Rent

[MacCruiskeen]

I forgot to say, Fuck Plastics.

Presumably you too own a toothbrush and a bank card and a computer and several foodstuffs & cleaning agents not supplied to you in paper bags, and presumably you also own or have owned at least one car, so you cannot possibly mean what you typed there. You typed it on a keyboard.

The problem is not plastics (per se) but power-relations, which are manifestly unsustainable and are therefore now being resisted with increasing vehemence and anger, all over the world*, by any means necessary.

Socialism or barbarism? The ruling class has a long-overdue choice to make. They can be carted to the guillotine on tumbrels, if they continue to insist on having it that way. Or else they can try to nuke the planet, double quick. What else is going to keep them both rich and safe? What else is going to satisfy the Great God Growth, if not Global War? Elon Musk's Mars Mission?

* except, of course, in the imperial Homeland, where the Trump Derangement continues unabated, and a TV-entranced populace continues to seek its salvation in the corporate media, the CIA, the Democratic Party, and a more fetching figurehead to take nominal charge of those 7,000 nukes.

[Iamwhomiam]

BBC:

Protestors storm Kensington Town Hall

jesus christ, that BBC reporter with his unforgivably stupid question ("Why do you think people are so angry?"), which he repeats and repeats and repeats like a robot, and his utter refusal to answer her incredulous question to him in return: "No. No. No. Why do YOU think they're angry? You're a reporter. Have you actually watched the news?"

Are these hacks actively trying to provoke a punch or a slap, so that "violence" can become the news?

Protests grow as fire anger increases

Theresa May heckled by angry crowds

I just finished watching the interview with May found down the page first linked to above and I really think she's as detached from reality as one could get. She never once responded directly to any question asked of her. The part of Mac's text quoted above I set in bold because if I was her interviewer, I might have decked her. I admire the interviewer's direct and pointed questioning of May, but I feel she should have cut May off and asked her to answer the question put directly to her. That woman has far more restraint than peaceable old me.

[MacCruiskeen]

Whatever the Quakers may claim, the problem is not difficult to solve. It is no more difficult than abolishing slavery, and it is essentially the same task. From page 1 of this thread:

Martha Lauren‏ @NQRW 17. Apr.

The idea of rent burden as greater than a third of income is darkly comic in a city where rents are regularly greater than half of incomes.

To put that another way, Londoners regularly labour for two weeks out of each month solely for the benefit of property owners.

07:17 - 17. Apr. 2017
Rents consume half of London's energy and productivity; life and soul.

https://twitter.com/NQRW/status/853975604483555328

Jacob Charles Wilson‏ @jclwilson 17. Apr.

Feudalism by any other name

Trevor Bastard 2000 ‏@OhMyDecades 2 hours ago.

Pre-Thatcher the average council housing rent was 7% of UK average income.

In the socialist world, rent was 3-4% of a family's income, capped at 5% in the USSR by Soviet law.

The peasants are revolting, and not for no reason.

[MacCruiskeen]

I just finished watching the interview with May found down the page first linked to above and I really think she's as detached from reality as one could get. She never once responded directly to any question asked of her.

That's been "politics" for the last 40 years. That's why so many people responded so strongly to Corbyn, despite a sustained and vicious media campaign against him, much of the worst of it in the so-called "liberal" media.

The part of Mac's text quoted above I set in bold because if I was her interviewer, I might have decked her. I admire the interviewer's direct and pointed questioning of May, but I feel she should have cut May off and asked her to answer the question put directly to her. That woman has far more restraint than peaceable old me.

IAWIA, that interviewer doesn't just have more restraint, she has a salary & a media-career she is extremely unwilling to endanger. Hence the restraint. Like most people, she doesn't want to become homeless or be forced to move into a firetrap. She knows which side her bread is buttered on, and she knows who butters it for her. Speaking truth to power is not a good career-move, because power controls the money faucet.

