The Roscommon house eviction in Ireland is going viral on the Internet. *FOOTAGE* OVER 1000 PEOPLE PROTEST ROSCOMMON EVICTION (17 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Make no mistake. Your elected leaders have limited power. The deep state intelligence complex runs the show. They expand their own power at the cost of your rights. Your vote is increasingly meaningless. The deep state owns the secrets of politicians and judges. They own you too.— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 15, 2018
It starts with eroding property rights, headlined by a recent incident in Falsk, outside Strokestown, County Roscommon, Ireland on 16 December 2018. When Belgian KBC Bank hired Northern Irish security guards to evict a small family from a foreclosed farmhouse on Tuesday, 11 December, an armed gang of some twenty men assembled by the Sunday after the family had departed. Just after 5 o'clock in the morning, they attacked the bank's eight guards who had taken possession of the house with baseball bats. They burned out the security guards' four cars, injured their attack dog so badly it had to be put down, and left three guards in the hospital. It looks like the owners of the foreclosed house may shortly be reinstalled in their home.
This vigilantism was obviously the product of local and social media buzz building between last Tuesday and last Saturday. The townsfolk felt that the foreclosure was unnecessarily brutal and they also disliked the fact that the eviction was scheduled right before Christmas. It was inhumane. From The Irish Examiner:
"One man said: 'I felt sorry for the family because I knew them for years, I grew up beside them and I suppose like every family they did try their best. They should have been given time and there should be more people out at that gate.'A woman said: 'It is shocking. You wouldn't throw an animal outside the door, they were treated like animals.' ...
The bank's hiring of Northern Irish mercenaries was the final straw. One Youtuber remarked: "this is a joke we need to have some balls like the French and yellow vest these orange bastards." Another commented:Independent Roscommon TD Michael Fitzmaurice claims up to 40 to 50 people are walking away from their homes because they are afraid of going through the court system. ... 'A lot of people are losing their home or a piece of land. We are dealing with too many cases, we’re trying to deal with the banks and the vulture funds,' he said."
"Eviction has a particular connotation, in Ireland, since famine times, and before. There is a visceral reaction to the concept, in the gut of every Irish person over a certain age. A horror of eviction is buried deep in our [psyche], and in our cultural memory. KBC bank clearly has no grasp of the cultural sensitivities in the matter, or cares less. I can't comment on the case details, because I don't know enough to do so. But there is always a right, and a wrong way, to approach every issue."
The aftermath of the Roscommon attack on the security guards who were hired by the KBC Bank to repossess a family's house. Anti Irish Bankster terror gang burnt out after stealing pensioner's home (16 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Roscommon Eviction Interview (16 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Australian Housing
In the video below, the tongue-in-cheek real estate ad reveals some of the underlying problems with real estate in the global financial system.
Most Creative Real Estate Ad Ever!!! (27 March 2011). Video Source: Youtube.
Bricks and slaughter: Part one - Exposing Australia's housing crisis | 60 Minutes Australia (17 September 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Bricks and slaughter: Part two - Exposing Australia's housing crisis | 60 Minutes Australia (17 September 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Data expert reveals the harsh reality of Australia's housing crisis | 60 Minutes Australia (18 September 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Housing Bubble Canada Aus Housing Bubbles ECONOMISTS CLASH AUSSIE HOUSING CRASH VS RISING PRICES (16 November 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Canadian Housing
In late September 2018, HuffPo reported that Canada was at risk as the first cracks appeared in global housing bubbles.
An alt-view: Canadian Housing Markets WILL CRASH! - This Is Why The Bubble Will BURST (19 September 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Canada’s Housing Market - Tough Times Ahead? (28 May 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Canada's real estate market slows down (17 May 2018). Video Source: CBC/Youtube.
Eisman Sees 'Severe Correction' for Canadian Housing (16 October 2017). Video Source: Bloomberg/Youtube.
The Bank of Canada Is Now Buying Canada Mortgage Bonds What it Means for Canadian Real Estate (15 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
U.S. Housing Market Struggles With Rising Rates, Prices (21 November 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Millennial Youtubers were skeptical about the Bloomberg report above:
"'Millenials don’t really appreciate 4-5% interest rate'LMAO! Maybe because the median home at $300,000 is 5 times the median household income of $60,000.How out of touch are these people?Real estate price inflation over the last few years has been insane, for every 1 dollar millenials save each year, houses go up 2. It’s a moving goalpost.So you spent 5 years saving up for a downpayment on a $200k house? Congratulations, now that same house is $350k. Ridiculous."
