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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread |
It’s not a problem out in the countryside. House prices vary wildly. It’s mainly a city problem that has been exacerbated by AirBnb.
I’ll also point out that it seems wrong to me to be fine with conglomerates owning lots of apartment buildings but being upset that some top 5%’ers are buying houses and renting them out on AirBnb in cities. Is the problem with HGTV and aspirational real estate empires that some people have a couple houses or is it something more complicated than that?
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It's getting harder and hard to avoid the reality that the Mueller report and his investigation into Trump was a fraud. There's now a second confirmed episode (after the Dowd VM) of Mueller misrepresenting facts in his report so as to unethically bolster the legitimacy of the prosecution's case. John Solomon has a new article showing that Konstantin Kilimnik, a central figure in Mueller's report, is not tied to Russian intelligence as Mueller represents. Instead, he's tied Western intelligence.
In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
The incomplete portrayal of Kilimnik is so important to Mueller’s overall narrative that it is raised in the opening of his report. “The FBI assesses” Kilimnik “to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Mueller’s team wrote on Page 6, putting a sinister light on every contact Kilimnik had with Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.
What it doesn’t state is that Kilimnik was a “sensitive” intelligence source for State going back to at least 2013 while he was still working for Manafort, according to FBI and State Department memos I reviewed.
Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded.
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
“Purcell described what he considered an unusual level of discretion that was taken with handling Kilimnik,” states one FBI interview report that I reviewed. “Normally the head of the political section would not handle sources, but Kasanof informed Purcell that KILIMNIK was a sensitive source.”
Purcell told the FBI that Kilimnik provided “detailed information about OB (Ukraine’s opposition bloc) inner workings” that sometimes was so valuable it was forwarded immediately to the ambassador. Purcell learned that other Western governments relied on Kilimnik as a source, too.
“One time, in a meeting with the Italian embassy, Purcell heard the Italian ambassador echo a talking point that was strikingly familiar to the point Kilimnik had shared with Purcell,” the FBI report states.
Kasanof, who preceded Purcell as the U.S. Embassy political officer, told the FBI he knew Kilimnik worked for Manafort’s lobbying firm and the administration of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose Party of Regions hired Manafort’s firm.
Kasanof described Kilimnik as one of the few reliable insiders the U.S. Embassy had informing on Yanukovych. Kilimnik began his relationship as an informant with the U.S. deputy chief of mission in 2012–13, before being handed off to the embassy’s political office, the records suggest.
“Kilimnik was one of the only people within the administration who was willing to talk to USEMB,” referring to the U.S. Embassy, and he “provided information about the inner workings of Yanukovych’s administration,” Kasanof told the FBI agents.
“Kasanof met with Kilimnik at least bi-weekly and occasionally multiple times in the same week,” always outside the embassy to avoid detection, the FBI wrote. “Kasanof allowed Kilimnik to take the lead on operational security” for their meetings.
State officials told the FBI that although Kilimnik had Ukrainian and Russian residences, he did not appear to hold any allegiance to Moscow and was critical of Russia’s invasion of the Crimean territory of Ukraine.
“Most sources of information in Ukraine were slanted in one direction or another,” Kasanof told agents. “Kilimnik came across as less slanted than others.”
“Kilimnik was flabbergasted at the Russian invasion of Crimea,” the FBI added, summarizing Kasanof’s interview with agents.
Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Kasanof’s and Purcell’s interviews are corroborated by scores of State Department emails I reviewed that contain regular intelligence from Kilimnik on happenings inside the Yanukovych administration, the Crimea conflict and Ukrainian and Russian politics. For example, the memos show Kilimnik provided real-time intelligence on everything from whose star in the administration was rising or falling to efforts at stuffing ballot boxes in Ukrainian elections.
Those emails raise further doubt about the Mueller report’s portrayal of Kilimnik as a Russian agent. They show Kilimnik was allowed to visit the United States twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, a clear sign he wasn’t flagged in visa databases as a foreign intelligence threat.
The emails also show how misleading, by omission, the Mueller report’s public portrayal of Kilimnik turns out to be.
For instance, the report makes a big deal about Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort in August 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.
By that time, Manafort had served as Trump’s campaign chairman for several months but was about to resign because of a growing controversy about the millions of dollars Manafort accepted as a foreign lobbyist for Yanukovych’s party.
Specifically, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington. Kasanof, his former handler at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, had been promoted to a top policy position at State, and the two met for dinner on May 5, 2016.
The day after the dinner, Kilimnik sent an email to Kasanof’s official State email address recounting the peace plan they had discussed the night before.
Russia wanted “a quick settlement” to get “Ukraine out of the way and get rid of sanctions and move to economic stuff they are interested in,” Kilimnik wrote Kasanof. The email offered eight bullet points for the peace plan — starting with a ceasefire, a law creating economic recovery zones to rebuild war-torn Ukrainian regions, and a “presidential decree on amnesty” for anyone involved in the conflict on both sides.
Kilimnik also provided a valuable piece of intelligence, stating that the old Yanukovych political party aligned with Russia was dead. “Party of Regions cannot be reincarnated. It is over,” he wrote, deriding as “stupid” a Russian-backed politician who wanted to restart the party.