It's coercion all the way down, and the most reliable kind of coercion is self-coercion, which is best facilitated by regular and dependable bribes, i.e., a salary.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair, from I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935)

[MacCruiskeen]

That hulk must be visible from miles around. As long as it remains standing it will be a daily reminder to millions of people in the UK's richest borough and far beyond. A war monument.

Politics-as-usual is finished in the UK.

[Elvis]

This is a good report, just heard it on the radio. Depressing.

https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/after-the-bubble-burst/

After the bubble burst
Jun 10, 2017



America’s housing bust created both winners and losers – and homeowners have been the biggest losers. Last year, the rate of homeownership in the U.S. hit its lowest point since the 1960s.

So who are the winners? This episode of Reveal takes you into the world of people who are still profiting, from rent-to-own investors in Detroit to President Donald Trump’s best friend, a real estate mogul.

Reveal’s Aaron Glantz looks at the national home rental empire that Trump’s friend Tom Barrack created from the ashes of the foreclosure crisis. Barrack is good at profiting from others’ misery – his business model is based on a fast-churning cycle of penalty fees and eviction notices. Having made millions from single-family rentals, Barrack began leveraging his profit by bundling the homes into giant mortgage-backed securities – an inventive financial product similar to what many remember as a catalyst of the housing crash.

Another lucrative business model that’s gained new momentum from the housing crisis is offering “land contracts” to would-be homebuyers. These often predatory contracts promise a pathway to ownership for people who can’t get traditional mortgages. It turns out that land contracts are nothing new; they’re a big part of the story of housing segregation in America. Host Al Letson talks to a brother and sister who grew up in a Chicago house that their parents bought on contract.

Michigan Radio’s Sarah Hulett brings listeners to ground zero for the land contract business, Detroit. After the housing bubble burst, tens of thousands of homes in the city went into foreclosure. Investors snapped up the vacant, deteriorating properties, and now offer contracts on them with low down payments. But there can be devastating surprises waiting for the buyers, who are responsible for all repairs and maintenance, and can lose their investment overnight.

Dig Deeper

Read: Profiting off pain: Trump confidant cashed in on housing crisis
Update: Trump friend Thomas Barrack cashes out of Colony Starwood Homes
Share: Your challenges with renting and buying a home

Then see:


The Many Homes of Twi-hard Real Estate Tycoon Tom Barrack

[MacCruiskeen]

BBC: London fire: 58 missing, presumed dead - police

14 minutes ago From the section UK

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40315194

#GrenfellTower

Jason‏ @jasonosamede

I'm horrified but everyone is saying 100/200 dead but I really think it's up to 500

People are 'missing', where did they go? Because if they're not in the building they'd be outside/at the hospital

I live in a block. If it lights up like a matchstick you can only escape by miracle. All those stairs? All that height?

No wonder that filthy cant term "conspiracy theory" is already being wheeled out to combat these wholly rational, justified and obvious questions.

Kensington & Chelsea council knows exactly how many flats there were in that 27-storey tower block. (With how many flats on each floor?) They also know exactly how many tenants lived in those flats. So all the council need do is to compare that number with the number of tenants who have reported escaping with their lives but losing their homes, and subtract the latter figure from the fomer. The difference between those two figures provides a bare minimum number of people to report missing, presumed dead. (And NB, this figure will not include visitors, babysitters, boyfriends/girlfriends staying overnight, etc.).

It is not rocket science, ffs. It is basic arithmetic. A ten-year-old could manage it.

The official "response" to this "tragedy" crime is now nothing less than criminal itself.

