher Construction Cost
4 - Lower Builder Confidence
5 - Changing Demographics
6 - Increase In Land Prices
7 - Government Subsidies
8 - Lower Supply
9 - Inflation
0 - Wages

https://www.fortunebuilders.com/why-are-houses-so-expensive/


Housing Market 2024: 7 Reasons It's Too Expensive To Buy a Home Right Now

1 - Interest Rates Are Still High
2 - The Cost of Real Estate Has Skyrocketed
3 - Increased Competition Could Lead to Consistently High Prices
4 - Investors Are Also Still Driving Up Prices
5 - Renting May Be Cheaper
6 - Inventory Is Limited and It’s Still a Seller’s Market
7 - Election Year Could Bring the Unknown

https://www.gobankingrates.com/investing/real-estate/reasons-its-too-expensive-to-buy-a-home-right-now/


Why is the Housing Market so Expensive?

Why are homes so expensive? A variety of factors have contributed to higher sale prices, including interest rates, low inventory and inflation.

Historical home values - “Homebuyers today are spending about 33 percent of their income to become homeowners,” says Clare Trapasso, executive news editor for Realtor-com. “That’s about double what they spent in 2012 and 2013, when the nation was coming out of the Great Recession.”

Supply and demand - Sean Roberts, CEO of Villa Homes, agrees. “Housing has been materially under-built for the past 15 years, especially entry-level homes,” he says. “New home construction has been focused primarily on larger and higher-priced homes, with very few entry-level, affordable residences prioritized. The lack of housing inventory has resulted in stark competition and driven prices to an all-time high and affordability to a multi-decade low.”

Why are homes so expensive?

House payment on 3.5% vs. 7% home loan rate - Another culprit? Mortgage interest rates, which have climbed quickly and significantly, making it harder than ever to afford a home purchase. The average rate for a 30-year mortgage was 7.36 percent as of August 23, according to Bankrate’s weekly national survey of large lenders. That’s the highest it’s been in more than 20 years. By comparison, at the end of August 2022 it was just 5.78 percent, and at the same time in 2021 it was a quaint-seeming 3.04 percent.

Wage and inflation growth vs. home-value growth - Another reason why homes are less affordable nowadays has to do with average wage growth versus home-value growth. When home prices rise faster than a buyer’s income does, homeownership gets further out of reach. High inflation makes matters even more difficult.

https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/expensive-housing/


The Impact of Large Companies on the Housing Market

The rise of corporate real estate has fundamentally changed the landscape of the housing market. Large companies are acquiring residential properties at higher rates, sometimes purchasing entire neighborhoods or apartment complexes. These properties are then managed by corporate entities, with tenants dealing directly with property management companies rather than individual landlords. These companies and others like them have transformed the housing market by consolidating ownership and introducing a new level of corporate management.

The Good and Bad of Corporate Ownership in the Housing Market

On the positive side, large companies often bring increased efficiency to property management. They have the resources and expertise to streamline operations, ensuring that properties are well-maintained and repairs are promptly addressed. Corporate ownership can provide access to resources that individual homeowners or small landlords may not have, such as professional property management services or bulk purchasing power for maintenance supplies.

However, there are also significant drawbacks, one being reduced affordability. As large companies acquire properties, they often raise rents to maximize profits, making it increasingly difficult for individuals and families to find affordable housing options. These activities can also lead to a lack of community involvement. Unlike individual homeowners or small landlords who may have a personal stake in the well-being of their community, corporations are primarily motivated by financial gain, often leading to a disconnect between the needs of residents and the priorities of the corporate owner.

The Impact on Local Communities and Neighborhoods

The presence of large companies in the housing market can transform a neighborhood’s character and its culture. When a large corporation acquires multiple properties in a neighborhood, it can lead to a homogenization of the area as properties are renovated or redeveloped to meet corporate standards. This can result in the loss of unique architectural styles or local businesses that contribute to the character of the neighborhood.

Corporate ownership can also lead to changes in community dynamics. In some cases, long-term residents may be displaced as properties are renovated or rents increase beyond their means. This can disrupt social networks and erode the sense of community that is often associated with stable neighborhoods. Corporate owners are likely to be less invested in addressing local concerns or participating in community initiatives compared to individual homeowners who have a personal stake in the well-being of their neighborhood.

https://www.heausa.org/the-impact-of-large-companies-on-the-housing-market/


Inside the Commodification of Residential Real Estate

If they have their way, U.S. housing — one of the country’s largest asset classes with a total value of more than $36 trillion — will become the most mechanized, institutionalized asset there is.

