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Home ownership has been called “the quintessential American dream.” Yet today less than 65% of American homes are owner occupied, and more than 50% of the equity in those homes is owned by the banks. Compare China, where, despite facing one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, a whopping 90% of families can afford to own their homes.
Over the last decade, American wages have stagnated and U.S. productivity has consistently been outpaced by China’s. The U.S. government has responded by engaging in a trade war and imposing stiff tariffs in order to penalize China for what the White House deems unfair trade practices. China’s industries are said to be propped up by the state and to have significantly lower labor costs, allowing them to dump cheap products on the U.S. market, causing prices to fall and forcing U.S. companies out of business. The message to middle America is that Chinese labor costs are low because their workers are being exploited in slave-like conditions at poverty-level wages.
But if that’s true, how is it that the great majority of Chinese families own homes?
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”
… 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other liens. On top of this, north of 20% of urban households own more than one home.
Due to their communist legacy, what they get for their money is not actually ownership in perpetuity but a long-term leasehold, and the quality of the construction may be poor. But the question posed here is, how can Chinese families afford the price tag for these homes, in a country where the average income is only one-seventh that in the United States?
The Misleading Disparity Between U.S. and Chinese Incomes
Some commentators explain the phenomenon by pointing to cultural differences. The Chinese are inveterate savers, with household savings rates that are more than double those in the U.S.; and they devote as much as 74% of their money to housing. Under China’s earlier one-child policy, many families had only one heir, who tended to be male; and home ownership was a requirement to score a wife. Families would therefore pool their resources to make sure their sole heir was equipped for the competition. Homes would be purchased either with large down payments or without financing at all. Financing through banks at compound interest rates doubles the cost of a typical mortgage, so sidestepping the banks cuts the cost of housing in half.
Those factors alone, however, cannot explain the difference in home ownership rates between the two countries. The average middle-class U.S. family could not afford to buy a home outright for their oldest heir even if they did pool their money. Americans would be savers if they could, but they have other bills to pay. And therein lies a major difference between Chinese and American family wealth: In China, the cost of living is significantly lower. The Chinese government subsidizes not only its industries but its families—with educational, medical and transportation subsidies.
According to a 2017 HSBC fact sheet, 70% of Chinese millennials (ages 19 to 36) already own their own homes. American young people cannot afford to buy homes because they are saddled with student debt, a millstone that now averages $37,000 per student and will be carried an average of 20 years before it is paid off. A recent survey found that 80% of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. Another found that 60% of U.S. millennials could not come up with $500 to cover their tax bills.
In China, by contrast, student debt is virtually nonexistent. Heavy government subsidies have made higher education cheap enough that students can work their way through college with a part-time job. Health care is also subsidized by the government, with a state-run health insurance program similar to Canada’s. The program doesn’t cover everything, but medical costs are still substantially lower than in the U.S. Public transportation, too, is quite affordable in China, and it is fast, efficient and ubiquitous.
DNA tests have been used in Israel to verify a person’s Jewishness. This brings a bigger question: what does it mean to be genetically Jewish? And can you prove religious identity scientifically?
When my parents sent their saliva away to a genetic testing company late last year and were informed via email a few weeks later that they are both “100% Ashkenazi Jewish”, it struck me as slightly odd. Most people I know who have done DNA tests received ancestry results that correspond to geographical areas — Chinese, British, West African. Jewish, by comparison, is typically parsed as a religious or cultural identity. I wondered how this was traceable in my parents’ DNA.
After arriving in Eastern Europe around a millennia ago, the company’s website explained, Jewish communities remained segregated, by force and by custom, mixing only occasionally with local populations. Isolation and intermarriage slowly narrowed the gene pool, which now gives modern Jews of European descent, like my family, a set of identifiable genetic variations that set them apart from other European populations at a microscopic level.
This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in small towns and villages in Eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married within the community, up until the Holocaust, when they were either murdered or dispersed.
But still, there was something disconcerting about our Jewishness being “confirmed” by a biological test. After all, the reason my grandparents had to leave the towns and villages of their ancestors was because of ethno-nationalism emboldened by a racialized conception of Jewishness as something that exists “in the blood”.
The raw memory of this racism made any suggestion of Jewish ethnicity slightly taboo in my family. If I ever mentioned that someone “looked Jewish” my grandmother would respond, “Oh really? And what exactly does a Jew look like?”
Yet evidently, this wariness of ethnic categorization didn’t stop my parents from sending swab samples from the inside of their cheeks off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The idea of having an ancient identity “confirmed” by modern science was too alluring.
Not that they’re alone. As of the beginning of this year, more than 26 million people have taken at-home DNA tests. For most, like my parents, genetic identity is assimilated into an existing life story with relative ease, while for others, the test can unearth family secrets or capsize personal narratives around ethnic heritage.
But as these genetic databases grow, genetic identity is re-shaping not only how we understand ourselves, but how we can be identified by others. In the past year, law enforcement has become increasingly adept at using genetic data to solve cold cases; a recent study shows that even if you haven’t taken a test, chances are you can be identified by authorities via genealogical sleuthing.
What is perhaps more concerning, though, is how authorities around the world are also beginning to use DNA to not only identify individuals, but to categorize and discriminate against entire groups of people.
In February of this year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the peak religious authority in the country, had been requesting DNA tests to confirm Jewishness before issuing some marriage licenses.
In Israel, matrimonial law is religious, not civil. Jews can marry Jews, but intermarriage with Muslims or Christians is legally unacknowledged. This means that when a Jewish couple want to tie the knot, they are required by law to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate according to Orthodox tradition, which defines Jewish ancestry as being passed down through the mother.
While for most Israeli Jews this simply involves handing over their mother’s birth or marriage certificate, for many recent immigrants to Israel, who often come from communities where being Jewish is defined differently or documentation is scarce, producing evidence that satisfies the Rabbinate’s standard of proof can be impossible.
In the past, confirming Jewishness in the absence of documentation has involved contacting rabbis from the countries where people herald or tracking genealogical records back to prove religious continuity along the matrilineal line. But as was reported in Haaretz, and later confirmed by David Lau, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, in the past year, the rabbis have been requesting that some people undergo a DNA test to verify their claim before being allowed to marry.
For many Israelis, news that the rabbinical judges were turning to DNA testing was shocking, but for Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi, it came as no surprise. Farber, who has been living in Israel since the 1990s, is the director of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization that helps Israeli Jews navigate state-administered matters of Jewish life, like marriage and conversion. In the past year, the organization has seen up to 50 cases where families have been asked to undergo DNA tests to certify their Jewishness.
Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 million strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent. This means that although most self-identify as Jewish, hundreds of thousands are not considered so by the Rabbinate, and routinely have their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including marriage.
[...]
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame. “I was approached by someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony maybe 15, 20 years ago, who recently received an official demand saying if you want to continue to be Jewish, we’d like you to do a DNA test,” Shindler said. “They said if she doesn’t do it then she has to sign papers saying she is not Jewish. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this.”
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian speaking immigrants in Israeli society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. “It is sad because in the Soviet Union we were persecuted for being Jewish and now in Israel we’re being discriminated against for not being Jewish enough,” he said.
Ibid: But according to Yosef Carmel, an Orthodox rabbi and co-head of Eretz Hemdah, a Jerusalem-based institute that trains rabbinical judges for the Rabbinate, this is a misunderstanding of how the DNA testing is being used. He explained that the Rabbinate are not using a generalized Jewish ancestry test, but one that screens for a specific variant on the mitochondrial DNA – DNA that is passed down through the mother – that can be found almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews.
A number of years ago Carmel consulted genetic experts who informed him that if someone bears this specific mitochondrial DNA marker, there is a 90 to 99% chance that this person is of Ashkenazi ancestry. This was enough to convince him to pass a religious ruling in 2017 that states that this specific DNA test can be used to confirm Jewishness if all other avenues have been exhausted, which now constitutes the theological justification for the genetic testing.
For David Goldstein, professor of medical research in genetics at Columbia University whose 2008 book, Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, outlines a decade’s worth of research into Jewish population genetics, translating scientific insights about small genetic variants in the DNA to normative judgments about religious or ethnic identity is not only problematic, but misunderstands what the science actually signals.
“When we say that there is a signal of Jewish ancestry, it’s a highly specific statistical analysis done over a population,” he said. “To think that you can use these type of analyses to make any substantive claims about politics or religion or questions of identity, I think that it’s frankly ridiculous.”
But others would disagree. As DNA sequencing becomes more sophisticated, the ability to identify genetic differences between human populations has improved. Geneticists can now locate variations in the DNA so acutely as to differentiate populations living on opposite sides of a mountain range.
