Distinction Matter - Subscribed Feeds

The idea of a national Eucharistic revival is a great thing. We can and should emphasize the Eucharist, the “source and summit” of the Catholic faith (Sacrosanctum Concilium 11, 14). We can and should bear witness to our faith that the Eucharist truly is the presence of Christ, and everything that presence means. But there is a note missing in the national discussion…

Source

Some of the IDF’s actions have been inconsistent with international humanitarian law, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said

Israel’s airstrikes and ground offensive in Gaza have left more Palestinian civilians dead than Hamas fighters, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has acknowledged.

During his appearance on the CBS TV news program Face the Nation on Sunday, Blinken was asked if Washington agreed with the recent claim by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the attacks on Gaza have so far resulted in the death of 14,000 “terrorists” and 16,000 civilians.

"Yes, we do,” the Secretary of State replied. “Israel has processes, procedures, rules and regulations to try to minimize civilian harm,” but they “have not been applied consistently and effectively. There’s a gap between the stated intent and some of the results we've seen,” he explained.

Blinken stressed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are fighting “an enemy that hides in civilian infrastructure, hides behind civilians,” which makes it problematic to determine what actually happened in each of the individual incidents.

“Given the totality of what we’ve seen in terms of civilian suffering, in terms of children, women, men… who’ve been killed or been injured, it’s reasonable to assess that in a number of instances, Israel has not acted in a manner that’s consistent with international humanitarian law,” he said.

However, the Secretary of State added that it was only an assessment, and that more investigating was needed for the administration of US President Joe Biden to come up with definitive conclusions.

Last week, the State Department released a report that criticized Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, but didn’t single out any specific violations that would necessitate a ban on US military aid to its ally.

At least, 35,034 people have been killed and 78,755 others wounded in the IDF’s attacks on Gaza, according to the latest data from the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and militants in its reports. Israel launched its military operation in Gaza in response to a October 7 cross-border incursion by Hamas, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.

READ MORE: Social media to blame for Israel’s Gaza PR failure – Blinken

The UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said last week that there were 14,500 children and 9,500 women among those who were killed in Gaza. The Jerusalem Post reported on Saturday that the UN has since then halved its estimated number of fatalities among minors and females.

Incredibly the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no medical facilities operational now anyway.

We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like all the rest.

It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the Western political and media classes. Any thought that their isolation from the vast breadth of public opinion would give them pause, must be abandoned. Their Zionist lobby paymasters have jerked the chain, and rather than rowing back, we are seeing a redoubling of their efforts to suppress dissent and obscure the truth.

Some of this shameless distortion is so dissonant with the alleged norms of Western society it is almost impossible to believe it is happening. Here are a few examples.

1) Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta is a highly respected reconstructive surgeon who continued to work heroically and tirelessly in Al Shifa hospital, carrying out operation after operation, mostly on women and children, as the hospital was shelled, strafed and machine gunned around him.

He was already a surgeon of great distinction, based in Glasgow where he is now Rector of Glasgow University.

When Germany banned him from entering to address the conference on Palestine from which Yanis Varoufakis and others were also barred, it appeared perhaps as an one-off action as part of Germany’s extreme and panicked reaction to pro-Palestinian expression.

We have come to understand that Germany has a vicious hatred of Palestinians, remarkably based on the psychological trauma of inherited guilt from the Holocaust. While this is a muddled national psychosis that is plainly immoral and wrongheaded, at least it is possible to have some understanding of how it occurred.

But it then turned out that the travel ban slapped on Dr Abu Sitta by Germany has a Schengen-wide effect as he was also banned from France. That appeared again something that was almost a technical accident as regards the rest of Europe.

But the Western political establishment has now doubled down again by banning him from the Netherlands, and this time the Dutch government has made it clear that it supports the ban, not is just caught by a Schengen restriction.

So the major governments of the European Union are forbidding a distinguished surgeon from giving first-hand medical evidence of the genocide taking place. I cannot think of anything that more sharply exposes the willingness of the Western political class to abandon the most basic tenets of supposed “Western democracy” in the interests of Israel.