Housing Bubble 2.0 - You Can't Handle the Truth - Bubbles Are Popping - Q3 Flipping Report (7 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Housing Bubble 2.0 - The Greatest Crash Ever Headed Our Way? (4 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Housing Bubble 2.0 Crash 2018-2019 (16 September 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
West Coast Housing Bubble Bursts Even Without Tech Bust (And the inevitable Tech Bust will come on top of it.) (9 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
A typical report on increasing homelessness: Advocates for homeless say Dallas faces affordable housing crisis (27 November 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
The everything bubble will burst, and not just in Australia, Canada and finally, the United States, where household debt reached USD$13.3 trillion in August 2018. The Chinese have been dominating country after country with big project debt-traps, but are prey to an internal debt crisis themselves. There are similar reports from the UK and New Zealand. Bloomberg states that "from London to Sydney and Beijing to New York ... it's the end of the global housing boom." The UN speaks of a global housing crisis. In trying to analyze this trend, the Financial Times was pretty feeble:
That's it? Just fix the planning rules? Thanks FT. I would argue that the housing crisis reflects the shift from one century to another, perhaps even from one millennium to another. The destruction of property ownership strikes at the heart of a certain way of living; it is central to citizens' economic stability, private aspirations, and their sense of security and democratic independence."The cost of housing in big western cities is one of the great economic and political problems of our age. From Sydney to Vancouver, and San Francisco to pretty much anywhere in south-east England, the cost of a place to live stops people moving to good jobs, creates vast inequity between young and old, and lowers the quality of life for millions.Over the past few years, the cause of those high costs has become more widely understood: restrictive planning and zoning rules lead to a chronic lack of supply in the places where people want to live. Building was a central issue in San Francisco’s mayoral election this year; British Conservatives often blame supply shortages these days, even if they are slow to act on them. ...Politicians often promise to 'build more homes'. But really this is just counting houses again: it will lead to small, low-quality dwellings in places nobody wants them, built to make up the numbers. Instead, reform the planning rules, and let people build homes where they are actually wanted."
The shock waves hitting the housing sector over the past twenty years demand a change in philosophy on how to live and how to see reality. Some of the securities of the past may be preserved, but we must also reconcile those attitudes toward property with dynamic population flows and reconsider how property relates to wealth, freedom and technology. You can't live in a truly international environment if you are tied by property to one place. At the same time, if you live a wholly international life and own nothing, you are economically and socially vulnerable in your lack of grounded connections to the world around you.
The housing crisis shows how broken and unjust the UK is | Owen Jones talks (26 October 2017). Video Source: Youtube.
A Simple Question: 'Huge Rise In UK Homelessness & Hammond’s New Plans' (20 November 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
DEAN BUCKNER on the UK Housing Market's Future (8 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
The subtext of crisis chatter is that we are livestock, herded in a panic toward a global cashless society. Even German mainstream outlets confirm that poverty in the developed world is on the rise. Conditioned to find security, reputation, and power in money and material objects - so the chatter goes - the human animal cannot survive psychologically when these props are decimated, removed and digitized.
The truth is the complete opposite.
France's 'Yellow Vests' Protests: Understanding the Collective Rage | Dispatches (10 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
We are not so helpless, nor so blind. The current system betrayed its people. Its dreams depend on printed money, borrowed against a future which we frantically try to make manifest before indebtedness consumes us.
Of course, there's nothing good about losing your home, nor in going bankrupt, nor in never being able to own a home at all. But these concerns are symptomatic of larger problems which must be addressed: the system must change. And consumers must transform how they interact with the system. Otherwise, we will all end up homeless and dependent on universal government incomes. City Lab reports that a drifting, property-less population is "baked into the 21st century global city."
AlJazeera concurs and predicts where all this is going. Unless we, as citizens and consumers, figure out at the grassroots level how to preserve the institution of property ownership in a new way, we are guaranteed a rootless existence, at the mercy of larger institutions that will microchip us and decide our destinies. There are two competing sets of values here. One is the betrayal of housing, a previously safe investment, when it was transformed in the 1990s and 2000s into a global financial investment vehicle. The other view sees housing and related private finances as a decisive factor in preserving fundamental human rights. According to AlJazeera, the housing crisis erodes those rights:
In short, the challenge is to escape the closing jaws of debt slavery, improve mobility, while maintaining some parts of the old system, in which property offered stability and economic independence."Housing is viewed as a way to 'grow wealth and that has changed the way in which housing operates ... It means ... you have investors, private equity firms, vulture funds, buying up housing. Who is their principle concern? It's their investor and if they're using housing to satisfy their investor interests, what do they have to do with that housing if it's rental housing? It's obvious, they have to increase the rents.'The right to adequate housing is enshrined in Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration for Human Rights, which states that 'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.'"
An international correction or crash under these circumstances could force a shift in perspective, a massive dismantling of delusion and addictive, divergent behaviours, fed by fake credit. Economic security must be founded in different attitudes, connected to the present moment. The entire economic system must be based on a different perception of time, something I discussed in another post, Bitcoin: Economy of the Eternal Now. We have to stop living on borrowed time and the future promises of credit created in a mortgaged present.
Money always represents a combination of potentialities and opportunities for stability. That is, it is both dynamic and non-dynamic in relation to how we see the past, present and future. It is time to reconsider the working permutations of money.
France Protests: Yellow vest movement supported in small towns (13 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Saturday's yellow vest protest in Paris is calmer and smaller (15 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Belgian protesters call for resignation of PM (15 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Water cannon used on yellow vest protesters in Belgium (15 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
French yellow vest protest moves to Netherlands (13 December 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Critics say that governments, banks, corporations and individuals have all been behaving like drug addicts who have replaced consciousness with hits of micro-narcissism and materialism. It's not the debt that will kill consumers, it's the heartbreak and disillusionment they experience as they sober up. Nobody can be blamed for believing the shiny dreams marketed to them by consumer culture, banks and governments. Nor can consumers be blamed for using credit to cover immediate shortfalls. The offers of easy credit were deliberately designed to keep the system going; but on another level, they were also meant to create debt slaves who, down the road, would never catch up.
The looming crisis offers an opportunity to find ways to diminish that vulnerability without lapsing into dependency on banks and governments. We must overcome the compulsion to survive by clinging to illusions and lies. It looks like that shift in mentalities is ongoing. You could call it a long, hard journey back to reality.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment