Wallace's Farmer Follow-Up

I want to expand a bit on my remarks about Wallace's Farmer in my last post.  Today I received my latest online edition through the WF affiliate FarmProgress.  In it was one of the usual estate planning articles the magazine runs.  Frankly these articles are generally a good thing because estate planning is a critical element of family farming, something I know all too well.  The article was by one of their regular contributors, Curt Ferguson, an estate planning attorney in Salem, IL.  Except this article had something in it that really brought me up with a start.  Contrasting his farmer clients against "the sort of thing you see in the news", he wrote:

In the nature of my work, my clients need to talk pretty openly about their family. Their children, usually one or more of whom will be carrying on the family farming tradition, rarely include the spoiled types who are addicted to alcohol or drugs, are rioting in the streets or are living on welfare trying to avoid working for a living. There are exceptions, of course, but they are the exception, not the rule, and they often require special treatment.

I can't pretend to be surprised, though.  This is racist, classist, entitled Turdville-speak, but it is standard Turdville-speak.  I know because I grew up with it.  He may have written that because he actually is that ignorant.  Don't assume for a minute that just because someone is a lawyer they know anything outside of their pigeon hole or are aware of the systemic inequalities that got them where they are.  On the other hand, he may have been fully aware of what he was saying but was playing to his audience, most of whom he knew are that ignorant.  This is why Fly-Over Country goes so hard for the Tangerine Latrine, and why he loves the ignorant.

So let's take a look at this shoveler.  Family lost their farm near Marshalltown, Iowa, in the early 80s.  That's genuinely sad.  Still managed to go to college, though, first locally and then at the now defunct Covenant Foundation College, affiliated with the conservative holiness movement, which he's apparently still affiliated with as a member of the Wesleyan Bible Holiness Church in Salem.  Law school at University of Texas, where he joined the Christian Legal Society, an organization whose favorite pastime is suing colleges that won't let it practice gender and religious discrimination.  Went into practice and also joined the Rutherford Institute, an organization with an agenda similar to CLS (because Christians are just so oppressed in this country) except they really lean into hatin' on the homos.  Two daughter, both homeschooled, both graduates of Hillsdale College, which is a member of Project 2025, a center of COVID denial, and a place so proud of all its forms of religio-fascist discrimination it stopped accepting federal money just so it could keep practicing them.  One of them actually managed to get to Oxford to study religion, but we are talking about Oxford, and on top of that we're talking about Wycliffe College, N.T. Wright's current and hopefully final bolt hole, so I guess it isn't that surprising.  The other recently wrote a play glorifying a family of Charleston, SC, crackers bravely resisting the Damn Yankees during the Southern Sedition.

So yeah, I think he knew exactly what he was saying.  And you should know this is what passes for information in Rural Murica.

Today On That's Fucked Up . . . .

 

I'm not even going into the open, unmitigated evil the Tangerine Latrine's administration is engaged in.  There's enough good info on that as it is.  Suffice it to say that if you believe ICE has not committed murders, plural, in Minneapolis, you are a lying, brain dead sack of shit, and I'm not interested in engaging with you.  In my unalterable opinion, ICE and Kristi "Razorface" Noem and Tom "Bagman" Homan and Greg "Mini Moo" Bovino and Kash "Deer in the Headlights" Patel are rabid animals who need taken behind the barn and Ol' Yeller'ed.

Along this vein, though, I just finished Ryan McBeth's YouTube from last night on the Pretti murder, and it was all I could do to keep my lunch down.  The man has completely whored out, and even his purely technical analyses are no longer to be relied on.  I unsubscribed so fast I think I damaged my mouse.

One last point here because no one else is making it.  The pistol the US Gestapo allegedly pulled off Pretti was a Sig Sauer P320.  This was the standard issue ICE sidearm until last Summer when it was replaced by the Glock 19 because of issues with "unintentional discharge" (Same issue many ICE agents undoubtedly have, but I digress.).  Interesting coincidence.