2) The willingness of the United States to use extreme violence against pro-Palestinian students on college campuses is another demonstration of the same abandonment of the pretence of democracy when it comes to Israel. It also illustrates what has come to be a serious generational divide in Western public opinion, with young people very strongly motivated to oppose the genocide (which is not to say that older people are pro-genocide, just that they are more split, particularly in the USA).

This is being followed up with yet more crazed pro-Israeli legislation in the United States, seeking to designate anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian expression on campuses as anti-semitic and thus illegal.

In many ways this typifies the reaction of the ruling class across the West. Their reaction to suddenly being exposed as the paid servants of an Israel which no longer has popular support and now causes public revulsion, is simply to attempt to ban free expression and make it specifically illegal to disagree with them.

3) The British Labour Party has gone even madder. Keir Starmer’s Genocide Party is an outstanding example of the success of the Israeli lobby in buying up both sides of the aisle and controlling the entire neoliberal uniparty that poses as the repository of democratic “choice” in the West.

Starmer had been doing his best to conceal his explicitly expressed “unequivocal support for Israel” lately, and to row back from his straightforward assertion that Israel has the right to cut off food and water from the population of Gaza. There had been a fake shift, from refusing to countenance the word “ceasefire” to supporting a temporary ceasefire or a “sustainable” ceasefire – the latter being code for a ceasefire after Israel had achieved all its ethnic cleansing objectives.

But then David Lammy blew this out of the water with an address to US Republican senators in which he made the totally bonkers assertion that Nelson Mandela would have opposed the college protests for Palestine. Lammy is a truly despicable individual, one of the ultimate examples of the corrupt politician whose voice is bought. But this was a move far beyond the pale.

4) Even today, the Western media continues to spout out Israeli propaganda at mains pressure. The Guardian, despite the thousands and thousands of dead women and children we have seen on our mobile phones this past seven months, continues to pretend that the genocidal attack is on “Hamas militants”.

The bombing and shelling of civilians in tents is still described as “clashes”. This propaganda really does not wash any more, though it may reinforce the morale of hardened Zionists. Everybody else has seen through it months ago. Yet still they persist.

5) The endgame is becoming very apparent. The United States is completing its floating harbour for Gaza, and Israel has gained control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, giving the US and Israel total control of entry points into Gaza. Israel has announced that the Rafah crossing is to be handed over to a US mercenary force. The US can then say it is complying with Biden’s pledge not to put US forces’ boots on the ground in Gaza, while actually taking control.

The Israeli attack on Rafah has been justified by the USA as a “limited military operation”, thus claiming it it does not violate Biden’s purported “red line”, even though Israel has ordered over a million displaced people in Rafah to evacuate again, to nowhere.

Conclusion:

The only possible conclusion from all of the above is to reinforce my analysis that the Zionist political and media classes in the West, including Biden, Blinken, Trudeau, Macron, Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz, von der Leyen and all, are active and willing participants in a programme of genocide.

They had numerous opportunities to turn back. We all saw what is happening months ago. They did not take them.

The endgame remains the processing of the remaining Palestinian population out of Gaza through the US-controlled points of the Rafah crossing and the floating harbour, primarily into camps in the Sinai desert. The Western powers are doubling down on their genocide and on their colonial project.

I see nothing whatsoever that indicates they can have any other long-term objective in mind than the complete Israeli annexation of Gaza minus its civilian population. What do you see?

————————————————

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

PayPal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

The post Shameless appeared first on Craig Murray.

The New Testament begins with a story about a humble young woman who willingly submits to the will of  God when He calls her to a momentous vocation. Yet she is also portrayed as a virtuous, contemplative heroine, capable of articulating the desires and expectations of her entire people in poetry so brilliant and beautiful that today, more than 2,000 years removed from that event, it’s daily prayed by millions of Catholics the world over.  The contemporary feminist critique of Catholicism, however, claims it’s a misogynist institution: whether it be the Church telling women what to do with their bodies (abortion and contraception), or prohibiting them from positions of ecclesial authority.

