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Businesses are starting to announce restructurings and redundancies. It is going to get messy.
It was the quarter day yesterday. Which businesses failed to pay rent? Which landlords are going to breach finance covenants?
Specifically on rents, we have a Shadow Housing Minister who thinks cancelling rents is “regressive” and “un-Labour”.
https://labourlist.org/2020/05/cancel-the-rent-policy-would-be-un-labour-says-debbonaire/
Some of her further comments show a lack of imagination/competence that the Tory front bench would be proud of.
Focusing on rents and the issue of insulating houses is fantastic. These are both things that would make a real difference.
Rent and mortgage takes a large chunk of most people’s income. Writing down mortgages and rents would be a huge boost to the economy as many people would have more money to spend on goods and services.
But I am not clear how this could be done. It would, depending on how much was written down, transform the social fabric and even power structure. But I can see it would cause a political divide like we haven’t seen since the nationalisations of the post war period or the Great depression.
I accept
But those write downs will happen anyway as the economy melts down
I am suggesting a structured mechanism to achieve this
I accept that it will not be easy
I hope to come back with more detail when work is less pressing
Although it would be difficult, I think it would beneficial overall.
I look forward to your thoughts -but don’t overdo it, Richard. Pace yourself.
Home working, the collapse of the retail High Street and modern communications technology is not just going to transform the way people work, shop and play. It is going to transform the way that land is turned into rent. It becomes more difficult. This is unavoidable. No doubt new models will develop, but it is unlikely that will serve rentierism very well. This is a crisis. It is threatening, but it presents an enormous opportunity that was never going to present itself by any other means.
This requires to be thought through with imagination, and not just seen as a problem.
Again I come to this issue about supposed incompetence verses the banality evil.
I honestly think we are dealing with the latter. It is not a question of being incapable of doing the right thing – its about the ‘will’ going towards using that capability to do the wrong thing – QE into the already rich private banking sector so that basically those funding the Tory party will get a nice big hand out as this cash flows through their self enrichment system – not LA s, or schools or the NHS.
It is one big greed fest – that is all it is, aimed at the largely unseen Tory constituency in the Establishment who continuously outflank our democracy such as it is.
My view is that until we call it what it is (deliberate and calculated self-interest) we will not create the conditions necessary to induce change.
And never forget this (sorry to sound like I’m on soapbox) – everything the Tories do like this damages the image of the State – that is what people remember, and therefore the creation of the myth – seen in the book ‘Angrynomics’ you talk of this morning – that the State is useless, which means that market methods are sought instead. There is I assure you, a fiendish logic at work here.
What looks like incompetence is – be assured – deliberate. We are well on the way to being more like America. Read about Flint (Michigan) water supply problem for start and marvel at the bare faced way in which that was done in the U.S. And then think about how Covid 19 has been handled here.
All of this leads me to one final conclusion about what I call ‘North American Capitalism’ – something that has been making itself known here in UK increasingly and the rest of the world.
In the future, we are all going to be the Red Indian, the African Negro, the Rain Forest Tribe, if North American Capitalism is not checked. Yes – that’s right – even us so-called ‘privileged white folk’ are next. And BTW, I’m white working class and I have NEVER felt privileged living in the UK in my life. So think about that BLM.
Identity politics like Black Lives Matter and the English Defence League will continue to obfuscate the issue. The fate however of your children will not necessarily be about their race, it will about where they are situated in the economy and how much money they have. Using the old language, we need to consider that societies will be increasingly split by economic class – not race.
I say again, in the future no matter what race you are, we all going to be treated like Red Indians, Negroes and other exploited or cast aside indigenous peoples whom the monied Elite find a problem because we simply exist and they do not want to do anything for us or with us. Look at the shrinking of the middle class – black and white, consider that Flint, Michigan is a mixture of races (white too) and those poisoning that community do not care about that at all in order to make money.
Incompetence? No. Deliberate opportunistic greed? Yes indeed. I feel that that is what we are upon against. We are up against people who want the world for themselves. And us more normal or regular folk hardly figure in that vision at all.
Thanks
Thanks for the ‘thanks’ – I was really worried about my comments about BLM being misconstrued and all hell breaking loose.
BLM and other identity politics is fine by me because it does react to obvious injustice.
I do worry though however, about the ability of identity politics being able to find common cause with the broad spectrum of other progressive causes because it is only I’m afraid the sheer weight of numbers that will shift the purveyors of injustice from our political systems.
Identity politics is related to market segmentation theory in marketing in my view – how groups of people are broken down in order to sell them specific or targeted goods which you could say is sneaky and ethically dubious anyway.
But when it is used in politics, it has the potential to undermine collective movements and atomise/dis-aggregate them. It is a useful tool for divide and conquer.
Thanks.
I first heard of the Michigan water scandal when watching Fahrenheit 11/9. Had to turn it off – I will revisit, but is horrific.