[conniption]

The Architects Sketch - Monty Python's Flying Circus
Monty Python

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RicaXxiU1WM
Monty Python
Published on Feb 2, 2015

from the comment section:
alexiaNBC1 year ago
Funny thing is that the point of the second building design catching fire is based on a real building called Ronan Point in East London that caught fire from a gas explosion and caused parts of the floors to collapse. It just shows that nothing was off limits to Monty Python's satirical wit

Matthew Layford
Matthew Layford1 year ago
+alexiaNBC Well spotted, I saw this sketch as a criticism of mass social housing in the 1960s.

alexiaNBC
alexiaNBC1 year ago (edited)
+Matthew Layford Actually yes. Ronan point was part of the UK's attempt to construct cheap affordable housing and the fire pretty much killed the project and mandated better building maintenance regulations in the UK. Pretty much satirizing how the designers were creating buildings that put their tenants at serious risk by sacrificing cost

Xaveze
Xaveze1 year ago
+alexiaNBC and suddenly the flashing text at 4:50 makes a lot more sense.

[Cordelia]

BBC: London fire: 58 missing, presumed dead - police

14 minutes ago From the section UK

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40315194

#GrenfellTower

Jason‏ @jasonosamede

I'm horrified but everyone is saying 100/200 dead but I really think it's up to 500

People are 'missing', where did they go? Because if they're not in the building they'd be outside/at the hospital

I live in a block. If it lights up like a matchstick you can only escape by miracle. All those stairs? All that height?

No wonder that filthy cant term "conspiracy theory" is already being wheeled out to combat these wholly rational, justified and obvious questions.

Kensington & Chelsea council knows exactly how many flats there were in that 27-storey tower block. (With how many flats on each floor?) They also know exactly how many tenants lived in those flats. So all the council need do is to compare that number with the number of tenants who have reported escaping with their lives but losing their homes, and subtract the latter figure from the fomer. The difference between those two figures provides a bare minimum number of people to report missing, presumed dead. (And NB, this figure will not include visitors, babysitters, boyfriends/girlfriends staying overnight, etc.).

It is not rocket science, ffs. It is basic arithmetic. A ten-year-old could manage it.

The official "response" to this "tragedy" crime is now nothing less than criminal itself.

One morning years ago, I was visiting a couple who rented an apartment in a Washington D.C. tenement, when an older Ethiopian man came into the room, thanked them, and left w/his bundle of belongings. He spent every night sleeping in their closet. Sometimes other undocumented homeless men slept there also before disappearing back onto the streets during the day. So there could very well have be other nameless victims not ‘officially’ living/sleeping in that Inferno.

Just outside Washington last summer, a gas line explosion killed and displaced a large number of immigrant adults and children. Their rent of $1,200.00 per month made it necessary to take in other boarders, probably not listed as tenants; it's not uncommon, in U.S. cities, at least.

For immigrant residents displaced by Silver Spring fire, finding new home may not be easy
By Antonio Olivo and Bill Turque August 20, 2016

‘We don’t feel safe’

About one-third of the Washington area’s households are rentals, and tenants up and down the economic ladder are stretched financially. The Urban Institute found that about half of the region’s renter households are “cost-burdened,” the federal government’s term for those paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing.

Cost is only one obstacle for low-income immigrant families. Poor credit or records of late rent payment — some triggered by a delay of just a few days — can lead to a rejected application. Illegal immigration status also leaves them ineligible for housing vouchers and other rental assistance.

When families do find something, it can be a place such as Flower Branch, a 60-year-old garden-apartment development with chronic maintenance problems, according to county records and tenant interviews.

Mice, roaches and bedbugs, mold from water damage, and broken stove fans surface repeatedly in code-violation reports. Although there is no evidence that these problems contributed to the Aug. 10 tragedy, they are an indication that conditions at Flower Branch were poor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md ... 11e6-96c0- 37533479f3f5_story.html?utm_term=.ebec6de560f2

(I can’t imagine this for apartment dwellers in neighboring, tonier, Bethesda, Chevy Chase & NW D.C.)

[Luther Blissett]

Something's going to change soon. At least in London. There are far more of us than them.

Here, there's been an egregious case of landlord-tenant abuse with a filthy rich, $12,000-shoes owning, Louis XIV couch-sitting manque landowner booting 200 families out of a building he owns in order to make way for higher-priced properties for, presumably, richer, whiter people. Remarkably, he actually came down from his tower to talk with the tenants who were protesting him, signs telling him that he "hates poor people" shoved right in his slick face. I couldn't believe it. And not one, but two rigorous intuition posters were there.