In response to this criticism, many Catholics claim that, far from being antiquated and sexist, the Church has always been the impetus for religious and social change that elevates the status of women. They’re not wrong. Nevertheless, apologetics that aim to argue that the Church was the first feminist institution – or similar rhetoric approaches – risk adopting the very same false premises that underlie the entire modern feminist project with its emphasis on power, autonomy, equality.

Bronwen McShea’s otherwise excellent brief history Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know, flirts with this feminist tendency, practically right out of the gate. “This book is also for anyone interested in the history of Catholicism – to demonstrate that the history of the Church’s women is the Church’s history, just as much as the history of her men is.” Fair enough, though who, exactly, has said otherwise? And is this a competition?

McShea offers fascinating anecdotes of the many Catholic female saints and martyrs from the third-century Perpetua and Felicity (whose Passion is probably the earliest, first-person account from the perspective of a female) to the great medieval monarchs such as Jadwiga of Poland, to modern mystics such as Thérèse of Lisieux. Yet there also seems a forced need to convince the reader of women’s indispensability.

She argues that without Helena, Constantine’s mother, there wouldn’t have been freedom for Christianity in the late Roman Empire, and no Nicene Creed, given that Constantine called the council that created it. True, but aren’t mothers behind every great person?

The text is unnecessarily sprinkled with this kind of language. “Women played an important part in the beginnings of Christian monasticism.” Christian queens and noblewomen “played leading roles in establishing new monastic communities.” Isabella of Spain was a “formidable Catholic woman without whom important episodes in the Church’s history cannot be fully understood.” Maria Theresa of Austria was “one of the most powerful figures in the Enlightenment era.”

This ritualistic reiteration of women’s power and influence is a drag on an otherwise interesting summary of female roles in Christian history. In the preface, McShea admits that as a child she was more drawn to male saints who appeared more “dynamic,” which seems to be an attempt to appeal to feminist readers suspicious of an oppressive, patriarchal Church. The celebrated Catholic writer Patricia Snow underscores that objective in her foreword when she writes, somewhat bizarrely: “the woman moves to the center and the dimensions of the female project become clear.”

Undoubtedly, McShea is correct regarding women’s critical role throughout Church history. The Bible and the early Church were quite radical in their respect for the human dignity of women, as well as for giving them unprecedented degrees of influence and autonomy. It was women who funded Jesus’ ministry (Luke 8:30); who comprised most of His followers at His crucifixion (Mark 15:40-41); and who first saw the risen Lord (John 20:1-18).

Controversy notwithstanding, McShea writes beautifully about women – saints and not – across two millennia of Church history. We learn of Dihya, a Berber queen in what is today Algeria, who fought against the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate in an (ultimately losing) action against Muslim conquest. We read of medieval Beguines, who, though not taking solemn religious vows, were informally committed to celibacy, prayer, fasting, manual labor, and charitable work. We are told of Blessed Mary Theresa Ledóchowska, a Polish noblewoman who promoted African missions in the decades around the beginning of the twentieth century.

But what lesson should we learn from these riveting anecdotes? Is it that these women were powerful, influential, and independent – language that, even if unintentionally, capitulates to modern feminist themes about where human meaning is ultimately found? Or that they courageously lived (and often died) for Christ? The whole presentation seems to imply that modern women need not fear; the Church promotes those feminist values of which they have already been catechized by secular feminists.

Moreover, such an approach belies the realities of Catholic teaching manifested in that Marian beginning to the Gospels – where a woman humbly surrenders her autonomy for the sake of others.  As sociologist Rodney Stark argues in his impressive The Rise of Christianity, this served as a major impetus for growth in the first five centuries of the Church.

In a Roman Empire that endorsed a system of abortion and infanticide that disproportionately targeted female babies, Christianity asserted the inherent dignity of all human life, regardless of sex. Christian condemnations of divorce, incest, marital infidelity, and polygamy all served to protect women. Meanwhile, the large percentage of females in Christian communities inevitably led them into positions of privilege rarely accessible in pagan Rome.

