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Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Gun Companies Gave Customers’ Sensitive Personal Information to Political Operatives

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How concentrated wealth disrupts housing markets and worsens the housing affordability crisis. By Chuck CollinsOmar OcampoAmee Chew – Across the United States, communities are facing an acute housing affordability crisis. Rents and homelessness are rising while home ownership feels increasingly out of reach for millions. What’s driving that crisis? In a word, inequality. Increased corporate control over our housing market — by billionaire investors and their for-profit entities — are driving these trends and placing significant barriers to the preservation and creation of permanently affordable housing. 

You’re personally experiencing this crisis if you’re among the over 653,000 U.S. residents who are unhoused — or the many more who are doubled-up in crowded housing, unable to leave a bad living situation, or who cannot afford to live independently. 

You’re experiencing it if you’re among the 22.4 million households — half of all renters — who spend more than 30 percent or more of your income on rental housing. You’re experiencing it if your wages aren’t keeping up with your rent, if your neighborhood is flooded with Airbnbs, or you can’t compete with affluent or investor home buyers to get a place of your own. 

You’re experiencing it if you have an absentee corporate landlord, a government-subsidized “affordable” apartment that’s increasingly unaffordable, or a long commute because you can’t afford decent affordable housing near your work or school. Even if you own a home in a mobile park, you may be worried an investor could buy the park and hike your pad fees. You may blame your housing challenge on your personal failure or a bad local market. 

But all of us are caught up in a larger housing system that is out of kilter and distorted by the participation of a class of ultrawealthy investors. Typical solutions involve simply building more housing.

 But a focus on expanding housing supply through for-profit development misses this key driver of the housing crisis: as wealth concentrates in the hands of billionaire investors, their predatory investment and wealth-parking in luxury housing defines our housing markets today. We call the consequences of billionaires’ increasing control over real estate the “billionaire blowback.”

 This report, jointly published by Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies, highlights the role of the billionaire class in driving our housing emergency — and outlines the policy solutions we need to protect the public interest.

See also The American Housing Crisis: A Theft, Not a Shortage – The unfolding housing crisis is a problem not of supply, but of grinding poverty. A growing number of Americans cannot afford a decent place to live. 

On this fact, the statistics are exceedingly clear. Let’s start with the ability to buy a home. Relative to the average American income, house prices are well within their historical norm.

 (See Figure 1.) But beneath this average lurks a story of crisis. Among the least fortunate Americans, incomes have collapsed. And that means a growing number of people are ‘house poor’ — their income is less than what’s needed to buy a typical house.


Gun Companies Gave Customers’ Sensitive Personal Information to Political Operatives

ProPublica: “For years, America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers to political operatives. Those operatives, in turn, secretly employed the details to rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House, a ProPublica investigation has found. The clandestine sharing of gun buyers’ identities — without their knowledge and consent — marked a significant departure for an industry that has long prided itself on thwarting efforts to track who owns firearms in America. 

At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The NSSF then entered the gun owners’ details into what would become a massive database. The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs.

 A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to win elections. The gun industry launched the project approximately 17 months before the 2000 election as it grappled with a cascade of financial, legal and political threats.

Within three years, the NSSF’s database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people. Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by President George W. Bush in 2004 and served as chair under President Barack Obama, reviewed several company privacy policies and warranty cards at ProPublica’s request. The commission has enforced privacy protections since the 1970s. Leibowitz said firearms companies that handed over customer information may have breached federal and state prohibitions against unfair and deceptive business behavior and could face civil sanctions.

 “This is super troubling,” said Leibowitz, who left the commission in 2013. “You shouldn’t take people’s data without them knowing what you’re doing with it — and give it or sell it to others. It is the customer’s information, not the company’s.” The undisclosed collection of intimate gun owner information is in sharp contrast with the NSSF’s public image… [h/t Pete Weiss]

ProPublica established the existence of the secret program after reviewing tens of thousands of internal corporate and NSSF emails, reports, invoices and contracts. We also interviewed scores of former gun executives, NSSF employees, NRA lobbyists and political consultants in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The insider accounts and trove of records lay bare a multidecade effort to mobilize gun owners as a political force. Confidential information from gun customers was central to what NSSF called its voter education program. The initiative involved sending letters, postcards and later emails to persuade people to vote for the firearms industry’s preferred political candidates. Because privacy laws shield the names of firearm purchasers from public view, the data NSSF obtained gave it a unique ability to identify and contact large numbers of gun owners or shooting sports enthusiasts…”