Moving on.  I was watching a financial commentator yesterday talking about Treasuries tanking because Europe is dumping them.  So far so good.  Then she brought up Germany's demand to have its gold reserves returned, and I went, yeah, that's a problem.  Then she took off her mask and said this indicated a return to gold-backed currencies.  Shit.  Another fucking brain dead goldbug.  These people are like cockroaches in the walls.  First, a bullion-based currency: 1) does not reflect how money actually works; 2) would crash the global economy; 3) would constrict the global economy to the level of about 1855; 4) would institute systemic, permanent deflation.  Second, the gold itself is not the issue in Germany's demand.  About 75 ago, Germany started acquiring gold to back the Mark because its economy was still too tattered to support it on its own.  Germany elected to store its gold at the New York Fed, just in case the Soviets got a wild hair and came storming through the Fulda Gap.  With the 1990s that stopped being an issue, but Germany said, "Hey, the US is stable, it's an ally, why not?"  This demand signals an end to that.  Germany no longer consider the US either stable or an ally.  And suppose we don't give the gold back?  So far only small potatoes Sweden and Denmark have dumped Treasuries, and that damned near wrecked the 30-year.  If Germany starts dumping (and France would join in, ostensibly out of "EU solidarity", but actually just for the sheer fun of it), it would get real ugly real fast.  And if Japan and China decide they need to follow suit to protect themselves?  Business Genius Trump will have successfully triggered American Economic Apocalypse.

Continuing on.  If there is one thing Trump is right about, it's that the US mainstream media are fake news.  They're just fake in the opposite direction Trump says.  There's plenty out there about the shit tsunami US news is, so I'm going to take you down a little, country backroad.  Having grown up on a farm, I've been reading Wallace's Farmer since I was a child.  It was founded by Henry C. Wallace, who was the grandfather of Henry A. Wallace, FDR's VP until FDR dumped him in favor of the safer, more Southern, more corporate Harry Truman (Truman left a lot of soundbites, but he delivered on effectively none of them.), and the last, significant, left wing candidate for president (1948, for those of you keeping score.).  The current Wallace's Farmer is just a corporate apologist shit pile, though.  This example is from its latest edition.  They're beating the drum for a new Iowa State University report saying only 30% of Iowa ag land sales are going to corporations.  Ahem.  Just from the article itself, I look at those figures and know that the 30% never comes back out of investor, while the 70% will come back around for them to have another crack at.  So every year more land shifts from operators to investors.

But I didn't stop there.  Because I'm one of those assholes who doesn't take other assholes at their word.  So I read the actual ISU report.  The first thing that stuck out was that inflation-adjusted land values were lower than 2015.  So hard assets are down, revenue is shitty because of Trump's trade wars, and all expenses are up a butt ton, but yeah farmers, you just keep ticking off that "R" on the ballot.

Then the ISU report made a couple of telling points.  First, they said their 70% group included farmers buying for investment.  You want to know what kind of farmer buys for investment?  A corporate farmer.  So part of the 70% is actually over with the 30%.  And then they broke purchases down by area.  And the best farmland areas in the state have majority investor purchases.  The media are telling you everything is fine, but you could empty a L'Oreal factory and not have enough lipstick for that pig.

Back to mainstream.  I watched a Marcus & Millichap webcast this morning, and my Gods were those brilliant, real estate experts leading a one-star shit parade.  Nothing to see here, citizens, don't worry about the lack of affordability, don't worry about the economy being propped up by nothing but data centers sucking up all the power and water, never mind the increasing income gap, pay no mind to the economic instability as the US gets relegated to pariah nation status, and above all, DON'T CONNECT THE DOTS.  It was like I was playing a tape of all the real estate con artists (er, excuse me, experts) right before the crash.

As Tom Paxton said in Twister, "We're goin' in!"

Another OF Follow-Up

 

Specifically, following up on this.  OF is touting a new book, Multicurrency Mercantilism.  Just what the Hells that's supposed to mean, I don't know.  I haven't read the book (And frankly I don't intend to.  I seriously think it would be a waste of time as set out below.), but I've read enough synopses to know it's a proposal for a basket-of-currencies trade system.  What the "mercantilism" part of that is about I have no clue, given mercantilism is about maximizing exports and minimizing imports, and if you define it any other way, you're just playing Humpty-Dumpty and claiming words mean what you say they mean.  So what's in the basket?  BRICS of course.

And this makes no FUCKING sense from an economic point of view because none of these five worthies can afford to be a reserve currency.  The reason US manufacturing and exports are the way they are is because Harry Dexter White "won" the Battle of Bretton Woods over John Maynard Keynes in 1944.  The British Pound had been the world's currency, but the UK was in too rough a shape to carry that anymore, so Keynes proposed an international monetary unit, the "bancor".  It would not be a sovereign currency but rather would be a trade currency controlled by a clearinghouse created by multilateral treaty.  White couldn't abide that because MURICA! and rammed through the Yankee Dollar as the new reserve currency.