Already, houses are being assessed algorithmically, marketed remotely, bought and sold in bulk and increasingly bypassing the individual homebuyer to land straight in the hands of institutional-scale landlords and investors.

The nation’s largest homebuilders and landlords are investing in iBuyers, sell-side startups that specialize in rapidly buying up homes, and the relationship is beginning to influence the ways homes are built, marketed and sold. These iBuyers, in turn, are teaming up with other venture-backed startups offering add-on services such as insurance, title and escrow, and mortgages.

Meanwhile, a growing pack of buy-side startups is enabling more transactions by using tactics seen in the auto industry, such as cash offers, rent-to-own and trade-in programs. Those startups are also getting love from builders and investors.

Fueled by cheap debt, venture capital and enormous potential profits, the home — the most emotionally resonant purchase the average American makes in their lifetime and for decades a largely peer-to-peer asset — is on its way to becoming a truly tradeable and transparently valued commodity. The implications for investors, homeowners and renters are immense.

https://therealdeal.com/magazine/national-september-2021/its-a-house-not-a-home/


UN Report Lays Bare the Waste of Treating Homes as Commodities

Building homes to lie empty

The report warns about a rise in “dehumanised housing”: housing built as a high-yield commodity rather than for social use. A significant portion of investor-owned homes are simply left empty. In Melbourne, Australia, for example, 82,000 (or one fifth) of investor-owned units are unoccupied. In prime locations for wealthy foreign investors, such as the affluent boroughs of Chelsea and Kensington in the city of London, the number of vacant units increased by 40% between 2013 and 2014.

In such markets, the value of housing is no longer based on its social use. Properties are equally valuable regardless of whether they are vacant or occupied, so there is no pressure to ensure properties are lived in. They are built with the intention of lying empty and accumulating value, while at the same time, homelessness remains a persistent problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/feb/28/un-report-lays-bare-the-waste-of-treating-homes-as-commoditiesactrl


Is One Company to Blame for Soaring Rental Prices in the U.S.?

The FBI recently raided a major corporate landlord while investigating a rent price-fixing scheme. Here's what we know.

The surprise search was reportedly part of a criminal antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) into RealPage, a $9 billion software company that recommends rent raises on millions of housing units across the U.S.

Per RealPage blog posts, Atlanta, Georgia-based Cortland, which owned nearly 85,000 apartment units as of June 2022, used RealPage's algorithm to "ensure consistent vendor pricing for their communities from Arizona to Georgia."

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/realpage-rent-price-fixing-probe-escalates-with-fbi-raid/475109


5 Reasons Housing is so Expensive Right Now

As inflation, gas prices and other rising costs have strained people’s wallets, housing has continued to be a challenge for buyers and renters alike.

In the past year, the median home price has jumped more than 15 percent, according to data compiled from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. And renters are feeling similar pain: On average, rents in May were up 15 percent than a year before, according to Redfin, but in some cities, like Austin, Nashville, or Seattle, the rise was more than double that.

All of this is making finding and affording shelter increasingly difficult. And while it seems this has been exacerbated in recent months, housing prices have been steadily rising for a decade, pushing homeownership and affordable rentals out of reach for many.

Here’s a look at some of the factors contributing to the difficult housing market, and who is most affected.

Inflation and Mortgage Rates - In the first quarter of 2021, the median home price in the United States was $369,800, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve. By the first quarter of 2022, the median home price had jumped to $423,600. As inflation has been increasing, it means that anybody who’s lending money knows that they’re not going to really get the true value back unless they charge a higher [mortgage] rate because the money in the future is not going to be worth as much as money today when you have inflation.

Wages - Home prices have been rising since the bottom of the 2012 housing crash. Purchasing a home is out of reach for many people whose wages haven’t kept up with inflation and the general rise in prices. A February 2022 National Association of Realtors report found, a household earning between $75,000 and $100,000 per year could afford about half of active home listings.

