Airbnb Is "Helping" Ukrainian Refugees - While Creating an Even Bigger Refugee Crisis
Airbnb Is "Helping" Ukrainian Refugees - While Creating an Even Bigger Refugee Crisis
Corporate cognitive dissonance is engineering a humanitarian catastrophe
Do ya’ll remember Mila Kunis?
Played Jackie on That ’70s Show and Meg on Family Guy.
Married the actor-turned-venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher.
Her real name is Milena Markovna Kunis, and she was born in 1983 in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi in what was then the USSR.
When she was seven, her family fled to America, essentially as refugees.
Two weeks ago, Mila and Ashton launched a laudable GoFundMe to raise money to help Ukrainian refugees.
So far they’ve raised over $23 million.
Amazing, right?
There’s a slight catch.
All the money will go to fund two organizations:
The first is called, Flexport.org, which “coordinates shipments of supplies to refugees in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Moldova.”
Neat, I guess.
The second charity is…
…wait for it…
…wait for it…
Airbnb.
More specifically, more than $10,000,000 will go to Airbnb.org, “an independent nonprofit which works with Airbnb to provide free, short-term housing to refugees fleeing Ukraine.”
Does anyone else find it a tad ironic that a former refugee is helping refugees by funding one of the biggest refugee-creating corporations on the planet?
There are more than 580,400 homeless people in America as we speak.
Nearly 40% are permanently unsheltered.
That’s several hundred thousand men, women, and children.
13,000 of our homeless brothers and sisters die every year.
And 100% of their pain and suffering is preventable.
Let’s call these precious people what they really are:
Domestic refugees.
A domestic refugee is someone who is displaced from their home by powers outside of their control.
While Putin has created 2+ million Ukrainian refugees in the same way America caused 9.2 million Iraqi refugees, Airbnb is creating a global refugee crisis on a scale that will eventually make all warlords look like benign bullies in comparison.
While 500,000 Americans sleep on the streets like dogs, literally dying by the hundreds each week, Airbnb has taken millions of family homes off the market and turned them into full-time illegal hotels.
Every full-time Airbnb evicts a real family.
As we’ve discussed in previous articles, Airbnb is an absolute nightmare for local communities for all sorts of reasons.
In addition to simply stripping housing supply from local communities, the sheer act of commodifying residential real estate as an investment (even by renting individual rooms) has seen house prices surge and rentals skyrocket — that is, when they don’t disappear entirely. Airbnb extended the capitalist script by turning houses into abusive investments, extractive commodities to be sold to the highest bidder. Would-be homebuyers and renters are the ones who pay the heavy costs of Airbnb’s financial success.
Rents are crushingly competitive and shelter costs are insane in nearly every city on earth, and essentially all desirable locations are feeling the squeeze. I personally know dozens of people who’ve been pushed out of communities where they grew up because now it’s just Touristville. But for those who can afford to stay, they’re paying the extra cost of competing with vacationers.
In other words, Airbnb has made life more difficult and mathematically miserable for literally every person in every one of the 65,000 cities in which they operate.
And Airbnb is just getting started.
According to the company’s own IPO filing documents, they have plans to wage legal war against 100,000+ cities in order to continue to grow and metastasize forever.
If you look at the predator corporation’s trajectory, you can see things pretty clearly:
Airbnb’s business model is creating the greatest humanitarian shelter crisis in human history.
The cognitive dissonance of corporatists like Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is truly unfathomable.
He started the company back in 2007 because he was struggling to pay rent on his San Francisco apartment.
Today, he’s an oligarch who’s making it harder for hundreds of millions of families to keep a roof over their heads.
And now he’s a philanthrocapitalist pretending to be self-sacrificially generous…
While accepting money from a former refugee…
So he can help Ukrainian refugees…
While creating a global refugee crisis that makes Ukraine look like a drop in a bucket.
Do I even need to mention that Ashton Kutcher is an early investor in Airbnb?
You really can’t make this $#!t up.