The problem with being the world's reserve currency is that everyone needs your currency for closing their trade deals, which means there's a demand for your currency that far exceeds your own needs, which means your currency is overvalued, which in turn means everything you produce (which of necessity is denominated in your currency) is overpriced, and you're at a gross trading disadvantage.  Ultimately, this makes it difficult to export much of anything (or even for your citizens to consume domestic products instead of imported ones), but it hits manufacturing especially hard, and that sector starts waving bye-bye.  Steve Keen does a quick synopsis here, and there are plenty of additional sources you can go to.

UK manufacturing was wrecked not by so-shul-izm but by being priced out of the market by its reserve currency.  And the UK floundered about, unable to identify what the problems were and not being able to fix anything because the real solutions were off the table courtesy Tories, LibDem precursors, and "moderate" Labour.  The US followed lock step, less the third political party.  When Maggoty Trencher came on the scene, like the good neoclassical neoliberal she was, she misidentified the problems, blamed the wrong causes, and implemented the wrong solutions.  And The Blessed St. Ronnie Ray-Gunz followed suit.  And here we all are.

Which is a long way of saying the BRICS are in no position to pull this off.  All five are dependent on exports and can't afford to have their currencies strengthen against everyone else's.  Without petro exports, Russia and Saudi Arabia would dry up and blow away.  Without cheap manufacturing exports, India and China would do the same, India far quicker.  Brazil is mostly exporting raw materials, but it has for less resilience to such a punch in the face.  They can't get there from here.

So what is the deal?  I don't know, but I do have an idea that all the puzzle pieces I know about fit into.  China is the embodiment of the long game.  Usually this has just been an excuse to do nothing, but occasionally it has meant China was waiting for everyone else to finish blowing their own feet off and perhaps helping a bit with their aim.  I think this may be one of those occasional occasions.  It is obvious we are on the cusp of a very different world, and I think China has seen it for awhile.  I think they see this as a way to undermine their rivals.  They want Russia and India to go all the way with reserve currencies just to watch their export economies get torpedoed amidships, while China maintains its "soft" peg to US$ (i.e. "constriction band" to protect exports to the US).  KSA has to dance to the tune China calls, or China will up its ante with Iran.  And Brazil is so owned by China that it's violating international law to cut Amazon forest to grow soybeans for export to China.  And if none of this works out, well China knows it can start over at square one because it's done it so many times.

So what is OF trying to prove?  Remember, OF is now a talking head for the Chinese Global Television Network and is spitting CCP and PRC propaganda.  If the BRICS basket is a part of Chinese trade strategy, OF's promoting it would make sense.  And a plan that promotes Chinese exports at the expense of all the others is certainly mercantilist.

Of Course Russia Did Nothing Wrong

The Noo Yuck Posthole (a Murdoch rag) is out beating the drum for a new Central Insane Asylum "report" that supposedly torpedoes the Russiagate investigations.  I'm not going to link it because I refuse to platform bullshit.  DYOFR.  Needless to say it actually says nothing.  It once again claims the Steele Dossier was part of the basis for the intelligence conclusions drawn and "discloses" flaws in the investigations that have long been known and were rectified long before any final reports and indictments.

It's a bundle of rubbish.  First, anyone who still claims the Russiagate investigation was based on the Steele Dossier is not a serious person.  It was reviewed by intel agencies, it was dumped, it is click bait for MAGAt mouth-breathers.  The final Intelligence Assessment in 2017 was not based on it, the 2018 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (which was Republican-controlled) was not based on it, and the July 2018 indictments of a dozen Russian intelligence officers were not based on it.  Second, it's long been known the investigation was rushed, and it's an old saying in the intel community that there's nothing more dangerous than a spy in a hurry (Cornwell didn't invent that line for Smiley's People.).  There was a reason they were rushed: They knew Trump was taking over and would deep six everything.  That doesn't change that the ultimate conclusions were based on a lot of digging through a lot of sources.

Finally, even the "serious" investigations from the Right run the gamut from the spurious to the scurrilous.  An example is Richard Sakwa's Deception.  Sakwa's objectivity is suspect out of the gate since he is one of those people who claims Russian attacks on the Caucasus and Ukraine were necessitated by Western aggression, ignoring centuries of Russian politically and religiously motivated aggression in those regions (Being of Polish descent, Sakwa really ought to know better.  But then he's a commentator for Russia Times and holds an honorary professorship at Moscow State University, so . . . .).

