Who Owns Debt?

Most people don’t do ‘economics’ – but actually quite a lot do end up running a budget of some kind – household, departmental and so on.  Of course,we can’t print money to make up for our blunders without the long arm of the law venturing near our shoulders.

The question my partner asks when I go off on one when media coverage sticks in my craw is ‘who owns the debt’?  This is a very Nietzsche-like question, as in the end debt has to be enforceable, and this makes it a police matter, much as one hopes that we don’t have police doing evictions.  The same principles that apply at Dale Farm apply in respect of debt.  If people won’t pay up the final resort is ‘sending the boys round’.

We have never managed to get rid of loan sharks (look at all the ads now for ‘payday loans’ and see if you can spot the interest rate at 2000% plus in the small print).  Their connections with banks are close.  All kinds of “specialists” are players in dodgy debt, including government debt, your debt and pretty much anything that can turn a profit faster than day-to-day business.  At the bottom of it all you will find such in-consequence as the suicide fashion that has killed a quarter of a million Indian farmers in very recent years.  Were they sold suicide insurance as I’ve seen included in Japanese loans?

We may like to think we have rid ourselves of the miserable exploitations found in ‘wog countries’  (what else are they in the mind of those who don’t care about these deaths?) – but they have reached Iceland, and even here credit card and other unsecured lending is being pursued by securitisation against property.

The truth on who owns debt is simple.  It’s owned by whoever can send the police round or the army in.  Britain’s government debt is 35% foreign owned – does this mean the Raving Loonies (who had a policy of selling Britain to the Arabs and giving us equal portions of the cash) got in when we weren’t looking?

We aren’t in the suicide misery of rural India yet.  But have a think about the cost of a reasonable time at university working only vacations is about £50K and in the 5 years of extra study you have lost maybe another £80K – £130K is about a mortgage.  You start paying back on £21K – which would get you a mortgage of about £60K.  We are thus loading many of our kids not only with serious debt by a bigger opportunity cost – and both are bigger than a sensible 30 year mortgage that would not buy a house anywhere in the country.  This system is as broken as the grim Indian farming debt system.

 

 

 

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Dale Farm Travelers and “human rights”

Given how long this saga has been running, could we have ‘traveler’ spelled with only one ‘L’ please?  As to the rest of it, Dispatches got to the root.  We don’t like what some travelers do and other travelers don’t stop them doing.  This involves miserable criminality from fly tipping, criminal damage and on to dismal con tricks, slavery and clowns who think armed robberies don’t hurt anyone.  Their culture is as internally racist as any.

The next consideration is why a council is spending £18 million of these bad neighbours when they won’t spend much smaller amounts on non-traveler scum.  Caught in the middle of current clown economics are decent travelers and many more of our own, stuck without affordable housing.  I doubt people hate travelers because they are travelers and anyone who does is a clown.  Being pissed off with people because of criminality, nuisance, filth creation and bad neighbourliness is a different matter.

No high-blown human rights issues really matter in any of this, as the arguments apply to all of us and thus use of this stuff for one small group is inflammatory.  We have a problem with poverty and social order across the board and refuse to deal with it. There should be sites for travelers with decent facilities and they should agree to stop protecting their own when they criminally transgress and stop using common resources without respect and forcing clean ups from our taxes.  But there should be housing for our own poor and isn’t, so is it remotely fair to single out travelers for favourable treatment?  What human right gives to one and denies another?

Eight Amish men are in jail (or were recently) because they refused to put orange safety triangles on their buggies.  This is a much smaller breach of law than what’s gone on at Dale Farm.  It’s stupid, but then that’s what we are in these situations.  They way the travelers present themselves as family people is fine – yet if this is how they came across in dealings with us, unless we’re turds, there would be no problem.  The truth is a long way from this.

I’d grant planing permission on the former scrap yard with severe conditions of tenancy making evictions of bad behaviour reasonably easy.  I’d build social housing with the same conditions.  Like many others, Dale Farm travelers are victims of their own scum – it’s time to deal with scum across the board and stop clown notions of racism being forced on us.