Posted on 01/27/2021 12:46:25 PM PST by Kevmo
I'm on my phone so I cannot excerpt this news item.
The thing is, I was THERE right in the middle of it, trying to show up to a court date in a dispute between me and my landlord.
It was kind of fascinating, and there was always the hint of violence in the air. For instance, some teenage kid wandered through the crowd carrying a car camshaft. Looked like it could be a serious deadly weapon. He was surrounded by sheriff's deputies and escorted off the property.
I was interviewed by 4 major news organizations, KQED, San Jose Mercury News, The Chronicle, and KPIX.
I steered some of them to my website, www.12smartprecariat.org but they probably won't do much with that information.
That wasn't a term I had heard of before, but it had all the stuff I wanted in a used bike so I bought it. I asked them , "why do you call it a Mayor's Bike"? Is that some new bike platform?
They said it was because Mayor Sam Lucardo had gone down to their store and donated/sold his bike to them, and they hadn't even finished cleaning it up and pricing it when I bought it.
I'm riding around on the Mayor's Bike.
Stay safe.
Most of the rental properties I know about...I’m a landlord...are mortgaged. If I didn’t get paid for several months, the bank would take them from me. Banks get to evict. At least here, they do. Banks have WAY more sway with the courts and the sheriff’s than do us lowly landlords. There is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay. If it’s the landlord, I can tell you that rental will be off the market for about a year. When it is sold it will be at a fraction of its original value and it will be trashed. Will new people buy it and fix it up, knowing they will be in the negative for several years and that at any moment the government might decide that they can’t evict non paying renters?
The reason the economy was so bad under Obama was the GM debacle. That took over thirty trillion dollars, corporate and private, out of the market. No one will invest when the rules in place for centuries can be changed by an executive order. This is partly why Trump’s years were so good.
Like so many other things, these shut downs have been gifts to the bankers.
So, is this being classified as a ‘riot’ or ‘insurrection’? Is there ‘storming’ going on?
What was the GM debacle?
I left because we were being rained on. Those of us who had ACTUAL bizness with the court were shunted into the rain, while the demonstraters had shelter from the rain.
I did see several attempts on the part of the organisers to keep it peaceful.
It was kind of surreal.
I left before it was declared an unlawful assembly.
That’s probably why the officers corralled us onto an area at the left, out in the rain.
That will make it easier for government entities to end up owning the property
“What was the GM debacle?”
During the Obama administration, GM wanted to declare bankruptcy. They were in bad financial condition and bankruptcy would have released them from onerous union contracts, allowed them to restructure debt and continue business as a smaller entity. Obama would not let them do that. Instead, Obama, ignoring the law and two centuries of common practice, made the “secured” bond holders take a “haircut” where they lost the better part of their money. The government and the unions ended up owning GM. The unions had zero legitimate financial interest in the ownership of GM. This was pure politics.
As a result, investors, both corporate and private, pulled their money out of the market. An estimated thirty trillion dollars left the economy overnight. To restart the stalled economy Obama doubled the money supply. It didn’t work, so he doubled it again. Then, they did something called “quantitative easing” which simply means printing money. Every month for several years the Fed added another 87 billion dollars to the money supply. The economy didn’t move. What did happen was the stock market went up. The companies did not increase in value, that was inflation due to the excess money. (We know these policies don’t work. They have been tried over and over and they have never worked. This is why Japan had the “lost decade” which has turned into the lost three decades. The other cause of failure is businesses want certainty. If the government could fire their CEO and take over the company and even give part of it to the employees, then there is no certainty. Trump reestablished the rule of law. That’s what brought the economy back online.)
Then, when Obama left office all of the money that had been taken out of the economy came flooding back. The normal investment that would have been made during Obama’s eight years was being made, plus the natural growth, plus Trump changed the tax laws so that billions of dollars kept overseas came back and it was invested. Now all that seems like a lot, and it is, but the drag on the economy is all the extra money Obama magicked into existence. That’s why the cost of everything is so high now.
This is the short answer to your question. In the future, textbooks will be written about this disaster.
“Like so many other things, these shut downs have been gifts to the bankers.”
Actually, no. Banks do not want to end up owning houses. They are a sure-fire money loosers. Often, it takes years to return the houses to the marketplace, because, as long as the banks own them, they don’t have to take the write-down on their books. In other words, if the former property owners owed, say, $100k, and the house was valued at $200k, the bank shows assets on that house of $200k. But almost all bank sales are fire sales. I have bought properties whose original cost was, say $200k, for as little as $60k, or, even $40k. And, at that, I have to put in anywhere from $20-30k to restore them to something you can rent.
On average, by the time a bank takes back a property, it’s in bad shape. I bought one that had been a drug house and was filled with used condoms, needles and other paraphernalia. The power and water had been shut off so the people living there had repurposed one bedroom as the bathroom. On top of that, there was a major roof leak and I had to rebuild part of the roof, a room and the floor. Incidentally, it was summertime and none of the guys I usually use for assistance would clean the “bathroom.” I did that myself. On the good side, I got a 1500 square foot house on a gorgeous five acre wooded lot way back in a neighborhood of similar lots. It has been my best earner as the people I rent it there always stay long, long times.
People like to dump on banks. Believe me, banks will work really hard not to take back your property. I know of cases where someone has lived in a really nice house for several years paying nothing. As long as they keep up the property, the bank didn’t foreclose. Why? Generally, it has to do with the bank’s bookkeeping. There are an amazing number of bad loans in NYC that the banks are not foreclosing on. If they do, it will cause the property values to go down and when a homeowner goes negative...owes more than it’s “worth,” they abandon the property. I think the banks call them “zombie properties.”
Sounds.... complicated.
Perhaps you should call it the Quantitative Easing debacle instead.
It was classified as an unlawful assembly and the designated arrestees (believe me, that was the exact term the organizers were using) were arrested.
I left prior to that, since they shunted US into the rain but the protesters got to stay sheltered from the rain.
Last I heard was that Judge Erik Johnson postponed all remaining hearings. Hopefully he got some kind of wakeup call today but freepers are bound to disagree.
Have you wondered why, for the most part, American auto manufacturers are no longer producing passenger cars? It’s because Obama would not let GM declare bankruptcy. If they had, they could have renegotiated the ridiculous benefits the UAW has. That would have lowered their fixed costs and allowed them to offer the same “content” that foreign competitors offer. A sixty thousand dollar American car is nowhere near the luxury of a similarly priced foreign car. If GM and Chrysler had renegotiated, then Ford would have similarly benefited. Some 33% of the purchase price of an American made vehicle goes directly to benefits for people who might not have worked at those manufacturers for thirty or more years. You title the car and you might as well just throw that much money out the window. It’s a huge weight to keep hauling around. I would never buy an American car manufacturer’s stock.
I have been a landlord in the valley for 30 years.
Selecting tenants is the most important skill you can acquire when renting real estate, IMHO
Still make mistakes from time to time, but not often.
Better to have ‘no renter’ than a ‘bad renter’...
You wanna talk about cars then open a thread about cars. This thread is about evictions and demonstrations.
Consider selling off slices of your property for a profit, converting renters into buyers but retaining control of the public areas of the property.
https://andysirkin.com/tenancy-in-common-tic/
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