Deception really is kind of a mess.  Sakwa purports he's doing an intelligence and academic deep dive, but it is apparent he was more than peripherally involved with many of these people, institutions, and events.  Personal involvement with the intel being collected does not make for good analysis.  For example he downplays any involvement by the Valdai Club (and his own involvement in Valdai), even though FSB/GRU constantly run assets through Valdai.  Sakwa criticized the Mueller report for biased investigating (He makes the same claim about the Roger Stone investigation, and if you're white-washing that guy, you need to rethink your life.) because he did not run down all the details on the Steele Dossier and all the dirt Matt Taibbi and Julian Assange had supposedly dug up.  The thing about investigations in the real world, though, is that resources are limited.  If you have a line of investigation and it looks like there's no there there, you stop going there.  By the time Mueller started, the Steele Dossier had been debunked, and Taibbi's and Assange's choo-choos had already jumped the track, so what was the point.  There was no point.  And while there were plenty of exasperating things about Mueller's report, most of the criticism Sakwa levels is actually the result of Bob Barr immediately flushing the report down an industrial commode.  But that would be contrary to Sakwa's narrative since it would indicate Putin in fact runs Trump.

Property Tax

Alright, I do a bunch of work in real property tax, and there are a few things I need to unload.

First, Salt Lake County.  The county assessor's office has no idea what they are doing.  And on a number of occasions when they do know, they're not entirely forthcoming.  They don't know how business entities work.  A few years ago they were tossing out all sales where a trust was selling as not being arm's length.  Turns out they had no idea a trust could own property and thought these were all trustee's foreclosure sales.  They don't know how corporate financing works.  They think that because two investment vehicles were created by the same bank and one gets into financial straits, property sales by the other are distress sales because its just raising money that will flow straight to the other vehicle.  This is a level of Dunning-Kruger reminiscent of Karen Martinez and her Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight at the Salt Lake SEC 10-15 years ago.  They have no idea much of the international commercial real estate market is now on line, that bid rooms are set up there rather like with construction bidding, that typically there is no struck price and the buyer picks the bid that's the best fit, and these transactions are typically run through major international law firms.  I know Utah's a backwater, but come on.

And then of course there's the stuff where they know better but do it anyway.  Like pretending to have subdividing authority to chop an economic unit up.  Like removing the haz-mat tag from a property.  Like reclassifying a building to something it isn't just so they can jack up the value/sf.  Like pretending there haven't been recent sales of a certain type of building so they have to go back to 2020 and 2021 and 2022 when lending rates were half what they are now just so they can drive the cap rates down and send assessed values into orbit.

And the mayor and the council and the tax admin office cover it all up.  Especially tax admin, which ignores any evidence and any reality that interferes with affirming the assessor.  And it all stinks like last week's diapers.

On to Washington.  In 2023 the legislature passed a bunch of laws intended to expand urban affordable housing, mostly through increasing density.  They'll probably increase density, but I seriously question whether they'll do a damned thing about affordability.  And I believe one of them, HB 1337, is a ticking bomb.  It requires cities within urban growth areas to allow for two accessory dwelling units (ADUs) per lot.  That means ADU approvals will be pretty much automatic as long as health and fire codes are met.  Which means the assessor will start valuing empty spaces as ADUs.  That basement area your kid used to live in but is empty since they moved out?  Better relet it, because the assessor is going value it as revenue producing space, and your property value is about to spike yet again.  It won't do squat to fix the affordable housing shortage, but it could well drive Ma and Pa out of their home.  I wonder who might show up to snap up properties like this?  It's such a mystery.

The Tangerine Latrine's Shit Show

Man, this mess is worse than even I thought it would be.  The Tangerine Latrine, the Muskrat, and their merry mob of thugs aren't interested in just taking power.  They're intent on a full-on rape and run.  They're playing this as End Game, and at the rate they're going, they may make it happen.  We're about to live Game of Oligarchs, but with climate change looming in the background, so we may end up living Fallout.  But these goons don't care because they're all convinced they're Enclave.  I hope I live long enough to see them realize there isn't enough room for all of them and start picnicking on one another.

It's our own damned fault, really.  We didn't do the heavy lifting necessary to make the system work for us, certainly not since WWII.  We didn't replace the Constitution, even though it needed replacing from the start.  We acted like Mormons, pretending the thing was divinely inspired, rather than admitting it was just an ugly compromise between slave owners masquerading as farmers and land speculators masquerading as merchants to keep all real power in the hands of white, propertied, Christian men while pretending to share it.  And we never corrected this, the result being the 1% made sure we couldn't have nice things.  The barest in civil rights.  The minimum in employment, workplace, and personal autonomy laws.  Hells, even Obamacare barely passed muster under this Constitution according to the Extreme Court.  And they cemented it all with Citizens United, which opened the money gates.