We're a long way from destroying the ownership class or popping off in any meaningful way any time soon without a bigger catalyst (the mostly poor, older, sometimes disabled tenants who are being displaced with nowhere to go in about two weeks are not attracting the numbers of supporters I'd hoped for), but maybe this can happen in London, and if it does, I'll support it.

I heard the word "occupy" pass Corbyn's lips earlier, is that accurate? What a time to be alive.

[Cordelia]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oohmvzkwWEw

Meanwhile, while many suffer and/or protest, the cavalier Royals laugh and celebrate, trooping their Colours and Cavalry.








https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96k1RIddc5U

[MacCruiskeen]

Disaster Capitalism, at home and abroad:

[MacCruiskeen]

Grenfell Tower: 120 flats, 600 inhabitants. Officially 58 dead. Where are the others? Interview with @DJISLA

Press TV UK· 16. June at 12:00 ·

Angry and emotional resident says aid effort for Grenfell Tower victims is in vain because they are all dead and no one will admit it, least of all the authorities.

https://www.facebook.com/presstvuk/vide ... 345850347/

https://twitter.com/DJISLA

[JackRiddler]

True enough on plastics though I'm sure iam thinks so.

This is not true:

* except, of course, in the imperial Homeland, where the Trump Derangement continues unabated, and a TV-entranced populace continues to seek its salvation in the corporate media, the CIA, the Democratic Party, and a more fetching figurehead to take nominal charge of those 7,000 nukes.

Don't confuse reality with the TV image of the populace, or with the demographic who post a lot about the Putin-Trump psyop, or with the faces who get on TV. I submit the populace is no more TV-entranced than has been average in the last 50 years. Remember, I came of age with "America Held Hostage." The popular hold of the current imperialist permanent-state military-entertainment complex propaganda is far less than then. The main problem for now remains ignorance of the world and lack of a common set of terms (so that the resort to whatever is being blah-blahed tubeside is easier).

There are big and growing movements not taking their cues from the TV or the Democrats. Compare the size and vigor of Black Lives Matter, NoDAPL and the immigrant solidarity actions nationwide with that ludicrous politician-led Russia "Truth" demo of a couple of weeks back. Consider the Chicago teachers' union strikes.

As an example of which I have first-hand knowledge, I know a lot of young people who have gone into the leftish Democratic Socialists (DSA) which has ballooned in New York. You'd believe from the TV that this population group (young, educated, left-liberal, urban, "millennial" meaning economically precarious) is motivated by Trump-Putin. Before you criticize DSA, correctly, that is not remotely the case, I guarantee you, e.g., people actually remember who Comey has always been, for example what he did before the election, and they regard it as a show, as you do. They're all in despair about the direction of the Democrats other than Sanders. (Debate away about the latter. And Sanders is it. People have seen through Warren.) The new people are also now by far the majority in DSA and what it will become is open. Their primary issue focuses are single-payer and protecting public education, student debt and the like. No need to exaggerate or have false hopes, but the movements are here and generally not deluded.

If I vest hope currently, it's in the UK developments, the possibility of Labour coming to power there under Corbyn and the effects on the U.S. If populist (in the best sense) developments in any other country can open a sense of possibilities and influence and motivate movements in the U.S., it would be the UK. (Conceivably also Anglo-Canada or Mexico via the Spanish-speaking population, but far less likely. For whatever set of historical reasons, UK is better followed and comprehended.)

We do lack a meaningful politically effective structure that allows entry and can be flooded with a new majority, as happened with Labour.

.

[smoking since 1879]

Inquiry. The Great British Housing Disaster (Adam Curtis, 1984)



watch it while it's still there

edit:
can someone do the social media thing with this start time pls
https://youtu.be/Ch5VorymiL4?t=45m26s