"The rent's too high"

Sat Jan 7 14:26:11 CST 2017

Young men inherit a mythology with many self evident reasons to believe it, of colonize or be colonized. It is an invitation to both a collective and individual identity(surveyor for the royals, millionaire, captain of industry, soldier against fascism, against terrorism, against empire, against the rival football teams) .  Young men are frequently escapists or dream of beating the system in some other way, making the big score, but both the town clerk, the farmer, and the gambler must pay the rent or the mortgage, so the structure of the myth remains embedded. All political and many ecological questions revolve around this inherited myth and structure and the legitimacy of its claims of  ownership. Much of Gravity’s Rainbow circles around who will own Slothrop, to whom will he give allegiance, pay tribute. His inclination to be unowned, unaligned, leads him toward an identity with the animal, away from abstractions, toward survival in nature.
   Many native pre industrial people had  an understanding of  nature that made them unable to see land or people as parcels to be owned and paid for via systems of debt. Some societies try to share and ease individual stress and debt by a more collective approach to ownership. It seems to me that Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Canadians have continued to work hard and got a rather better deal with their versions of democratic socialism on school, vacations and health care than the US citizens, but to each his own.  
  Crocker Fenway seems to know that ownership is just a claim, debt is just pieces of paper backed by hired guns.  The big short as a fantasy of making money on a collapse was a classic american rogue smart guy interpretation that had a nonsense aspect, but the collapse was not nonsense.  It was a revelation of how phony those pieces of paper can be. As to real estate not being a market, sounds like an indefensible premise to me.

 Regardless of revolutionary dreams,  the wisdom of alternative cultures, or humane morals, Imperial capitalism prevails, imperiled only by its own commodification of the very ecosytem of life. The wars are increasingly wars on nature, the oceans die, forests die, water reservoirs of ice and snow melt into the air and oceans, aquifers sink, poisons proliferate,   the wars are unaccompanied by healing and regeneration.  A serious philosophical accomodation to biology is needed, but it is much easier just to be angry, greedy  or resigned and gun to get your piece of the pie. Maybe more atomic weapons will help.

> On Jan 7, 2017, at 10:11 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> So rent so you don't need to pay property taxes? Of course the
> landlord will pay them with the rents she collects. Taxes and Death
> are inescapable. Even Houdini paid. Someone must pay. The question is,
> who pays and how much, and what are the taxes collect for and spent
> on. On average American pay $3000/year in property taxes. Property
> taxes are often based on a complex calculation that takes as its
> largest factor the value of the property so in some US states, like
> NY, the average is much higher. As with all other taxes, a simple
> measures shows that the rich pay most of the taxes. Of course, a
> simple measure doesn't tell us much of anything. Most Americans spend
> an unsustainable figure on "rent" (the cost of owning a home is made
> equivalent to rent).
> 
> Real Estate, people in American have been conditioned to believe, is
> an investment. It is not unless you rent it or lease it or generate
> cash flows from it. The housing markets in the US have provided plenty
> of anecdotal evidence for investing in real estate, but owning a home
> is not an investment and, although we can all name hundreds of people
> who made a fortune owning a home in the US, even after tax incentive,
> federal subsidies, appreciation...etc., home ownership doesn't keep
> pace with inflation. In other words, it's not an investment. That
> said, owning a home is not a rational or economic idea anyway and the
> market itself is completely irrational. The Big Short film is
> astounding nonsense because you can't really short the  real estate
> market. That you can't short, for example, the high end NYC bubble
> right now, or the bubble in Miami or San Francisco is one reason why
> the real estate market is not a market at all.
> 
> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 8:53 AM, Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I didn't see this mentioned here so I'll insert it.
>> 
>> Property taxes are another form of rent. Even when the property is owned
>> 'free and clear' and the landlord or banker is vanquished, property taxes
>> come due regularly with an unsentimental threat to pay or face confiscation.
>> 
>> I digress...
>> 
>> I used to spend a lot of time  checking out "homesteader" holdings when I
>> was younger. I was always impressed by how thoroughly they were reducing the
>> actual cash needed for survival. Most back-to-the-landers (better
>> description) were well aware that they had to pull together enough cash each
>> year to pay their taxes or they'd lose their holdings. Usually this meant
>> some sort of  off-the-land seasonal employment (fruit picking or Christmas
>> retail) but often it meant planting fine lumber trees which would  be sold
>> off to lumber companies a tree at a time to make ends meet when the land
>> holder got too old or too crotchety to bring in the cash. The new plagues of
>> boring beetles in the US must be upsetting a lot of best-laid-plans
>> coast-to-coast nowadays.(Didja know that when I started non-toxic farming 30
>> years ago that there were locust fence posts in some fence lines that had
>> been standing for nearly a hundred years?Traditionally, locust was so
>> innately rot-proof that it outlasted other hardwood fence posts at a ratio
>> of about 4 to 1 (If your posts were oak you'd replace them 4 times before
>> you would have had to replace a locust post.) Now, thanks to chaos in the
>> natural order (here in WV most likely caused by precipitation of toxic
>> discharges of smoke stacks somewhere in the mid-West acidifying the soils
>> enough to disrupt the primordial soil foodweb even on 'virgin soils' enough
>> that entropy of a system that had maintained itself through millennia
>> ensued) In the past dozen years more and more locusts are infected with a
>> 'heartwood fungus' that causes the locust to produce a wood that is
>> essentially not rot resistant at all and certainly doesn't hold in the soil
>> any longer than a good oak post.
>> 
>> -Allan in WV
>> 
>> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 8:18 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> :-)
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 7:47 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Except for yours which is being raised.
>>>> 
>>>> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 7:33 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Every time I see this goddamn discussion thread re-appear in my inbox,
>>>>> I get nervous all over again.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Jeez with the RENT crap already!
>>>>> 
>>>>> ;-)
>>>>> 
>>>>> YOPJ
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 6:35 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> Or even, thinking of the lifelong power/ domination theme, all about
>>>>>> "
>>>>>> structured subjugation", a phrase I like learned in an essay on
>>>>>> globalization, which is not, or not just, " everything solid melting
>>>>>> into
>>>>>> air" these days, something Pynchon also knew in his (only)
>>>>>> pre-modernity
>>>>>> novel, Mason& Dixon.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On Jan 7, 2017, at 1:33 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Isn’t the relationship of landlord to renter a rather obvious mirror
>>>>>>> of
>>>>>>> the more universal Pyncon theme of colonizer and colonized?
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Can the relationship between renters and landlords be extrapolated
>>>>>>>> into a broader existential dynamic? It's worth a thought.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Chase Carnot
>>>>>>>>> <chase.carnot at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> "[...] Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. ‘A bit late for
>>>>>>>>> that,
>>>>>>>>> Mr.
>>>>>>>>> Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first
>>>>>>>>> time
>>>>>>>>> they pay
>>>>>>>>> anybody rent.’"
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> When I saw PT Anderson's IV, this line jumped at me for the first
>>>>>>>>> time. In
>>>>>>>>> the novel, it must have just washed over me. Anyway, I've been
>>>>>>>>> thinking
>>>>>>>>> about diving back into the novel sometime soon with an eye toward
>>>>>>>>> rent as a
>>>>>>>>> central theme. I felt vindicated when a reading app I use cropped
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> IV
>>>>>>>>> 'Last Supper' poster... it left the center...
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> https://goo.gl/photos/zaJops8hNHUrju2u6
>>>>>>>> -
>>>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> -
>>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>> -
>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> 
>> 
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l