stabby_cicada
Preach.
Housing is a human right.
Private land ownership violates that human right.
All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.
We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.
But we are a long way from implementing that.
It boggles my mind how people still insist there’s a “free market” in rent when we have proof of giant property management corporations colluding nationwide to raise rents.
This shit is why we need rent control.
Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don’t survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.
It’s more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.
I’m certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it’s mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In “hard times” the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he’s in charge of the army’s salary.
Seitan is the first that comes to mind.
That factoid is vastly misinterpreted. In particular, the term “responsible for” does not mean “emitted”.
The study it’s referencing studied only fossil fuel producers. And it credited all emissions from anyone who burned fuel from that producer to that producer. So if I buy a tank of gas from Chevron and burn it, my emissions are credited to Chevron for purposes of that study.
The study is not saying that 100 companies emit 71% of global emissions. It’s saying that 100 companies produce 71% of the fossil fuels used globally.
A whole lot of people hate this notion because it essentially frames it as the consumer’s fault, but at the end of the day it kind of is.
Absolutely. Producers and consumers have joint responsibility for getting us where we are. Climate action requires joint action by consumers and by (or, more likely, against) producers.
Because politicians follow the money. And they understand voters follow the money. So polls may show that legislation against fossil fuel companies is popular. But politicians look at all the gas consumers buy and ask themselves “what will voters do if we pass fossil fuel legislation and gas gets more expensive”? And then they decide not to pass fossil fuel legislation, because even if voters say they want fossil fuel legislation they know how the voters will respond if that legislation makes their consumption habits more expensive.
It’s a lot easier to pass higher gas taxes in cities where 90% of residents take public transit to work than in cities where 5% do.
I was ranting in a different thread about the “discourses of delay” that corporate and right-wing propagandists use to delay climate action. And the fascinating thing is, the idea that only individual consumption matters (the BP carbon footprint ad campaign) and the idea that only the actions of corporations matter (a typical American activist attitude) are both industry propaganda. The former is meant to discourage political action. The latter is meant to discourage individual action. And by framing it as one against the other, propagandists discourage us from taking effective action on either.
We can do both. We have to do both.