Ironically, the very same Catholic teachings that once fostered female value and status are today perceived to be the greatest obstacles to those goods. What links secular, feminist modernity to the ancient pagan world seems to be an aversion, if not hostility, towards female fertility, which limits human autonomy and power.

If so, telling women that they will find power, influence, and equality in the Church is clearly not the right message, given that the Church more fundamentally teaches humility and self-abnegation.

Far better, I’d think, forthrightly to tell the marvelous stories of female Catholics with all the pluck and passion they deserve. At that task, in any case, McShea succeeds.

The post A Marian or a Feminist Church? appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

At the Vatican this weekend, the great German composer’s ode to joy provided a sublime exhortation to universal brotherhood at the World Meeting on Human Fraternity. The event featured an array of celebrities, including Garth Brooks and Tom Brady, the latter fresh from an obscenity-laced Netflix “roast.” Such “fraternal” encounters can be fraught, but it remains true that culture can give expression to the highest ideals and noblest aspirations.
 

The post Beethoven’s ‘Ninth’ v. Tom Brady’s obscenities appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

I
In the doorway of a low grey house,
built of stones as old as the Crusades,
a woman of Bruges sits in the sunlight,
among the flowers, saying her Rosary.
She seems to be carved out of season walnut
and polished smooth
by the constant touch of the hand of God,
and the beads that twine her crippled fingers
are scarlet berries on the thorny twigs.
The running rhythm
and the repetition
of the Paters and the Aves
is like the rhythm that in nature
moves through the seasons
from seed to harvest
with the unity
and the pause and stress
of music;
like the bloodstream of Christ,
that flows through the seasons
from Advent to Easter
in the Liturgy of the Church,
the ebb and flow of the tide of love
in the Mystical Body of Christ.

II
God has given His children strings of beads,
as we give strings of beads to our children,
to teach them to count.
We do not say,
“Learn from these the doctrine of numbers,
the measure of human life,
the dream of Pythagorus,
counting the pulse of the world.”
We do not say
to a child with a string of beads,
“learn the perfection of reason in mathematics.”
We say,
“Learn to count on the beads,
small for your hands to hold,
bright for your eyes to see.”
And he begins,
slowly,
with one, two, three:
the spark is kindled
to light the flame of philosophy.
God has counted in fifteen Mysteries,
on the fingers of human creatures,
the singleness of the Undivided Love,
the simplicity
that we cannot comprehend
because our hearts are divided.

III
We are not all vessels of gold,
lifted up in virginal hands,
empty chalices to receive
from the perfect vine
love,
absolute
and complete.
But the old woman of Bruges
is a round bowl,
lifted up to be brimmed
with pure wine.
and the Mysteries of the Rosary
concern familiar things
known in her own life.
Her mind, like a velvet bee
droning over a rose,
gathers the honey of comfort
from the story of God,
familiar as the things in her kitchen—
the shining pots and pans,
the milk in the jar of earthenware,
and the flags of the scrubbed floor.
The story told by the Rosary
is the story of primitive beauty,
true as the burden of folksongs.
It is a song piped on the hills,
by a shepherd calling his sheep.

IV
The cradle of wood,
the wood of the cross;
from cradle to cross,
like a lullaby;
the wail of an infant,
lost on the wind—
the arms of a girl
in a circle of love,
rocking to rest;
a woman’s arms
in a circle of love,
the young Man dead
on His Mother’s breast.
The jewels that glow
low in the grass
on the feet of Christ,
risen from death,
touching the flowers
and touching the dust,
even in glory.
The dust of the earth
on the feet of God,
walking the soft blue meadows of stars.