Zoned Out - The best solution is for communities to build modest rental housing. But local zoning laws can pose significant barriers to that happening. There’s a phenomenon called NIMBYism, not in my backyard, where people who have already bought a home, a single family home, oftentimes don’t want their neighborhood to change”with the addition of smaller, more affordable homes.

The Big Picture - Housing in America has typically been used as way to build wealth. But in a housing crisis where some can’t find a home within their means or at all, there are generational financial and socio-economic consequences, too, experts say. If housing is the primary source of wealth and it’s passed down from generation to generation, then it really matters whether or not your grandparents were in a position to buy a home back in, say, like the 1950s or sixties before the Civil Rights Act was passed. These consequences for generational wealth can also exacerbate the racial wealth gap.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/5-reasons-housing-is-so-expensive-right-now


What Makes Housing So Expensive?

Because of the enormous costs of housing, it's worth understanding where, specifically, those costs come from, and what sort of interventions would be needed to reduce these costs. Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself. However, in dense urban areas — the places where building new housing is arguably most important — this changes, and high land prices driven by regulatory restrictions become the dominant factor.

People concerned about building more housing are right to pay attention to zoning and land use rules: over 100 million Americans live in places where most of the cost of residential property comes from the land itself. But they should not neglect the physical costs of building homes, which are overall more important. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, reducing these physical costs is far from straightforward.

The costs of a single-family home

We’ll look at housing costs chiefly through the lens of single-family homes, for a few reasons. Most housing in the US consists of single-family homes, so the costs of building them largely map to US housing costs generally. There’s also a large amount of data available on single-family home construction that doesn’t exist (or is much less accessible) for other types of housing. And most multi-family apartment buildings in the US will be built using the same basic technology, light-framed wood, used to build single-family homes, so much of what we learn about single-family costs, particularly on the construction side, will apply to multi-family apartments as well.

Hard costs - Hard costs are inherent to constructing the building itself: digging and pouring the foundations, building the framing, installing the HVAC system, and so on. Hard costs make up the majority of the costs of a new home, which is why I spend so much time thinking and writing about construction productivity. ...These costs can also be difficult to reduce, because people’s preferences about how various parts of the house look or feel can be surprisingly strong, and constrain the use of new systems.

Soft Costs - Soft costs include financing, permits, inspections, design work, and other administrative tasks not directly associated with building the physical home. According to the NAHB survey, soft costs make up the second largest portion of costs of a new home. Looking at a line item breakdown shows the difficulty of reducing costs, and the lack of straightforward paths for improvement.

Land Costs - The third major cost of building a new house is the cost of the land itself. Given how prominent regulatory restrictions on housing are in online discourse (zoning, NIMBY vs YIMBY, and so on), I think many people would be surprised that land only makes up around 20% of the cost of a new home.

Conclusion - The cost of housing comes from a variety of sources. In most cases, for both new construction and existing housing, the largest line item is the cost of constructing the home itself. For new construction this is on average 80% of the cost of a home (including hard and soft costs), while for existing construction it's still in the neighborhood of 60-70%.

It’s only in dense urban areas that the cost of land begins to dominate the cost of new housing, driven by regulatory and zoning restrictions that limit how much housing can be built in a given area. Another way of looking at it is that in the areas that we need housing the most, zoning and regulatory factors are responsible for the lion’s share of housing costs.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so-expensive


5 Reasons It's So Expensive to Build Housing in California

It’s not just the construction industry’s unwillingness or inability to change that’s driving high housing costs. Here are some other reasons why housing is so expensive to build in California:

Land is just more expensive in California than other places. In the Golden State, the cost of land is about 12% of total construction costs, compared to about 5% in other states.

Labor is also more expensive. One reason: After the Great Recession in 2008, a lot of construction workers left the industry, creating a shortage of skilled workers. To top it off, the construction boom that followed has far outpaced the growth in the construction industry. An analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley found that the number of permitted housing units grew by 430% between 2009 and 2018, while the number of workers grew only 32% during that same time period.

Density restrictions that limit how many apartments can be built on one lot also adds to the cost. As the size of a building increases, developers are able to take advantage of economies of scale, reducing the cost per apartment. But opposition to large affordable apartment buildings makes it difficult to get projects approved. Researchers at the Terner Center spoke to one developer who said, “It is impossible to overstate the continued resistance to new affordable development in most cities in California.”