In recent years, a number of high-profile commentators have appropriated these scientific insights to push the idea that genetics can determine who we are socially, none more controversially than the former New York Times science writer, Nicholas Wade. In his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Wade argues that genetic differences in human populations manifest in predictable social differences between those groups.
His book was strongly denounced by almost all prominent researchers in the field as a shoddy incarnation of race science, but the idea that our DNA can determine who we are in some social sense has also crept into more mainstream perspectives.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last year, the Harvard geneticist David Reich argued that although genetics does not substantiate any racist stereotypes, differences in genetic ancestry do correlate to many of today’s racial constructs. “I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism,” he wrote. “But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’.”
Reich’s op-ed was shared widely and drew condemnation from other geneticists and social science researchers.
In an open letter to Buzzfeed, a group of 67 experts also criticized Reich’s careless communication of his ideas. The signatories worried that imprecise language within such a fraught field of research would make the insights of population genetics more susceptible to being “misunderstood and misinterpreted”, lending scientific validity to racist ideology and ethno-nationalist politics.
And indeed, this already appears to be happening. In the United States, white nationalists have channeled the ideals of racial purity into an obsession with the reliability of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. In Greece, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party regularly draw on studies on the origins of Greek DNA to “prove” 4,000 years of racial continuity and ethnic supremacy.
Most concerning is how the conflation of genetics and racial identity is being mobilized politically. In Australia, the far-right One Nation party recently suggested that First Nations people be given DNA tests to “prove” how Indigenous they are before receiving government benefits. In February, the New York Times reported that authorities in China are using DNA testing to determine whether someone is of Uighur ancestry, as part of a broader campaign of surveillance and oppression against the Muslim minority
While DNA testing in Israel is still limited to proving Jewishness in relation to religious life, it comes at a time when the intersection of ethnic, political, and religious identity are becoming increasingly blurry. Just last year, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government passed the Nation State law, which codified that the right to national self-determination in the country is “unique to the Jewish people”.
John Bolton spearheading P.N.A.C. and going to show that even (((1/8th))) can be toxic.
Journalist Explains John Bolton’s Push For ‘Aggressive Use’ Of American Power
NPR, 2 May 2019: New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins says President Trump’s current national security adviser is a hawk who sees America as “a colossus operating anywhere it wants.”
TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. President Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton is known as a tough-talking hawk. A new article about him in The New Yorker is titled “John Bolton On The Warpath.” My guest is the author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dexter Filkins, who’s a staff writer for the magazine. He’s joined us many times on the show, dating back to when he covered the war in Iraq.
Bolton is President Trump’s third national security adviser, after Generals Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster. Trump was familiar with Bolton’s views because Bolton had made hundreds of appearances on Fox News as a guest, and then as a paid commentator. On Fox, he’d advocated for military strikes on Iranian training camps and for forced regime change in North Korea. Earlier in Bolton’s career, he served in the George W. Bush administration as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs and as U.N. ambassador. He advocated for the invasion of Iraq and told Filkins he still thinks the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was correct.
Dexter Filkins, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So as you point out in the piece, the Trump administration has no permanent secretary of defense, no secretary of homeland security, no ambassador to the U.N. What does it mean in terms of the power John Bolton has now in his role as national security adviser?
DEXTER FILKINS: Well, the national security adviser, just by virtue of the geography of that job - it’s in the West Wing. It’s right down the hall from the Oval Office. It’s an incredibly powerful position. You know, Bolton sees the president every morning. He sees him or he talks to him in the evening. It’s just, the proximity of that job to the presidency gives the occupant of that job just an enormous amount of power. So just on its face, you know, you’re in the pole position there. But I think in this administration because, you know, it’s a revolving door in the rest of the government pretty much all the time - Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, he’s gone. There hasn’t been - no replacement has been named so there’s an acting secretary of defense. There’s no ambassador to the United Nations. There’s no secretary for homeland security.
So it’s just kind of a big vacuum. I think it’s fair to say that makes his job even bigger and gives him even more influence than you would ordinarily have. So I think in that administration, when you’re talking about foreign policy, you’re basically talking about John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, and that’s it.
GROSS: And are they on the same page on most things, Pompeo and Bolton?
FILKINS: I think so. I had a funny conversation about Pompeo and Bolton together with an unnamed Western diplomat who knows them both. And they said, look, you know, Pompeo is really only interested in what Trump is interested in. So you can’t really sit down and talk about the world with him. Bolton, on the other hand, you can talk about anything. You can talk about aid programs in Africa, and he’s well-briefed. He knows about it. But Pompeo has a much more political outlook.