V
In the doorway of a low grey house,
built of stones as old as the Crusades,
a woman of Bruges
sits in the sunlight, among the flowers,
saying her Rosary.
The story of Mary is her own story,
and her son was her life’s joy
and her life’s sorrow;
and for ever
her son is her life’s glory.
In a field in Flanders,
among the red poppies, he is sleeping:
he will sleep soundly
until the day of resurrection.
She has still the patchwork quilt
made, when her hands were nimble,
for the wooden cot:
now he is sleeping, and each year
he has a new coverlet
of delicate young grass,
and at the end of his cot
a wooden cross.
The cradle of the wood,
the wood of the cross:
from cradle to cross,
like a lullaby.
The story of the woman of Bruges
is the world’s story.
It is the story
of human joy and sorrow,
woven and interlaced,
like the blue and crimson thread
in a woven cloth:
the story of birth and death,
of war and the rumours of war
and of peace past understanding,
peace in the souls that live
in the life of Christ.
In the doorway in Bruges,
sitting among the flowers,
her mind like a velvet bee
droning over a rose,
taking the honey of comfort
out of the heart of Love,
the old woman is nodding
over her Rosary.
She has lived her meditation,
like the Mother of God,
living the life of Christ:
let her sleep in Christ’s peace.

VI
Under the loud din
of the tramp of metallic feet
in the armed march of time,
like a river moving
under the dark hills,
the everlasting life
is flowing, eternally.
The measured beat of love,
with pure perfection of music,
timing the life of Christ
in the human heart
goes on.

The post The Rosary appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

In a papal bull, Spes non confundit (“Hope does not disappoint”), Francis, Bishop of Rome, has formally announced the Jubilee Year of 2025. The Jubilee Year will officially begin with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve 2024. “Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love . . .”
 

The post Pope proclaims bull appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

There are plenty of very real things to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin for, not least of which is invading Ukraine. But lying (in this instance) may not be one of them. Putin lied when he said Russia was not going to invade Ukraine. But, wrong though the invasion may have been, it is not … Continue reading "Biden Said Putin Killed Navalny; He Didn’t"

The post Biden Said Putin Killed Navalny; He Didn’t appeared first on Antiwar.com.

On May 1, the US House of Representatives passed the fraudulently titled “Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023.” It’s not yet law, pending Senate passage and a presidential signature, but the lopsided House vote (320 to 91) should worry all Americans, including the country’s 7.6 million Jews. In theory, the bill merely clarifies how the US … Continue reading "We’ve Already Got an ‘Antisemitism Awareness Act.’ It’s Called the First Amendment."

The post We’ve Already Got an ‘Antisemitism Awareness Act.’ It’s Called the First Amendment. appeared first on Antiwar.com.

WHEN TRAITORS RULE, PATRIOTS ARE PARIAHS

If the US were not the bitch of Organized Jewry (Communism & Zionism), Charles Coughlin's crusade against its Satanism would be taught in every public school. 

Hollywood would make blockbusters about him, instead of Barbie & the Communist Robert Oppenheimer.

Reb Culhane is the pseudonym of a 21 year old college student in Denver, Colorado.

from Dec 11, 2009

By Reb Culhane

Throughout the 20th century, voices that cut a little too close to the core of the New World Order, were silenced, slandered, and discredited. One such voice, was Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979.) A Roman Catholic priest of Canadian birth, Coughlin pioneered use of the radio to reach vast numbers of people during the 1930s era of Roosevelt's New Deal.  Father Coughlin spoke the truth in key areas which led to his consignment to the "wrong" side of history in official accounts. 

Originally a strong supporter of the Wall Street puppet FDR, Coughlin said, "The New Deal is Christ's Deal" and "God is directing Franklin Roosevelt." However, he soon changed his mind.  Coughlin became a staunch proponent of monetary reform and an early advocate of abolishing the Federal Reserve.

With the advent of Coughlin's radio program, he began to reach millions of people a week and by 1934 had become the most prominent Roman Catholic economic and political speaker.  Roosevelt himself sent Frank Murphy and JFK's father Joseph P. Kennedy to try and "tone him down." Coughlin ignored them and began to denounce FDR as a puppet of Wall Street. Coughlin also began to support the Louisiana populist leader Huey Long, who was murdered by the Illuminati.