And now even our vaunted rule of law is being exposed for what colonized peoples have always known it to be: a device to protect and preserve the position and power of the 1%.

Actual Real Estate Stuff

Yeah, believe it or not.

First, ag land auctions.  Currently these are mostly retirement and estate sales with some foreclosures and bankruptcies mixed in.  Iowa is currently loaded with $15,000+/acre auction prices.  Even though commodity prices are flat and expenses are up.  Even though the American Bankers Association thinks only half of ag borrowers will be in the black in 2025.  So what's going on?  I have a strong suspicion the bigs are getting bigger.  They have cash and can get their hands on more, and they're turning it into dirt.  So yet more family farms are landing in the hands of agribusiness.  Which bodes ill for surviving small farmers, consumers, soil, water quality, name it.

Now on to office space.  Most law firms I know are reducing their footprint.  No reason not to given how much we can do remotely.  But the bigs are entering into big, new leases.  Why?  Because they can.  Because they know the legal industry is changing dramatically, and size means survival.  Because their corporate clients want image and are willing to pay for it.  Because they have hammerlocks on their employees and can force on-site work.

What we're seeing is yet more asset concentration to the detriment of all the rest of us.  I won't call this neo-feudalism, though, because it isn't.  There is no interlocking system of rights and responsibilities.  The rights have all floated up the hill, and the responsibilities have all rolled down it.  There are no holidays.  We're on call all the time.  There are no commons we have access to.  Any possible Third Space either has an admission fee or is locked down entirely.  We aren't peasants.  We're serfs.

OF Redux

This is an update of this post.

OF continues down the multilateral currency road.  In spite of many electrons being spilled, just how the BRICs are supposed to accomplish this remains unexplained.  One member (Russia) is failing in its war against a measurably inferior opponent and and is dancing with a demographic death spiral (although Putin's takeover the the US may buy some time).  One member (China) is so desperate to distract everyone, foreign and domestic, from its being history's largest Potemkin Village, it's preparing to invade Taiwan in 2027 or early 2028.  One member (India) is so insecure about its currency it's trying to eliminate cash.  One member (Brazil) is simply mired in a multi-pronged inability to function (although Trump's tariffs may give it a boost).  And as OF has reported, China has just issued a new round of bonds denominated in US$.  Not the surest way to break the US$ as the reserve currency.  I don't see anything, BRIC or otherwise, remotely capable of replacing US$, even as part of a basket of currencies.

Do I think US$ is undefeatable?  Absolutely not.  Bad Vlad has done a very good job of putting a mob of ticking bombs in the US government.  By the time Trump is done this time, I think everything that made the US function will have been plundered and pillaged, and the US$ will be irretrievably broken.  So the US will lose; that doesn't mean anyone will win.  By 2034 the whole world could look like Central Europe in 1634.  Only worse, because all attempts to stop climate change will have fallen by the wayside.

So while I expect US$ to fall, I do not expect it to be replaced.  If there's no global economy, who needs a global reserve currency?

He's Baaaack

Awhile back I posted about Mikkel Thorup and his "advice".  Shortly after that, his incessant emails dried up.  No loss.  Then a couple of months ago I got a promo email.  Shortly after that, I received another "newsletter" type thing.  And it looks like he and his tools have only gotten worse.

First, he's completely come out as a COVID denier who believes "woke" is destroying civilization.  Second, he's using that fear-mongering to sell his latest grift, Veritas Villages scattered throughout developing nations, where you can live independent of "government" grids because you have your own water and power and apparently (though Thorup doesn't mention this point of course) your own staff of locals to maintain all this because you sure as Hells aren't going to.  In other words, rank neocolonialism.  Not that the types who buy into this rubbish see anything wrong with that.

The other big drum he's beating is for Pavel Durov, the Russian tech bro who was arrested in France in August.  According to Thorup, Durov was arrested because he protected free speech.  According to France and its case filings, it was because Durov refused to cooperate with investigations into criminal activities on his Telegram platform.  I would note that crime is not free speech, at least not when it's fraud, drug dealing, trafficking, and political hits, so it doesn't really look like Durov was protecting free speech.  But the truth wouldn't help Thorup's sales pitch.