Kasanof replied the next day that, although he was skeptical of some of the intelligence on Russian intentions, it was “very important for us to know.”
He thanked Kilimnik for the detailed plan and added, “I passed the info to my bosses, who are chewing it over.” Kasanof told the FBI that he believed he sent Kilimnik’s peace plan to two senior State officials, including Victoria Nuland, President Obama’s assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs.
So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”
Lest you wonder, the documents I reviewed included evidence that Kasanof’s interview with the FBI and Kilimnik’s emails to State about the peace plan were in Mueller’s possession by early 2018, more than a year before the final report.
Officials for the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department and Mueller’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Kilimnik did not respond to an email seeking comment but, in an email last month to The Washington Post, he slammed the Mueller report’s “made-up narrative” about him. “I have no ties to Russian or, for that matter, any intelligence operation,” he wrote.
Kilimnik holds Ukrainian and Russian citizenship, served in the Soviet military, attended a prestigious Russian language academy and had contacts with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. So it is likely he had contacts over the years with Russian intelligence figures. There also is evidence Kilimnik left the U.S.-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in 2005 because of concerns about his past connections to Russia, though at least one IRI witness disputed that evidence to the FBI, the memos show.
Yet, omitting his extensive, trusted assistance to the State Department seems inexplicable.
If Mueller’s team can cast such a misleading portrayal of Kilimnik, however, it begs the question of what else might be incorrect or omitted in the report.
Attorney General William Barr has said some of the Mueller report’s legal reasoning conflicts with Justice Department policies. And former Trump attorney John Dowd made a compelling case that Mueller’s report wrongly portrayed a phone message he left for a witness.
A few more such errors and omissions, and Americans may begin to wonder if the Mueller report is worth the paper on which it was printed.
Source.
So that we know that Mueller was willing to misrepresent one Western asset as a Russian spy, how much more plausible does it now seem that Mueller, the FBI, and everyone else who pushed the legitimacy of the Carter Page FISA warrants also lied about who Joseph Mifsud really is? It's only a matter of time before that shoe drops.
Also, it's stories like this that make it very clear why Mueller does not want to testify at all regarding what's in his report. He'll get torn apart.
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On June 07 2019 10:09 KwarK wrote:
As for the gig economy, I'm not entirely sure that you know what that is. It's not starting a small business, it's taking work as a 1099 contractor to work for below minimum wage for a tech company. You're no more a small business owner than a pizza delivery guy is.
You're focusing on the baser elements of it. There are lots of people who are starting side careers using either better platforms or their own platforms making money doing things that they love. And once they have enough business, those side gigs become their full time careers.
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On June 08 2019 01:04 xDaunt wrote:It's getting harder and hard to avoid the reality that the Mueller report and his investigation into Trump was a fraud. There's now a second confirmed episode (after the Dowd VM) of Mueller misrepresenting facts in his report so as to unethically bolster the legitimacy of the prosecution's case. John Solomon has a new article showing that Konstantin Kilimnik, a central figure in Mueller's report, is not tied to Russian intelligence as Mueller represents. Instead, he's tied Western intelligence. Show nested quote +In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
The incomplete portrayal of Kilimnik is so important to Mueller’s overall narrative that it is raised in the opening of his report. “The FBI assesses” Kilimnik “to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Mueller’s team wrote on Page 6, putting a sinister light on every contact Kilimnik had with Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.
What it doesn’t state is that Kilimnik was a “sensitive” intelligence source for State going back to at least 2013 while he was still working for Manafort, according to FBI and State Department memos I reviewed.
Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded.
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
“Purcell described what he considered an unusual level of discretion that was taken with handling Kilimnik,” states one FBI interview report that I reviewed. “Normally the head of the political section would not handle sources, but Kasanof informed Purcell that KILIMNIK was a sensitive source.”
Purcell told the FBI that Kilimnik provided “detailed information about OB (Ukraine’s opposition bloc) inner workings” that sometimes was so valuable it was forwarded immediately to the ambassador. Purcell learned that other Western governments relied on Kilimnik as a source, too.
“One time, in a meeting with the Italian embassy, Purcell heard the Italian ambassador echo a talking point that was strikingly familiar to the point Kilimnik had shared with Purcell,” the FBI report states.
Kasanof, who preceded Purcell as the U.S. Embassy political officer, told the FBI he knew Kilimnik worked for Manafort’s lobbying firm and the administration of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose Party of Regions hired Manafort’s firm.
Kasanof described Kilimnik as one of the few reliable insiders the U.S. Embassy had informing on Yanukovych. Kilimnik began his relationship as an informant with the U.S. deputy chief of mission in 2012–13, before being handed off to the embassy’s political office, the records suggest.
“Kilimnik was one of the only people within the administration who was willing to talk to USEMB,” referring to the U.S. Embassy, and he “provided information about the inner workings of Yanukovych’s administration,” Kasanof told the FBI agents.
“Kasanof met with Kilimnik at least bi-weekly and occasionally multiple times in the same week,” always outside the embassy to avoid detection, the FBI wrote. “Kasanof allowed Kilimnik to take the lead on operational security” for their meetings.
State officials told the FBI that although Kilimnik had Ukrainian and Russian residences, he did not appear to hold any allegiance to Moscow and was critical of Russia’s invasion of the Crimean territory of Ukraine.
