The Roots of the Housing Crisis
In Britain chronic shortage of affordable housing is the issue that never goes away.
It turns out that there are some programmes on the subject – I’ve never watched them.
This recent BBC programme is on the Brighton & Hove Advocate’s YouTube Channel
Here’s part 2:
It Wasn’t Me
Are the Media, Banking, & Construction oligopolies that captured the Government going to suddenly admit it was them all along?
I just saw this story in the FT (click to bypass the paywall):
Are Savills painting themselves out to be the victims?
Some questions :
- Who is responsible for building affordable housing?
- Is it Local Government, Central Government, Charity, or the Private Sector?
- Should there be more ambitious building targets? How else can the state ensure an increasing supply?
- What is the role of the financial system? Does it need to change?
- What ideas are most commonly floated in relation to housing and finance?
- What has contributed to the problem?
- Given there is a sense of market failure, who are the winners, who loses out, and is there a blame game at play?
- Do the people who are not properly housed in this country have any agency? Who will help them? Where is the accountability in the system?
- Is there any real ambition to solve this problem, or are the people making money from the broken system lobbying to maintain the status quo?
Some more programmes:
Hush Money
Scrolling through the news yesterday Donald Trump appears to have met the McLaren driver (who won) before yesterday’s F1 race in Miami.
Interesting that a property developer facing fraud charges in relation to hush money he paid a porn star is the number one contender to lead the free world.
There’s a whole Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) subplot here as it turns out that Stormy Daniels’s lawyer arranged for celebrity sex-related NDAs, ie hush money) in several other cases
Pale Blue Eyes
Whistleblowers
Boeing whistleblowers will not be encouraged by the recent deaths of Boeing whistleblowers.
As with Stormy Daniels, it would be normal to expect Boeing staff to have signed NDAs.
The equivalent of corporate hush money.
But of course, under certain circumstances, their silence is broken.
#MeToo
Harvey Weinstein – that great friend of Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell – is being retried for his rape convictions in New York – let’s see what he can also get done in California.
Weinstein famously hired former Israeli Military intelligence executives’ outfit Black Cube to go after his accusers before being taken down by Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. Ronan’s father Woody Allen was also friends with Epstein – who even helped Noam Chomsky with his finances.
Hush money and media silence appear to be very much the norm in Western societies.
Israeli Private Intelligence Firms
Epstein and Israel
Novara has done some good work lately but they are not that different from the MSM in terms of what they talk about. They mistreated Jackie Walker, George Galloway (who blocked me for not much, I must say) and haven’t been great on Julian Assange or Covid. But as I said, when they’re good they’re good.
Finkelstein on Netanyahu
Just as Israeli society is very much in favour of oppressing Palestinians, so to does UK society keep voting in right wing imperialist Zionist sympathisers.
UK Media Fear of Anti-War Candidates
Banning TikTok & Controlling the Narrative
When the US allowed billions to be sent to Ukraine and Israel a couple of weeks ago they also sneaked in a TikTok ban
TikTok outside China is already 60% owned by overseas investors including the Carlyle Group private equity firm which famously held a meeting in New York on September 11th 2001 and whose shareholders at the time included the Bin Laden family, Bushes, and John Major.
The US wants TikTok to be 100% US-owned.
Maybe they think that this will stop students at US universities from calling out the US, UK, EU backed Israeli genocide and the push to Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS)
Israel ban Aljazeera
Israel’s decades of human rights violations mean that it should not come as a surprise that they have banned Aljazeera
UK Poverty
Ex-BBC Economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders states that poor people in the UK would now be better off being poor in other European countries.
China & Macron talk trade
China to allow French cosmetics more access to Chinese Markets?
Roger & Ranjan discuss the rise of independents in the Local Elections
Roger Lewis and I have been chatting online again recently – hopefully we’ll meet up in London again tomorrow for a property event at Excel Centre. Unlike many people I know, Roger pays lots and lots of attention to the news cycle as he is a businessman and needs to know what’s going on.
Olivier Messiaen
Trippy Electronic music from the 1930s