GROSS: So you’re saying Pompeo is there to amplify Trump’s views. Bolton has very strong views of his own.
FILKINS: Yes, he does.
GROSS: So the title of your piece is “John Bolton On The Warpath.” I know he’s a hawk. Does the piece imply that he’s going to lead us into war?
FILKINS: No, but I think it fairly raises a lot of questions. And I think the basis of the piece is this, which I was kind of surprised to find - this divergence of world views between Bolton, on the one hand, who’s been a hawk his whole life. He’s for aggressive use of American power. He’s advocated bombing North Korea. He’s advocated bombing Iran. And then on the other hand, to the extent that President Trump has a world view, it is he wants to stay home. It’s America first. He’s pretty close to being an isolationist. He doesn’t want to - you know, he doesn’t want to partake in this kind of entire international architecture that was set up after the Second World War, whether it’s the World Trade Organization, or NATO or EU. He doesn’t want to pay for any of that stuff, and he doesn’t want to get involved.
So Trump, I think it’s fair to say, doesn’t really want to launch new military operations. They do not see eye to eye on things. I tried to kind of, you know, figure out what it is they talk about when they get together (laughter) for that reason.
GROSS: If Trump and Bolton have such opposing world views when it comes to the possibility of military intervention or war, why would Trump choose him? Why did he choose him?
FILKINS: Well, I think there’s - that’s a really good question. I think there’s two reasons for that. One is that, you know, I think he’s, Bolton, is kind of emotionally appealing to Trump. You know, Bolton was a very highly paid analyst on Fox News. He was on there few times a week. One of the revelations is - for me was I got to look at Mr. Bolton’s financial disclosure, which you’re required to submit for a job like that. And yeah, there was lots of stuff in there. So I think he was being paid $600,000 a year - this is just part of his income, but - $600,000 a year to be on Fox. And so every night, he’s banging away, talking tough. And I think that appeals emotionally to Trump. He’s like, he’s a tough guy. Plus he just sees him all the time. ‘Cause they didn’t really know each other very well.
I think the other reason is there were - H.R. McMaster had been the national security adviser before John Bolton. And there was a kind of a pretty large group of Trump allies who had decided that McMaster had to go. They didn’t like him. They thought he wasn’t supportive enough of Israel and of, you know, the current leadership there. And so they pushed him out. I mean, I think it’s fair to say they lobbied very hard to get him out, and they worked pretty hard to get Bolton in. So I think it was a confluence of those two things.
GROSS: What did Bolton advocate for as a highly paid commentator on Fox News?
FILKINS: (Laughter). Well, he, as I mentioned, he - and I went through a lot of stuff that he said on the air. And, you know, I think he’s finding - I should say, before I answer that question - I think he’s finding, you know, it’s a little different when you’re in power, as opposed to being out of power. But on Fox, talking tough - strike North Korea, if necessary, before they acquire an ICBM capability. Strike Iran in various, you know, various ways and in various contexts. That’s, like, at a minimum. And support Israel in its kind of what I think is a covert or actually pretty hot war that’s going on with Iran and Syria.
So really aggressive use of American power. But I think even more than that, not just - you know, not just dropping bombs. I think that Bolton’s worldview is he’s extremely skeptical of international agreements, whether they’re treaties or, again, the whole kind of architecture that was built by the United States over the past 70 years. You know, whether it’s NATO, or the EU, or the U.N. or the World Trade Organization, all those things which, you know, that’s the world we live in. And he is - and these are, you know, treaties and commitments, and bilateral agreements, multilateral agreements. He’s deeply skeptical of all those things. And he says, essentially, in - he has said this on Fox News, but he’s been very articulate about it in his writing, which is, every time you sign a treaty or a multilateral agreement, you give up a little bit of your sovereignty. And so I think he sees - his view of America is as a kind of colossus operating unilaterally wherever it wants. And, you know, if you pick up friends along the way, great. But they’re not going to be your friends for long. ‘Cause there’s no such things as friends in the international system. There’s only interests. And only interests endure. And so don’t get sentimental about it. Just carry on. And I think that it’s a very unsentimental view of the world that he OK. But Trump fell in love with…
David Baruch Lau, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
John Bolton spearheading P.N.A.C. and going to show that even (((1/8th))) can be toxic.
Michael Levine-Clark / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