“Most sources of information in Ukraine were slanted in one direction or another,” Kasanof told agents. “Kilimnik came across as less slanted than others.”
“Kilimnik was flabbergasted at the Russian invasion of Crimea,” the FBI added, summarizing Kasanof’s interview with agents.
Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Kasanof’s and Purcell’s interviews are corroborated by scores of State Department emails I reviewed that contain regular intelligence from Kilimnik on happenings inside the Yanukovych administration, the Crimea conflict and Ukrainian and Russian politics. For example, the memos show Kilimnik provided real-time intelligence on everything from whose star in the administration was rising or falling to efforts at stuffing ballot boxes in Ukrainian elections.
Those emails raise further doubt about the Mueller report’s portrayal of Kilimnik as a Russian agent. They show Kilimnik was allowed to visit the United States twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, a clear sign he wasn’t flagged in visa databases as a foreign intelligence threat.
The emails also show how misleading, by omission, the Mueller report’s public portrayal of Kilimnik turns out to be.
For instance, the report makes a big deal about Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort in August 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.
By that time, Manafort had served as Trump’s campaign chairman for several months but was about to resign because of a growing controversy about the millions of dollars Manafort accepted as a foreign lobbyist for Yanukovych’s party.
Specifically, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington. Kasanof, his former handler at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, had been promoted to a top policy position at State, and the two met for dinner on May 5, 2016.
The day after the dinner, Kilimnik sent an email to Kasanof’s official State email address recounting the peace plan they had discussed the night before.
Russia wanted “a quick settlement” to get “Ukraine out of the way and get rid of sanctions and move to economic stuff they are interested in,” Kilimnik wrote Kasanof. The email offered eight bullet points for the peace plan — starting with a ceasefire, a law creating economic recovery zones to rebuild war-torn Ukrainian regions, and a “presidential decree on amnesty” for anyone involved in the conflict on both sides.
Kilimnik also provided a valuable piece of intelligence, stating that the old Yanukovych political party aligned with Russia was dead. “Party of Regions cannot be reincarnated. It is over,” he wrote, deriding as “stupid” a Russian-backed politician who wanted to restart the party.
Kasanof replied the next day that, although he was skeptical of some of the intelligence on Russian intentions, it was “very important for us to know.”
He thanked Kilimnik for the detailed plan and added, “I passed the info to my bosses, who are chewing it over.” Kasanof told the FBI that he believed he sent Kilimnik’s peace plan to two senior State officials, including Victoria Nuland, President Obama’s assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs.
So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”
Lest you wonder, the documents I reviewed included evidence that Kasanof’s interview with the FBI and Kilimnik’s emails to State about the peace plan were in Mueller’s possession by early 2018, more than a year before the final report.
Officials for the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department and Mueller’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Kilimnik did not respond to an email seeking comment but, in an email last month to The Washington Post, he slammed the Mueller report’s “made-up narrative” about him. “I have no ties to Russian or, for that matter, any intelligence operation,” he wrote.
Kilimnik holds Ukrainian and Russian citizenship, served in the Soviet military, attended a prestigious Russian language academy and had contacts with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. So it is likely he had contacts over the years with Russian intelligence figures. There also is evidence Kilimnik left the U.S.-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in 2005 because of concerns about his past connections to Russia, though at least one IRI witness disputed that evidence to the FBI, the memos show.
Yet, omitting his extensive, trusted assistance to the State Department seems inexplicable.
If Mueller’s team can cast such a misleading portrayal of Kilimnik, however, it begs the question of what else might be incorrect or omitted in the report.
Attorney General William Barr has said some of the Mueller report’s legal reasoning conflicts with Justice Department policies. And former Trump attorney John Dowd made a compelling case that Mueller’s report wrongly portrayed a phone message he left for a witness.
A few more such errors and omissions, and Americans may begin to wonder if the Mueller report is worth the paper on which it was printed. Source. So that we know that Mueller was willing to misrepresent one Western asset as a Russian spy, how much more plausible does it now seem that Mueller, the FBI, and everyone else who pushed the legitimacy of the Carter Page FISA warrants also lied about who Joseph Mifsud really is? It's only a matter of time before that shoe drops. Also, it's stories like this that make it very clear why Mueller does not want to testify at all regarding what's in his report. He'll get torn apart. Was wondering when you'd post that.
An opinion piece by a political hack. basically worthless without some very solid underlying evidence that I havn't seen.
Also shifty people are often willing to deal with anyone and everyone. He can help Russia get access to US polling data while also providing the US with information.
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Re: GH and xDaunt arguing about what income is “labor” and what income is from “capital”
The situation is fairly complicated. As Kwark points out, capital is a necessary condition for earning lots of income. As xDaunt points out, lots of capital can substitute for something like “labor” but top capital owners and earners are doing something extra besides merely owning capital:
Capitalists in the 21st Century
From the abstract:
Have the idle rich replaced the working rich at the top of the U.S. income dis- tribution? Using tax data linking 11 million firms to their owners, this paper finds that entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death. Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners.