Father Coughlin was a major opponent of the twin Hegelian heads of the New World Order, monopolistic capitalism and communism. He declared in 1935 "I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness."

Indeed, Coughlin was by very nature anti-globalist and supported the America First Movement of which Charles Lindbergh was a prominent figure.

"Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity" was a campaign slogan of Coughlin's organization, the National Union for Social Justice. Speaking like this brought the full scorn of the New World Order down on the outspoken Catholic priest.

SHUTDOWN

During its height, Coughlin's radio program was wildly popular, with listeners flooding his office with 80,000 letters a week. It is estimated that almost a third of the nation tuned in at the time. However, Coughlin's popularity gained him some powerful enemies. The Roman Catholic Church itself did not approve of him and the Vatican wanted him silenced. The Roosevelt administration was determined to shut down the "Radio Priest".

Eventually accomplished this by performing an end run around the 1st Amendment.  The administration decided that freedom of speech did not apply to broadcasting because radio was a "limited national resource" and should be regulated as a "publicly owned commons." New regulations were put into place demanding that regular radio broadcasters obtain operating permits. Coughlin was denied a permit and forced off the air.

He attempted to work around this by purchasing air time, but this became incredibly costly and reduced his resources and ability to reach people. Coughlin then resigned himself to publishing editorials in his own newspaper, entitled Social Justice. The Roosevelt administration acted predictably and revoked his mailing privileges, rendering him impotent in sending the paper out to subscribers.

Upon this, his influence was crippled. In addition, the attack on Pearl Harbor and entrance into World War II turned public opinion against anti-interventionists like Coughlin and official government propaganda smeared them as "collaborating with the enemy."

Thus, Coughlin faded into obscurity, spending his retirement keeping a low profile and writing anti-communist pamphlets until his death in 1979. His church, the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, still stands today and was declared a National Shrine by the United States Bishops Conference in 1998.

Modern history texts smear him as a demagogue and anti-Semite with fascist sympathies. This isn't surprising because the winners write history and the Illuminati has been the winner for quite some time now.

 Father Charles Coughlin was a strong anti-NWO activist and showed steadfast courage and bravery in his crusade to expose those who run the Shadow government. He pointed to the power structure, the central bankers, and called to abolish their control center, the Federal Reserve. For this he should be commended and held as an example for all patriots who value God, Freedom, and Country.

Coughlin's story also brings with it a strain of pessimism, though. After all, if a man who once had the attention of a third of the nation could not effect change, what chance do we have of doing so today?

Millennials like me were confused and incensed during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. We wanted reform. We wanted heads to roll. We got corporate welfare instead. In the ensuing decade and a half, we have listened and nodded along as politicians and news outlets rail against the greed of Wall Street grifters who packaged riskier and riskier mortgages in AAA-rated securities and then peddled them to unsuspecting investors, all the while preparing their own golden parachutes. We’ve all seen The Big Short. We all seem to agree about what happened and who’s to blame.

But this conversation never included a more fundamental issue, one every homeowner I know intuits on some level: housing cannot be both shelter and an investment. As shelter, it is far too expensive; as an investment, its price must go up. This is something Charles Marohn, the founder of the Strong Towns organization, and Daniel Herriges call the “housing trap.” In their new book, Escaping the Housing Trap, Marohn and Herriges lay out the problem and propose a way forward.

Housing as Investment

In the early part of the twentieth century, as building technology and housing quality improved, housing prices swung violently. When the federal government became involved in mortgage lending during the Great Depression, prices began to rise. Housing—or more precisely, mortgage paper—became a financial product. And Americans in the booming post–World War II economy needed something to invest in, generating ever-increasing demand for more mortgages. The need to make those investments safe was used to justify the practice of “redlining,” by which minorities were excluded from lending, and thus from building intergenerational wealth. With the help of these new financial products (along with cars, also bought with new consumer debt instruments), we embarked on what the authors call the “suburban experiment.” We built entire communities from scratch to a finished state and put them under glass using exclusionary zoning. They were only accessible by car, so we invented the strip mall, the shopping mall, the office park, and the hour-long commute.

