industryterm:real estate speculation

CrimethInc. : Insurrection is Not a Game : Play, Resistance, and Designing the Game “Bloc by Bloc”
▻https://crimethinc.com/2018/06/04/insurrection-is-not-a-game-play-resistance-and-designing-the-game-bloc-b

https://cloudfront.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/06/04/header.jpg

I have learned more about the history of subversive and anti-authoritarian tabletop games out there in the world. Suffragetto is a game from 1909 that simulates women’s suffrage protestors clashing with police. What we now know as the game Monopoly was originally a game called The Landlord’s Game that critiqued real estate speculation and finance capitalism. Class Struggle, Chicago Chicago, and Mai 68 Le jeu are a few other titles from the 1970s and ’80s that attempted to simulate popular uprisings. A few years ago, some Italian comrades created a game called Riot that features anarchists, autonomists, police, and nationalists fighting each other in the streets.

(...)

For gamers’ perspectives on the themes of colonialism and domination in Settlers of Catan, check out:

Postcolonial Catan

First Nations of Catan

For more on systems thinking in games, check out Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. For more on the critique of cybernetics, watch Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

#jeux #anarchisme

Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter – We Make Money Not Art
▻http://we-make-money-not-art.com/policing-the-planet-why-the-policing-crisis-led-to-black-live

http://i0.wp.com/we-make-money-not-art.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/9policingd682c5ff4.jpg?w=700

It seems that everything started with the best intentions back in the 1990s when the “community-minded” broken windows theory was adopted by the police. It was an easy and logical idea: nipping any form of anti social behaviour in the bud would naturally curb down urban disorder and vandalism in neighbourhoods.

Unfortunately, the broken windows policing often led to increased militarization of the police, school-to-prison pipeline, residential segregation, mass incarceration, mass surveillance and mass criminalization of the black working class, of Native Americans and more generally of poor people.

The authors of the book are social movement organizers, scholar-activists, journalists and artists. Together, they challenge the role and legitimacy of the police, reflect on alternatives to the most aggressive forms of policing and denounce the over-funding of the police force to the detriment of the social security net, job creation, rent control programs, basic public services like health care and transportation, etc.

Each of the essay or interview in the book explores a different case study: ‘anti-Indianism’ in New Mexico, influence of Israeli policing structures on the LAPD, New York city’s strategy to rely more on invasive policing than on mass incarceration, LA Skid Row as a testing ground for police practices that will be exported to the world, links between criminalization of poverty and real estate speculation, state violence and gentrification in El Salvador, etc.

Taxing Wealth: IMF Suggests Real Estate | Al Akhbar English
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/taxing-wealth-imf-suggests-real-estate

It is now relevant to open a serious debate on local tax reforms. Taxes on the highest income bracket in Lebanon are some of the lowest globally and the same goes for taxes on corporations and profits. However, treasury bills, profits on the stock market, and real estate speculation are not taxes, for example.

At the same time, 80 percent of tax revenue in Lebanon comes from indirect taxes, whose actual burden falls on medium- and limited-income brackets. Around one-third of treasury expenses are used for debt servicing. This means that a very narrow segment of treasury bill-holders make tremendous gains from rent and are tax-exempt.

Does the recommendation by IMF experts to impose taxes on wealth and profits from real estate make them into organs for “socialist propaganda,” like some Lebanese pundits are saying?

#Liban
#FMI
#fiscalité
#immobilier

Chinese Architecture, Old and New
►http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/11/chinese-architecture-old-and-new/100409

The growth of China’s massive population has slowed in recent years, but migration to urban areas has increased, with almost half of China’s 1.3 billion people living in or near cities. A booming economy, government housing initiatives, infrastructure programs, and private real estate speculation have all driven construction to record levels.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/china112012/s_c05_RTR2A10I.jpg

North Lebanon: A State That Sells its People to the Devil | Ibrahim al-Amin
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/north-lebanon-state-sells-its-people-devil

Didn’t the Saudi embassy in Lebanon once send an envoy who found that what was presented in reports about development programs implemented by the Future Movement and March 14 leaders in Tripoli and Akkar was merely an illusion? These projects never existed.

[…]

The rich should have embraced projects that feed people in a dignified manner, instead of escaping taxes on financial and real estate speculation...

Certainly, someone is preparing someone big in the North, linked to the situation in Syria. The escape of the state is an announcement telling us we should only expect death to come from the North.