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On June 08 2019 01:14 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 08 2019 01:04 xDaunt wrote:It's getting harder and hard to avoid the reality that the Mueller report and his investigation into Trump was a fraud. There's now a second confirmed episode (after the Dowd VM) of Mueller misrepresenting facts in his report so as to unethically bolster the legitimacy of the prosecution's case. John Solomon has a new article showing that Konstantin Kilimnik, a central figure in Mueller's report, is not tied to Russian intelligence as Mueller represents. Instead, he's tied Western intelligence. In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
The incomplete portrayal of Kilimnik is so important to Mueller’s overall narrative that it is raised in the opening of his report. “The FBI assesses” Kilimnik “to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Mueller’s team wrote on Page 6, putting a sinister light on every contact Kilimnik had with Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.
What it doesn’t state is that Kilimnik was a “sensitive” intelligence source for State going back to at least 2013 while he was still working for Manafort, according to FBI and State Department memos I reviewed.
Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded.
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
“Purcell described what he considered an unusual level of discretion that was taken with handling Kilimnik,” states one FBI interview report that I reviewed. “Normally the head of the political section would not handle sources, but Kasanof informed Purcell that KILIMNIK was a sensitive source.”
Purcell told the FBI that Kilimnik provided “detailed information about OB (Ukraine’s opposition bloc) inner workings” that sometimes was so valuable it was forwarded immediately to the ambassador. Purcell learned that other Western governments relied on Kilimnik as a source, too.
“One time, in a meeting with the Italian embassy, Purcell heard the Italian ambassador echo a talking point that was strikingly familiar to the point Kilimnik had shared with Purcell,” the FBI report states.
Kasanof, who preceded Purcell as the U.S. Embassy political officer, told the FBI he knew Kilimnik worked for Manafort’s lobbying firm and the administration of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose Party of Regions hired Manafort’s firm.
Kasanof described Kilimnik as one of the few reliable insiders the U.S. Embassy had informing on Yanukovych. Kilimnik began his relationship as an informant with the U.S. deputy chief of mission in 2012–13, before being handed off to the embassy’s political office, the records suggest.
“Kilimnik was one of the only people within the administration who was willing to talk to USEMB,” referring to the U.S. Embassy, and he “provided information about the inner workings of Yanukovych’s administration,” Kasanof told the FBI agents.
“Kasanof met with Kilimnik at least bi-weekly and occasionally multiple times in the same week,” always outside the embassy to avoid detection, the FBI wrote. “Kasanof allowed Kilimnik to take the lead on operational security” for their meetings.
State officials told the FBI that although Kilimnik had Ukrainian and Russian residences, he did not appear to hold any allegiance to Moscow and was critical of Russia’s invasion of the Crimean territory of Ukraine.
“Most sources of information in Ukraine were slanted in one direction or another,” Kasanof told agents. “Kilimnik came across as less slanted than others.”
“Kilimnik was flabbergasted at the Russian invasion of Crimea,” the FBI added, summarizing Kasanof’s interview with agents.
Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Kasanof’s and Purcell’s interviews are corroborated by scores of State Department emails I reviewed that contain regular intelligence from Kilimnik on happenings inside the Yanukovych administration, the Crimea conflict and Ukrainian and Russian politics. For example, the memos show Kilimnik provided real-time intelligence on everything from whose star in the administration was rising or falling to efforts at stuffing ballot boxes in Ukrainian elections.
Those emails raise further doubt about the Mueller report’s portrayal of Kilimnik as a Russian agent. They show Kilimnik was allowed to visit the United States twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, a clear sign he wasn’t flagged in visa databases as a foreign intelligence threat.
The emails also show how misleading, by omission, the Mueller report’s public portrayal of Kilimnik turns out to be.
For instance, the report makes a big deal about Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort in August 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.
By that time, Manafort had served as Trump’s campaign chairman for several months but was about to resign because of a growing controversy about the millions of dollars Manafort accepted as a foreign lobbyist for Yanukovych’s party.
Specifically, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington. Kasanof, his former handler at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, had been promoted to a top policy position at State, and the two met for dinner on May 5, 2016.
The day after the dinner, Kilimnik sent an email to Kasanof’s official State email address recounting the peace plan they had discussed the night before.
Russia wanted “a quick settlement” to get “Ukraine out of the way and get rid of sanctions and move to economic stuff they are interested in,” Kilimnik wrote Kasanof. The email offered eight bullet points for the peace plan — starting with a ceasefire, a law creating economic recovery zones to rebuild war-torn Ukrainian regions, and a “presidential decree on amnesty” for anyone involved in the conflict on both sides.
Kilimnik also provided a valuable piece of intelligence, stating that the old Yanukovych political party aligned with Russia was dead. “Party of Regions cannot be reincarnated. It is over,” he wrote, deriding as “stupid” a Russian-backed politician who wanted to restart the party.
Kasanof replied the next day that, although he was skeptical of some of the intelligence on Russian intentions, it was “very important for us to know.”
He thanked Kilimnik for the detailed plan and added, “I passed the info to my bosses, who are chewing it over.” Kasanof told the FBI that he believed he sent Kilimnik’s peace plan to two senior State officials, including Victoria Nuland, President Obama’s assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs.