The complexity of financing affordable housing projects is another big factor when it comes to developing housing for low-income people in particular. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that affordable housing projects in California had an average of six different funding sources, which contribute to a project’s “soft costs,” which includes things like legal fees, consultants, and appraisals. In California, soft costs added around 14% to the total cost of construction, compared to 7% nationwide. Another report from the Terner Center found that, on average, each additional source of funding on a project added $6,400 per unit in total development costs.

Development fees, which cities impose on developers to pay for things like street lighting, sidewalk improvements or sewage upgrades, also contribute to higher costs for housing. The same Terner Center report found that development fees on affordable housing developments added about $16,600 per unit.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11839409/5-reasons-its-so-expensive-to-build-housing-in-california


The Perfect Storm for Record-high Home Prices 

With US housing costs soaring due to increased demand and limited stock, the dream of home ownership or an affordable rental is becoming unreachable for many

To understand what’s going on, we have to understand how we got here.

There is no universal rule on what you can afford based on your income, since it’s dependent on location and your financing. But historically, the average home cost about 2.6 times the median income – a ratio real estate agents often cite as a threshold for affordability. So if your annual household income is $100,000, then this simple formula says you can afford a $260,000 home.

The simple explanation for why housing prices are so high is that more people want to buy homes, but there aren’t enough on the market. There are several causes of this, according to housing experts.

Millennials – born in the 1980s through the mid-1990s – are driving up demand because they’re now entering the housing market, after years of being delayed in buying their first homes.

Investors are buying an increasing number of properties, adding to the competition. In 2010, only about 10% of homes were bought by investors; now it’s approximately 20%, according to Redfin data.

Mortgage interest rates hit a record low during the pandemic, supercharging sales. But today rates are high – nearly 6.5%, up from less than 3% a few years ago – and many sellers would rather stay put than risk entering the market for a new home themselves, meaning inventory has cratered.

Existing homes also aren’t going on the market because baby boomers – born between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s – are ageing in place rather than moving into senior living arrangements.

Despite all this demand, new home construction hasn’t kept up. There was a shortage of about 2.3m homes by the end of 2022, an increase of about 500,000 since 2012...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/10/us-housing-market-prices-increasing


Packaging Your Commodities: Commodity Investing Through Residential Real Estate

The strategy that we advocate at the financial freedom report is to use the attributes of rental real estate to invest in the commodities used for home construction. By following this strategy, we gain ownership of valuable commodities such as wood, concrete, petroleum products, and other building materials with the advantage of leverage from the bank and tax advantages from the government. We affectionately refer to this phenomenon as ‘packaged commodity’ investing because the commodity products are packaged into a residential home instead of sitting in a warehouse. The culmination of this strategy lies in the fact that commodities packaged into real estate investments can be rented to tenants. As an investor, this allows you to purchase commodity products while outsourcing the interest payments to a tenant and hedge against inflation with fixed rate debt, while delaying the payment of taxes through a section 1031 exchange.

The way that this strategy ultimately plays out is that the packaged commodities produce rental income through your property while inflation pushes up the cost of materials and the cost of labor. Over time, these increases in construction costs will generate a ‘rising tide’ that drives up market values. The cost of construction for new homes is split between materials and labor roughly even, with a contractor profit margin right around eleven percent of the construction cost. As the cost of materials and the cost of labor rises, it is likely to drive increases in replacement cost since the contractors do not have the ability to absorb large cost increases into their profit margins over an extended period of time. In practice, this will result in cost increases being passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

Furthermore, it is important to consider the fact that many people need to be paid from the contractor profit margin on new construction. This makes home building an inherently volatile industry, since profit margins can expand or contract very dramatically, depending on the market cycle. Because of this, we advocate a strategy of purchasing attractive rental properties from somebody else instead of moving into the homebuilding business ourselves. This strategy allows us to ‘outsource’ the risks of new construction and focus on finding attractive deals.

Packaging Your Commodities: Commodity Investing Through Residential Real Estate
https://sites.libsyn.com/121459/june-18-2019-packaging-your-commodities-commodity-investing-through-residential-real-estate


Financialization of Housing

I believe there’s a huge difference between housing as a commodity and gold as a commodity. Gold is not a human right. Housing is.
- Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha, in documentary PUSH.

Housing and real estate markets worldwide have been transformed by global capital markets and financial excess. Known as the financialization of housing, the phenomenon occurs when housing is treated as a commodity—a vehicle for wealth and investment—rather than a social good.

With roots in the 2008 financial crisis, the impact of the shift from housing as a place to build a home to housing as an investment has been devastating. This includes millions of evictions as a result of foreclosures in countries most affected by the Global Economic Crisis.

In developing economies, informal settlements or long existing neighborhoods located in ‘prime land’ are subject to evictions and displacement to make way for speculative investment. Residents are often rendered homeless, replaced by luxury housing that often stands vacant.

Global real estate represents nearly 60 percent of the value of all global assets or $217 trillion USD—with residential real estate comprising $163 trillion USD or 75 percent. This represents more than twice the world’s total GDP.

The vast amount of wealth has left governments accountable to investors rather than to their international human rights obligations.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/financialization-housing


How Real Estate Became a Global Commodity

A New York Times investigation is looking at the purchase of New York real estate by wealthy buyers from other countries. There’s something about citizens of other countries buying land and homes in the U.S. that can be unsettling to some Americans. That goes for both the purchase of $15 million condos and the conversion of mortgages to hugely complicated paper assets sold on international markets.9

It’s also something that can seem inevitable. People with more money tend to buy valuable things, regardless of where in the world they are. But a 2006 paper by Tulane University sociologist Kevin Fox Gotham argues that the globalization of U.S. real estate is driven more by deliberate government policies than most people realize. Gotham was writing at the height of the real estate bubble. Now that we know about the implosion of mortgage-backed securities that followed, and the disastrous consequences for the global economy, there are even more reasons to be interested in his argument.

Gotham notes that all kinds of cross-border exchange depend on “an elaborate and complex set of rules, regulations, and institutions that are established by the state.” Governments, in other words, make it possible for a home to become an impersonal asset ripe for investment by anyone with money, anywhere in the world.

Even in an economy where just about anything can be bought and sold, real estate stands out as something different. Houses and apartment buildings can’t be shipped overseas, of course, and they’re rarely standardized like widgets in a factory. If you’re buying a house for yourself, you’ll probably spend time looking around the rooms, checking the pipes for rust, and finding out about the local schools.

https://daily.jstor.org/how-real-estate-became-a-global-commodity/


The Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3601 et seq., prohibits discrimination by direct providers of housing, such as landlords and real estate companies as well as other entities, such as municipalities, banks or other lending institutions and homeowners insurance companies whose discriminatory practices make housing unavailable to persons because of:

race or color
religion
sex
national origin
familial status, or
disability.

The Fair Housing Act
https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-1

https://nationalfairhousing.org/

Why Housing Prices Are Getting More Expensive
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/09/why-housing-prices-are-getting-more-expensive/


First Man: The New Story Of Our Origins

Thirty million years ago a new group of creatures appeared on planet Earth: the great apes. From their ranks arose one family, gifted with exceptional skills: our protagonists.

This family would change the face of our world forever.

Moving upright in the trees, they were then lords of the canopy, reigning supreme over limitless forests stretching from Europe to Asia. They founded a new social way of life. They created a language. They invented education as a way of passing on knowledge to their children.

But the day came when the forest no longer sufficed to feed them. Little by little, they ventured onto the ground where they developed hunting skills, and tools to improve their skills.

This early family expanded in number, producing the need to become collectively organized. Politics reared its head. Power structures and warfare soon followed.

Some now decided to risk liberating themselves for good from the world of the trees.

Our ancestors were hungry for freedom. But on the savannah, the predators were absolute kings. So our ancestors invented weapons. And, for the first time, challenged the supremacy of the big cats. A new era had begun.

Man’s early ancestors set off to conquer the world, to explore the unknown, to adapt to every environment. And one day, to conquer fire – a discovery that made them invincible.

They built shelters. They transformed their environment. But still this did not slake their thirst for more. They sought to fathom Nature’s mysteries. They invented stories to explain the inexplicable. Now, they are Men.

Here, for the very first time in television history, is the saga of our origins, told through the story of one single family – an epic journey upon which the latest scientific discoveries shine an exciting new light.

DIRECTOR: Jérôme Guiot, Frédéric Fougea 

Autocracy, Inc - The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

Dictators are Less Interested in Ideological Alliances and More Interested in Helping Each Other Stay Powerful We think w...