Comment on Rent is theft
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days agoEven in the case of a break even mortgage situation the meme is still true, it’s just the rich assholes getting paid for doing nothing are the banks and holders of mortgage backed securities.
wampus@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
And if the person’s got their mortgage from a Credit Union… then its… all those evil working class credit union members profiting?
The trope that landlords are all evil, profiteering off of the poor, is an over-simplification / stupid stereo-type. Yes, there are shitty landlords. Yes, there are more corporations involved in renting places these days, and those corps are pretty exploitative. But there are lots of landlords who are just regular locals looking to try and gain some financial security.
Stereotyping an entire demographic of people based on some negative trait of a particular subset of that demographic is not helpful. It’s not helpful when it’s done to portray racial minorities in a broadly negative way, nor is it helpful when its done to portray landlords in a broadly negative way.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
A very small portion of mortgages are owned by credit unions, and the income of those mortgages are mostly going to a small percentage of wealthy members as opposed to the average working class person with 10k in a savings account earning 0.5% APY
The trope that slaveholders are all evil, profiteering off of the slaves, is an over-simplification / stupid stereo-type. Yes, there are shitty slaveholders. Yes, there are more planter aristocrats involved in slavery these days, and those planters are pretty exploitative. But there are lots of slaveholders who are just regular locals looking to try and gain some financial security.
Stereotyping an entire demographic of people based on some negative trait of a particular subset of that demographic is not helpful. It’s not helpful when it’s done to portray racial minorities in a broadly negative way, nor is it helpful when its done to portray slaveholders in a broadly negative way.
wampus@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Have you worked in the industry, or are you basing all this on bullshit and memes you’ve done “self research” on?
Cause I’ve been adjacent to the CU industry for decades, and your points are just irrelevant. Like your comment about wealthy members is baseless in my view, as the vast majority of CUs I’ve audited have policies that prohibit member wealth concentration – ie. they actually CAP how much money a person can have, and tell that person to take their money elsewhere if they go over that cap. This is done in part because the lending practice at CUs isn’t like that at Banks, they can’t easily leverage things like stock market share sales – it’s risk management at all CUs to have caps, enforced by most regulators. Put slightly differently: If you only have Peter Thiel and his buddies as customers at SVB, and they all pull their money at once, you’re fucked. CUs have been aware of that risk, and mitigating it, for decades. And because the ultra-wealthy can’t have that sort of leverage, they typically don’t tend to use CUs.
You may not like loans / credit. That doesn’t make the process of loans/credit inherently slaveholder/slave, and implying as such is just ridiculously childish. You aren’t going to convince any sane adult with that sort of semantic stupidity.
Again, the approach of this trope to villianize all landlords, is not that dissimilar to the sorts of things you see coming out of racist shops. Treating any demographic as a monolith is prejudice.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I haven’t worked in the industry but I’ve been a member of a credit union for enough years to see that as my wealth goes up, so do my relative returns. The basic savings account earns 0.05% , you have to have more invested to get higher APY. To get the top tier, as far as I know, high yield rate of 3.75% you need to have $25,000 invested there. The median savings account in the US is around $8,000. So 10 people each with $100,000 are getting more than 100 people with $10,000.
Yes credit unions may not be taking top 0.1% billionaire money, but they’re definitely taking top 20% money, which is where the real class divide in the US is at. The top 20% own over 70% of the nations wealth. This combined with the increased rates I mentioned above mean that this top 20% is getting a majority of the investment income, even from credit unions.
The difference between a slaveholder and a landlord is one of magnitude not kind. Both demand labor from someone without a claim to property to someone with a claim to property, not for the labor they put into producing that property, but simply because they own that property. In slavery that property is the slaves body, for a landlord it is the house a person lives in. A landlord demands a smaller share of the person’s labor, 30% vs 100% but that’s just a difference of magnitude. You can mystify that relationship all you want through a bunch of third parties and middle men but fundamentally that is what landlording is, exploitation of the propertyless by the propertied. A small portion of that money going to slightly less wealthy people doesn’t change the exploitative nature of the system.
So I guess one of the most influential and consequential sociologists and economists of all time isn’t a sane adult because he compared capitalism to slavery
Read any Communist or anarchist theory and it will be full of comparisons between capitalism and slavery with analysis of the similarities and differences of the coercive nature of both.
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Are you actually this obtuse or is this a bad faith argument?
wampus@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
It’s pointing out situations where the trope/stereotype falls apart. And your response is basically a troll response, so I’ll offer this one reply and then ignore you.
I likely know more about how small credit unions operate than you do, I also likely have more familiarity with regular “mom and pop” type landlords than you do, given that I’ve worked in the Credit Union industry in the past, and have audited many of those loans. Typically, CU board of directors don’t get paid shit compared to banks, the CEOs typically don’t earn many multiples more than the rank and file employees (unlike banks), their profits generally go back to the membership, though those “profits” are not the target of most of those orgs, as the people they’d be profiting off of are their bosses (in that their Boards are elected from the membership – so you piss off members with fees, they just go on the board and direct you to remove / reduce those fees). So for example, in Canada, CU members generally enjoy no-ding ATM withdrawls from all Credit Union owned machines – there’s a whole campaign about ‘ding free’ banking with CUs. The board of most CUs are often just working class people, with a few specific ‘professional’ types required by regulators to ensure things like accounting oversight.
People often default to thinking banks are the only option for mortgages. They’re not. Credit Unions provide mortgages to large segments of the population, and they’re cooperative organisations in structure – which is in pretty good alignment with progressive ideals.
It’s not a bad faith argument to point out stereotyping in these sorts of threads. Just like it isn’t bad faith to point out when a racist post is made about a visible minority.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 days ago
People who believe in idealizes theory don’t care about facts or a complex reality.
They just think that stuff is fake or lies and will be swept away but the glory of the revolution when all the evil awful people own property get it stolen from them and it’s handed out to the TRULY DESERVING people, like themselves.
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
No, it’s misdirection – where the landlord got their money from doesn’t make a whit of difference
GaMEChld@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, I mean I rent out my upstairs which is a legal accessory apartment in an owner occupied dwelling. I’ve had people arguing with me that I’m evil and should throw out my tenants or something or I have no idea what they think is reasonable. Because they are not reasonable, they are just mad and want to blame just like humans are apt to do.
FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Why don’t you rent it at exactly the cost of maintenance?
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
ROFLMAO this guy literally just equated landlords with minorities. Oh won’t someone think of the poor landlords!