So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”
Lest you wonder, the documents I reviewed included evidence that Kasanof’s interview with the FBI and Kilimnik’s emails to State about the peace plan were in Mueller’s possession by early 2018, more than a year before the final report.
Officials for the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department and Mueller’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Kilimnik did not respond to an email seeking comment but, in an email last month to The Washington Post, he slammed the Mueller report’s “made-up narrative” about him. “I have no ties to Russian or, for that matter, any intelligence operation,” he wrote.
Kilimnik holds Ukrainian and Russian citizenship, served in the Soviet military, attended a prestigious Russian language academy and had contacts with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. So it is likely he had contacts over the years with Russian intelligence figures. There also is evidence Kilimnik left the U.S.-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in 2005 because of concerns about his past connections to Russia, though at least one IRI witness disputed that evidence to the FBI, the memos show.
Yet, omitting his extensive, trusted assistance to the State Department seems inexplicable.
If Mueller’s team can cast such a misleading portrayal of Kilimnik, however, it begs the question of what else might be incorrect or omitted in the report.
Attorney General William Barr has said some of the Mueller report’s legal reasoning conflicts with Justice Department policies. And former Trump attorney John Dowd made a compelling case that Mueller’s report wrongly portrayed a phone message he left for a witness.
A few more such errors and omissions, and Americans may begin to wonder if the Mueller report is worth the paper on which it was printed. Source. So that we know that Mueller was willing to misrepresent one Western asset as a Russian spy, how much more plausible does it now seem that Mueller, the FBI, and everyone else who pushed the legitimacy of the Carter Page FISA warrants also lied about who Joseph Mifsud really is? It's only a matter of time before that shoe drops. Also, it's stories like this that make it very clear why Mueller does not want to testify at all regarding what's in his report. He'll get torn apart. Was wondering when you'd post that. An opinion piece by a political hack. basically worthless without some very solid underlying evidence that I havn't seen. Also shifty people are often willing to deal with anyone and everyone. He can help Russia get access to US polling data while also providing the US with information.
Like I have pointed out previously, his "opinion" pieces are actually investigative pieces, which should be obvious by their contents. Plus, Solomon has been right on everything as it pertains to this Russia stuff. He certainly has been more reliable then all of the "investigative reporters" who argued for two years that Trump conspired with the Russians.
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On June 08 2019 01:07 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On June 07 2019 10:09 KwarK wrote:
As for the gig economy, I'm not entirely sure that you know what that is. It's not starting a small business, it's taking work as a 1099 contractor to work for below minimum wage for a tech company. You're no more a small business owner than a pizza delivery guy is. You're focusing on the baser elements of it. There are lots of people who are starting side careers using either better platforms or their own platforms making money doing things that they love. And once they have enough business, those side gigs become their full time careers. What you are talking about is different than what Kwark and I and talking about. What you are talking about is frequently what the kids these days refer to as a "side hustle", which is optional side work you do where you are not usually beholden to anyone else outside of people you agree to do work for, often on a temporary or single project basis. For example, being a freelance web designer or something along those lines. What Kwark and I are talking about are a specific class of work in which you are contracted to a company and frequently use their tech/equipment (think the Uber app for drivers), but are classified such that you are considered a contractor, and as such have no benefits or guarantee of consistent income. The "1099" companies are companies like Uber, GrubHub, Lyft, etc. that rely upon these contract workers to function.
While in concept there is a useful place in society for this type of work, the reality is right now a lot of these companies are taking advantage of a lack of regulation to exploit those who work for them, who, as we mentioned, often end up making less than minimum wage, and are often left in a bind if anything goes wrong. That's why there's such a huge push right now for the government to force Uber and all to reclassify those who work for them as employees. The people working for them currently legally check off every box required for them to be company employees, but due to a legislative gap, the companies can get away with keeping them as contractors, which saves the company money but is obviously detrimental to those who work for them since they essentially have no rights that an actual employee would have.
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On June 08 2019 01:21 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On June 08 2019 01:14 Gorsameth wrote:On June 08 2019 01:04 xDaunt wrote:It's getting harder and hard to avoid the reality that the Mueller report and his investigation into Trump was a fraud. There's now a second confirmed episode (after the Dowd VM) of Mueller misrepresenting facts in his report so as to unethically bolster the legitimacy of the prosecution's case. John Solomon has a new article showing that Konstantin Kilimnik, a central figure in Mueller's report, is not tied to Russian intelligence as Mueller represents. Instead, he's tied Western intelligence. In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
The incomplete portrayal of Kilimnik is so important to Mueller’s overall narrative that it is raised in the opening of his report. “The FBI assesses” Kilimnik “to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Mueller’s team wrote on Page 6, putting a sinister light on every contact Kilimnik had with Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.
What it doesn’t state is that Kilimnik was a “sensitive” intelligence source for State going back to at least 2013 while he was still working for Manafort, according to FBI and State Department memos I reviewed.
Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded.
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
“Purcell described what he considered an unusual level of discretion that was taken with handling Kilimnik,” states one FBI interview report that I reviewed. “Normally the head of the political section would not handle sources, but Kasanof informed Purcell that KILIMNIK was a sensitive source.”
Purcell told the FBI that Kilimnik provided “detailed information about OB (Ukraine’s opposition bloc) inner workings” that sometimes was so valuable it was forwarded immediately to the ambassador. Purcell learned that other Western governments relied on Kilimnik as a source, too.