In the years since the end of World War II, the cost of housing relative to inflation, as reflected in the Case-Shiller Index, has been on an upward climb. There have been bubbles like the Savings and Loan Bubble of the 1980s and the one that burst in 2008. Eventually, the government stepped in, lowering interest rates and buying bad mortgages, in order to stabilize prices and prevent a more widespread crisis.

But prices did not return to normal after these bubbles burst. After the subprime mortgage crisis, the Case-Shiller Index never again fell to the level it was in 2001, a time when analysts like Stephane Fitch and Josh Rosner were already warning of a bubble. Prices bottomed out in 2012 and then began climbing more steeply than they did in the last bubble. They are much higher now than they were at the peak.

Part of the problem, according to Marohn and Herriges, is that mortgages make bad investment instruments: 

When interest rates fall, the investment value of a 30-year fixed rate mortgage goes up. Someone owning a bundle of mortgages paying 6% annually is going to want to hang onto them when new mortgages are being made at 3%. Yet those are the exact conditions when the borrower refinances, terminating the 6% payment in exchange for a lower-yielding loan. The investor has no recourse but to give up their prized asset. The opposite happens when interest rates rise. Someone owning a bundle of mortgages paying 3% annually is going to want to trade them out when new mortgages are being bundled at 6%. That is exactly when homeowners hunker down. Again, the investor is stuck, this time with lower-yielding paper.

So why invest in mortgages? “Mortgages are at the foundation of our financial system,” the authors continue, “yet they are the worst kind of investment. The reason investors accept such bad payoff asymmetry is because the federal government is committed to keeping housing prices elevated” (emphasis added).

The government and financial institutions have decided that housing is an investment. They cannot let prices fall.

Housing as Shelter

So what is the problem with home prices going up? When housing is thought of as an investment, nothing. But that’s just it: someone has to live in that investment. Twenty years ago, the average American household was spending 23 percent of its income on housing. By the end of 2022, that number was 30 percent. We are in a well-documented crisis of housing affordability.

One of the causes of this crisis, according to Marohn and Herriges, is exclusionary zoning. These policies, which were widely adopted after the Village of Euclid Supreme Court decisions made them legal in 1926, allow governments to decide what land uses are allowed in what areas, and exclude all others. If you live in a detached single-family home, in a neighborhood full of single-family homes, that is probably because zoning ordinances dictate that single-family homes are the only thing that can be built there.

None of us wants to live beside a waste treatment plant or a paper mill. We want laws that prevent those from being built in our communities. But exclusionary zoning does much more than prevent harmful land uses from cropping up in neighborhoods: it prevents neighborhoods from maturing over time. Under the traditional development pattern, communities that thrived would gradually become denser and more various, with property owners converting homes into duplexes and quads, small apartment buildings supplanting rundown houses, and neighborhood-centric businesses opening to serve the community’s needs. None of this is possible under a regime of exclusionary zoning. Whole neighborhoods are now built all at once to a finished state. This is part of what Marohn calls “the suburban experiment.”

There are many problems with this pattern of development. Since home and places of work have been separated by statute, everyone needs a car. People without access to cars—the elderly, children, the disabled, and the poor—are stranded or stuck on inefficient public transit that must cover huge distances because of the low population density. The homes in these neighborhoods tend to be similar in quality and age, leading to de facto socioeconomic—and often racial—segregation.

But why has this led to a crisis in housing affordability? In places where housing is scarce, developers need to be able to build enough housing to keep up with demand, or prices will rise. But in most places that is not legal. If a community cannot add enough housing by adding density—growing upward—it will do so by growing outward.

This outward growth only worsens the problem, because it is fiscally unsustainable, as Charles Marohn showed convincingly in his book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. When a new suburb is built, it requires a large infrastructure investment. In the best cases, cities get developers to foot that bill. The city gets a sudden influx of property taxes from all that new housing. But roads, pipes, and treatment plants age, and after a decade or two, those maintenance bills start to exceed the tax revenue. Cities experience budget shortfalls and need another influx of property taxes to fill the gap. Marohn calls this the “suburban growth Ponzi scheme.” The problem, as he recently explained in an article about financially insolvent cities, is that “if you lose money on every transaction, you don’t make it up in volume.” Cities can keep it going as long as growth continues. 