“One time, in a meeting with the Italian embassy, Purcell heard the Italian ambassador echo a talking point that was strikingly familiar to the point Kilimnik had shared with Purcell,” the FBI report states.
Kasanof, who preceded Purcell as the U.S. Embassy political officer, told the FBI he knew Kilimnik worked for Manafort’s lobbying firm and the administration of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose Party of Regions hired Manafort’s firm.
Kasanof described Kilimnik as one of the few reliable insiders the U.S. Embassy had informing on Yanukovych. Kilimnik began his relationship as an informant with the U.S. deputy chief of mission in 2012–13, before being handed off to the embassy’s political office, the records suggest.
“Kilimnik was one of the only people within the administration who was willing to talk to USEMB,” referring to the U.S. Embassy, and he “provided information about the inner workings of Yanukovych’s administration,” Kasanof told the FBI agents.
“Kasanof met with Kilimnik at least bi-weekly and occasionally multiple times in the same week,” always outside the embassy to avoid detection, the FBI wrote. “Kasanof allowed Kilimnik to take the lead on operational security” for their meetings.
State officials told the FBI that although Kilimnik had Ukrainian and Russian residences, he did not appear to hold any allegiance to Moscow and was critical of Russia’s invasion of the Crimean territory of Ukraine.
“Most sources of information in Ukraine were slanted in one direction or another,” Kasanof told agents. “Kilimnik came across as less slanted than others.”
“Kilimnik was flabbergasted at the Russian invasion of Crimea,” the FBI added, summarizing Kasanof’s interview with agents.
Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Kasanof’s and Purcell’s interviews are corroborated by scores of State Department emails I reviewed that contain regular intelligence from Kilimnik on happenings inside the Yanukovych administration, the Crimea conflict and Ukrainian and Russian politics. For example, the memos show Kilimnik provided real-time intelligence on everything from whose star in the administration was rising or falling to efforts at stuffing ballot boxes in Ukrainian elections.
Those emails raise further doubt about the Mueller report’s portrayal of Kilimnik as a Russian agent. They show Kilimnik was allowed to visit the United States twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, a clear sign he wasn’t flagged in visa databases as a foreign intelligence threat.
The emails also show how misleading, by omission, the Mueller report’s public portrayal of Kilimnik turns out to be.
For instance, the report makes a big deal about Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort in August 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.
By that time, Manafort had served as Trump’s campaign chairman for several months but was about to resign because of a growing controversy about the millions of dollars Manafort accepted as a foreign lobbyist for Yanukovych’s party.
Specifically, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington. Kasanof, his former handler at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, had been promoted to a top policy position at State, and the two met for dinner on May 5, 2016.
The day after the dinner, Kilimnik sent an email to Kasanof’s official State email address recounting the peace plan they had discussed the night before.
Russia wanted “a quick settlement” to get “Ukraine out of the way and get rid of sanctions and move to economic stuff they are interested in,” Kilimnik wrote Kasanof. The email offered eight bullet points for the peace plan — starting with a ceasefire, a law creating economic recovery zones to rebuild war-torn Ukrainian regions, and a “presidential decree on amnesty” for anyone involved in the conflict on both sides.
Kilimnik also provided a valuable piece of intelligence, stating that the old Yanukovych political party aligned with Russia was dead. “Party of Regions cannot be reincarnated. It is over,” he wrote, deriding as “stupid” a Russian-backed politician who wanted to restart the party.
Kasanof replied the next day that, although he was skeptical of some of the intelligence on Russian intentions, it was “very important for us to know.”
He thanked Kilimnik for the detailed plan and added, “I passed the info to my bosses, who are chewing it over.” Kasanof told the FBI that he believed he sent Kilimnik’s peace plan to two senior State officials, including Victoria Nuland, President Obama’s assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs.
So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”
Lest you wonder, the documents I reviewed included evidence that Kasanof’s interview with the FBI and Kilimnik’s emails to State about the peace plan were in Mueller’s possession by early 2018, more than a year before the final report.
Officials for the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department and Mueller’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Kilimnik did not respond to an email seeking comment but, in an email last month to The Washington Post, he slammed the Mueller report’s “made-up narrative” about him. “I have no ties to Russian or, for that matter, any intelligence operation,” he wrote.
Kilimnik holds Ukrainian and Russian citizenship, served in the Soviet military, attended a prestigious Russian language academy and had contacts with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. So it is likely he had contacts over the years with Russian intelligence figures. There also is evidence Kilimnik left the U.S.-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in 2005 because of concerns about his past connections to Russia, though at least one IRI witness disputed that evidence to the FBI, the memos show.
Yet, omitting his extensive, trusted assistance to the State Department seems inexplicable.
If Mueller’s team can cast such a misleading portrayal of Kilimnik, however, it begs the question of what else might be incorrect or omitted in the report.
Attorney General William Barr has said some of the Mueller report’s legal reasoning conflicts with Justice Department policies. And former Trump attorney John Dowd made a compelling case that Mueller’s report wrongly portrayed a phone message he left for a witness.
A few more such errors and omissions, and Americans may begin to wonder if the Mueller report is worth the paper on which it was printed. Source. So that we know that Mueller was willing to misrepresent one Western asset as a Russian spy, how much more plausible does it now seem that Mueller, the FBI, and everyone else who pushed the legitimacy of the Carter Page FISA warrants also lied about who Joseph Mifsud really is? It's only a matter of time before that shoe drops. Also, it's stories like this that make it very clear why Mueller does not want to testify at all regarding what's in his report. He'll get torn apart. Was wondering when you'd post that. An opinion piece by a political hack. basically worthless without some very solid underlying evidence that I havn't seen. Also shifty people are often willing to deal with anyone and everyone. He can help Russia get access to US polling data while also providing the US with information. Like I have pointed out previously, his "opinion" pieces are actually investigative pieces, which should be obvious by their contents. Plus, Solomon has been right on everything as it pertains to this Russia stuff. He certainly has been more reliable then all of the "investigative reporters" who argued for two years that Trump conspired with the Russians.
But... those reports were correct. His family, and he, conspired with them at every available opportunity ("This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump..."). What you're referring to is that there was not enough evidence to prove that he conspired with the Russian government. And that's only because A. evidence was destroyed and B. oligarchs/others were used as cutouts. Which is also to say that there was not "no evidence". Just "not enough". Regardless, you keep saying things that are factually untrue, you get corrected, and continue to make the same false claims as if no one said a word. It's baffling. This is like the bullshit about the Steele Dossier all over again.
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I'm sympathetic to people who honestly thought there was something to Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. I'm a little less so to people who persist in calling reporters "hacks," who were proven right through the investigation.
It's one part embarrassment that they were not partners in being fooled, and one part hope that attacking the man instead of the report will make Trump's contentions less supported. Find who's been most right, label them, dismiss them, ignore the underlying evidence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Lest you wonder, the documents I reviewed included evidence that Kasanof’s interview with the FBI and Kilimnik’s emails to State about the peace plan were in Mueller’s possession by early 2018, more than a year before the final report. Good luck wagering that he's making all this up. I'd try a different tack, particularly to separate yourself from other people labeling and attacking journalists as political hacks rofl.
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On June 08 2019 01:57 Danglars wrote:I'm sympathetic to people who honestly thought there was something to Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. I'm a little less so to people who persist in calling reporters "hacks," who were proven right through the investigation. It's one part embarrassment that they were not partners in being fooled, and one part hope that attacking the man instead of the report will make Trump's contentions less supported. Find who's been most right, label them, dismiss them, ignore the underlying evidence. Show nested quote +But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Lest you wonder, the documents I reviewed included evidence that Kasanof’s interview with the FBI and Kilimnik’s emails to State about the peace plan were in Mueller’s possession by early 2018, more than a year before the final report. Good luck wagering that he's making all this up. I'd try a different tack, particularly to separate yourself from other people labeling and attacking journalists as political hacks rofl.
This is why every corrupt government official who was involved in perpetrating this fraud upon the American people needs to be prosecuted. I can't think of any other way to fix this. There are ample facts already publicly available showing that what these people did was wrong, yet the diehard "Trump conspired with the Russians" crowd couldn't care less about the real truth.
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I think this conversation about property values ignores property tax. I don't know about how larger citiy finances work but most of the rual communities are funded either through municipal properties (my town has a city bar and a liquor store that are both really awesome) or through property taxes.
Higher property values in gentrified areas mean higher taxes for the city. Which means that its not in the cities interest to counteract higher rent its actually in their interest to encourage higher rent. This makes It impossible for people who are trying to fight this through their city government. This is why san Francisco is such a mess and will always be a mess until they restructure the entire city government.
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I still don't see the added value. Yes you give a service,the ability to rent a house goes up by 1 house. But you are also taking away. The ability to buy a house (or even invest in one) goes down by one.
A house for rent and a house for sale have imo the same economic value in the end.Its the same house.
Maybe because of constructs one has more value then the order,but it should be possible to see that its the same value if only because its the exact same house.
Houses build by property developers are typically sold to people who are going to live there,at least that's the case here though this is changing lately. Or the developer rents them out himself.
You could apply the same logic to getting interest in general. In the end there is no real difference between getting interest or renting out a house (renting out a house can have more or less risk depending on circumstances)
No value is added by having a huge sum of money and lending it out but you can get a lot of interest from it.
And for the people who say that value is being added:well then its simple,we give everyone a huge sum of money to lend out and by that way we add huge value to the economy.
The system is good I think,it creates activity and chances for everyone. But when inequality is getting very high (like recent years) the income from capital increases to the point where it starts to harm the overall economy and you get into a sort of deadlock where as the saying goes "the rich get rich and the poor stay poor"
Anyway:i am no communist or even socialist just to be clear. And I don't particulary mind people being able to gain income from their capital with virtually no risk,even when it doesn't add anything. They earned their capital one way or the other and they earned the right to retire to put it simply. But there are excesses which will only grow when inequality keeps growing and which will harm economic growth.
I think that if capital was much more equally devided amongst the people that the usa could see economic growth of up to 10%.
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Higher property values in gentrified areas don’t necessarily lead to higher property tax collection when the developments in those (likely TIF) areas are given all sorts of tax abatements, some of which can stretch decades into the future.