But like the classic Ponzi scheme, the moment growth stops, the house of cards comes falling down. The mayor of Houston recently announced that the city’s finances were broken, facing a $160 million budget deficit. Communities across the country are feeling the same squeeze. In Portland, where I live, the Bureau of Transportation is facing $3.5 billion in deferred maintenance on about $20 billion in assets. Taxpayers will end up footing this bill, making their housing even more unaffordable.

A Path Forward?

Bad investing, exclusionary zoning, and the suburban experiment have helped to create the housing affordability crisis. But what is to be done about it? While they offer proposals for dealing with the housing trap, Marohn and Herriges are quick to explain that they are not providing a solution. They caution against the kind of top-down thinking denoted by the idea of a “solution to the housing crisis,” noting that such thinking created the problem in the first place.

But the authors provide several proposals that they believe would stabilize the cost of housing. The most important change is to allow neighborhoods to grow denser by relaxing exclusionary zoning ordinances. They recommend making the “next increment of density” legal everywhere; in a single-family neighborhood, this would mean allowing backyard cottages, duplexes, and neighborhood-centric businesses. And they call on communities to “release the swarm” of small-scale local developers necessary to build enough housing.

Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that cities “have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” That is the swarm the authors want to release. 

A Breath of Fresh Air

Housing is shelter. Its value as an investment is, if anything, secondary. We do not have enough housing in growing communities right now, and what we do have is far too expensive. In order for prices to come down, we need to build a lot more housing, and we need to do so fast.

We cannot do that without recognizing that this is not a partisan issue. The typical housing advocate is a leftist; the Yes, in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement has not yet caught on on the Right. But this dynamic seems to be in the middle of shifting, as almost every American is feeling the strain of unaffordable housing, and people across the political spectrum are looking for creative solutions. Escaping the Housing Trap is an example of this. 

Marohn, who started the Strong Towns organization in 2009, is not your typical housing advocate. He is a devout Catholic whose political views lean right. This is significant because it has allowed Marohn and his co-author to write a book that will not appeal just to progressives. The authors recognize several principles that conservatives tend to value, most importantly, fiscal responsibility and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the understanding, often articulated in Catholic social teaching, that the level of society that is best suited to address a problem is the smallest or most local level. More centralized levels of authority in society exist to support, rather than supplant, the lower levels. In the context of housing, this means that the people most capable of building housing that meets local needs are those already embedded in the communities that need more housing. Large-scale developers tend to build housing that changes communities in cataclysmic ways (and, as the authors point out, creates more NIMBYs). Local developers do not, both because that sort of housing is expensive to build, and because they are hesitant to fundamentally alter their communities. 

The most important thing local policymakers can do to get us out of the housing trap is to encourage this kind of incremental development in every possible way. This means relaxing exclusionary zoning ordinances, allowing so-called “granny flats,” or accessory housing units for extended family, long-term guests, or aging parents, and legalizing the next increment of density everywhere. These proposals are in everyone’s interest because they would allow our communities to grow organically, while bringing homeownership—one of the surest ways of building generational wealth and community stability—within reach of average Americans.

But cities that adopt these changes are not guaranteed success. In my hometown of Portland, we have made some of them but are not building nearly enough housing. Escaping the Housing Trap helped me understand why: you cannot open a door with several deadbolts until you’ve unlocked all of them. Here in Portland, we’ve changed some laws, but we have done nothing to remove the bureaucratic red tape that makes permitting, as I discovered when I tried to renovate my home recently, a nightmare that only deep-pocketed developers and insiders can survive. 

For American families, housing has become too expensive. We can make it more affordable if we build enough housing. But in order to do that, we cannot stop at making it legal; we need to make it easy.

Image by AnnMarie and licensed via Adobe Stock.