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United States42263 Posts
There has always only ever been one way to resolve private ownership of a limited resource that the public are required to consume and that is nationalization. City rents get out of control because supply cannot rise to meet demand, creating a bidding war where the poorest will have to go homeless. Imposing rent caps do not solve the problem of supply exceeding demand, they transfer the excess value from the lessor to the lessee which, as has been pointed out, leads to illegal subletting and a black market.
Rents must be allowed to float with the market, and yet the owners of these properties should not be given a license to exploit the population. In a market failure situation where supply has been capped ownership of shelter is provides disproportionate rewards to the owners far in excess of their cost of capital. Limited natural resources that are required by the population as a whole, of which living space is obviously one, must be owned by the people.
Once exploitative ownership has been transferred to the state the proceeds can be used to build high speed public transport links, new housing in the areas linked by public transport, higher density housing projects, and homeless shelters where they're needed.
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On June 08 2019 01:57 Danglars wrote:I'm sympathetic to people who honestly thought there was something to Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. I'm a little less so to people who persist in calling reporters "hacks," who were proven right through the investigation. It's one part embarrassment that they were not partners in being fooled, and one part hope that attacking the man instead of the report will make Trump's contentions less supported. Find who's been most right, label them, dismiss them, ignore the underlying evidence. Show nested quote +But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Lest you wonder, the documents I reviewed included evidence that Kasanof’s interview with the FBI and Kilimnik’s emails to State about the peace plan were in Mueller’s possession by early 2018, more than a year before the final report. Good luck wagering that he's making all this up. I'd try a different tack, particularly to separate yourself from other people labeling and attacking journalists as political hacks rofl.
I'm still waiting for someone other than bar to read the entire report.
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United States42263 Posts
On June 08 2019 02:42 pmh wrote:
I think that if capital was much more equally devided amongst the people that the usa could see economic growth of up to 10%.
The inability of the poor to purchase goods, and the obvious problem that presents to the markets when a good 70% of the US population are working poor, has been resolved by the ridiculous levels of personal credit that have been extended to the population. The working poor no longer needs capital to consume, instead the temporarily embarrassed millionaires can mortgage their futures safe in the knowledge that they can repay it when they're rich.
77% of Americans are in debt and the average personal debt is $38,000. But that's not a problem because their earnings are sure to go up soon.
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On June 07 2019 23:14 Trainrunnef wrote:Show nested quote +On June 07 2019 22:16 Gorsameth wrote:On June 07 2019 22:14 Velr wrote:
Uhm, it allows more persons to live in the area. These new Inhabitants will consume more goods from local business so local companies get an economic benefit, they will pay taxes...
I really don't see a problem with this as long as the market is regulated by laws/taxes so blatant profiteering isn't possible (or at least not easy to do). But that would also happen without someone else buying it and renting it on. Someone would live there. The landlord adds nothing that wouldn't be gained by someone directly owning the house itself. The problem is that when a house is built it has an owner, that owner can choose to occupy or not occupy. by building it they have incurred certain costs and liabilities (mortgage). In order to maintain their own financial solvency they must either sell the house at a price > cost + liabilities or rent it at a price > liabilities. This essentially sets a floor for the cost of the house in the rental or sale market. in the case of a sale, how many people have the capital available to purchase the house? not many, and the nicer the house the fewer the people. If the house is so nice that it is beyond the affordability of the residents of the area then the house will eventually foreclose and may remain empty for years (should the original owner choose not to live there). The alternative is renting where it is much easier to pass the threshold of price>liabilities because little capital is required. and in this way a landord adds value, by bearing the liability into the future so that the current residents (who dont have the capital to spend) can live there at an affordable price. in summary it is not a given that a house will be occupied just by its existance.
Note : some of this is wrong. Renting the house doesn't have to be at a price > liabilities (short term). Plenty (including myself) operate at a monthly loss. It is still worth it in the end, as my -300€ monthly translates to +400 net equity in the value of the flat (provided the market doesn't crash and burn, which it did. I bought at 100k, it's now worth 60k so I'm actually losing net money. I don't really care, as long as I don't sell it and continue to rent it when the mortgage is over. It's just going to take longer, and forces me to save.)
The rental can perfectly be done at an affordable amount while still being profitable long term, but the greed is extreme these days (and things like AirBnB are part of the culprits in large cities), and investors want to profit extremely quickly (10, 15 years ?), even taking the risk to keep flats empty to keep prices high instead of just lowering the rents all across.
Note about providing value : in my case, I am renting a fully furnished flat for two students, who definitely do not have the resources to buy an apartment or house, nor the need for it since they are staying 2 to 3 years in that city. So they don't have to buy furniture nor get in debt. I think that is providing value. I haven't increased the rent in 8 years over 6 generations of tenants, and am providing good conditions (no liability for a tenant over the other half of the rent if the second guy doesn't pay, etc).
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Living in London, some of the things people have written here is so cute. As if aspects of capitalism in home ownership isn't a problem and this is some theoretical problem as opposed to an actual problem. As much as I beleive in the power of the invisible hand of the market, the ideas of capitalism to solve supply problems is built upon the assumption of infinite resources and as we all know, land and therefore space for habitation is finite.
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EPT
