build a wall round the poor

luka

Well-known member
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/14/italy.worlddispatch
The Serenissima housing estate. A large and ugly barrier has been erected to help protect local residents from the run-down apartment blocks, largely filled with immigrants. Stretching for 84 metres, three metres high and made of thick steel panels, there is a police checkpoint at the entrance as well as CCTV cameras. The project has been welcomed by local people but is highly controversial. The barricade has already been dubbed Padua's Berlin wall and has reignited a debate about how to treat foreign migrants.

see also isreal, mexico-us border, australian 'off-shore solutions', fortress eu
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html
An apartment in this publicly owned housing is also known as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the social status and degree of political influence of those expected to rent them. The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only their own nest.”
gated communities, city of quartz, cities under siege, escape from new york, etc etc
 

luka

Well-known member
US-Iraqi forces will supposedly clear militias from civilian streets which will then be walled off and the occupants issued with ID cards. Only the occupants will be allowed into these "gated communities" and there will be continuous patrolling by US-Iraqi forces. There are likely to be pass systems, "visitor" registration and restrictions on movement outside the "gated communities". Civilians may find themselves inside a "controlled population" prison.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...d-rule--americas-plan-for-baghdad-444178.html
 

vimothy

yurp
Alzv5w9CMAArM8j.jpg:large


 

luka

Well-known member
thats good vimothy. i looked at the twitter account you got it from. ive seen these people before. they're very voluble. are they right do you think? can you give me a brief summary of what its abut? not neccessarily here on this thread although i dont mind. ive seen you say the same things i think. that public deficit=private surplus. is that the crux of it or is there more.
 

vimothy

yurp
that public deficit=private surplus. is that the crux of it or is there more.

Right--that's basically the crux of it, where "it" is their particular school of thought. I've come to see these guys as being interesting, but often misguided. There is some truth to what they say but also some nonsense.

One issue is this: There are a set of accounts and accounting identities that describe the quantitative macroeconomic behaviour of the economy (e.g. public deficit=private surplus). The school of thought to which "deficit owl" belongs views them as being the holy grail of economic understanding.

It's certainly true that understanding them is necessary for any serious large scale macro analysis, and I'm sympathetic to this aspect of their thought. But although their national accounting is often good, their economic theory and the way they then interpret the accounts can be quite bad.

A case in point is this piece, by "deficit owl", aka Professor Stephanie Kelton of UMKC: http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/06/what-happens-when-government-tightens.html

I find it mind-boggling-ly confused. That a professor of economics cannot distinguish between accounting identities and structural, causal relationships... :eek:
 

Bangpuss

Well-known member
Greenland? I thought they were dirt poor, or they would be if Denmark didn't give them loads of money.
 

Dr Awesome

Techsteppin'

That's interesting, I'm surprised Singapore isn't included on that map, and I'm curious about NZ's placement on it. NZ has got a patchy policy and history on the whole boat people thing for sure... could go either way I suspect.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
wrt Luka's original post, the French have pretty much perfected exiling poor people to the margins of the city. though I don't know the history of how they did this in the ifrst place. I'm guessing in much the same way as the Tories are attempting to rid London of poor people at the moment, by outpricing people with the logic that 'the inner city is an expensive area; to live here is a privilege and not a right'.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
also, chicago is the epitome of this concept. it's the most racially segregated city in the U.S. + it's also highly economically segregated (the 2 are related obviously).

Chicago's the only US city I've spent any real time in and the separation of it into Downtown and Everywhere Else is just astonishing, I mean on a purely visual/architectural level. You've got this incredible skyscraper city that extends for about two miles along the lakefront and half a mile inland, then there's a sudden cutoff and the rest of the city extends for miles and miles all around, with hardly any buildings taller than a few stories. Just amazing. As you approach the city centre it actually looks like a cliff face.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
What I found interesting about recent trips to Joburg and Durban were how the city centres were deemed to be deserted, no-go areas at night. We spent alot of time talking about whether this was just what happens in the development of cities - see central london of old etc, or whether this was a newer thing.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"wrt Luka's original post, the French have pretty much perfected exiling poor people to the margins of the city. though I don't know the history of how they did this in the ifrst place. I'm guessing in much the same way as the Tories are attempting to rid London of poor people at the moment, by outpricing people with the logic that 'the inner city is an expensive area; to live here is a privilege and not a right'."
Yeah but they expect law and order to be maintained and health issues to be dealt with by menials shipped in like cattle on financially ruinous trains and shipped out again every evening.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I'm guessing in much the same way as the Tories are attempting to rid London of poor people at the moment, by outpricing people with the logic that 'the inner city is an expensive area; to live here is a privilege and not a right'.
I'm normally up for a bit of Tory bashing, but do you really believe that they're deliberately using house prices as a means to the end of driving poor people out of London? My reading would be that they see London house prices as a product of the Noble All-Knowing Free Market That Must Not Be Interfered With, and are either too short sighted to see that segregating the poor into banlieus will lead to massive social problems or are Alright Jack themselves and hence don't care.
 

hucks

Your Message Here
I'm normally up for a bit of Tory bashing, but do you really believe that they're deliberately using house prices as a means to the end of driving poor people out of London? My reading would be that they see London house prices as a product of the Noble All-Knowing Free Market That Must Not Be Interfered With, and are either too short sighted to see that segregating the poor into banlieus will lead to massive social problems or are Alright Jack themselves and hence don't care.

I think he's talking about the housing benefit cap. And they are using it as a means of driving poor people out of London.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Not house prices as such, but destroying housing benefit. House prices of course are insane too. Edit: hucks, you got there first

yeah, I do think it's social engineering though. The free market is just a mantra to return to as an excuse to do horrible things - it's hardly as though the Tories or any other government actually believe in a properly free market when it threatens their/their mates' interests. What does a truly free market even mean?

Also, I don't think anyone believes the tories care about social problems in and of themselves - they'll deal with them by whatever repressive tactics they choose, and they give the opportunity to bring in ever more repressive legal measures. Often there's at least a little doubt about how much contempt governments really have for their subjects in general/ esp. their subjects with no power, but with this government there's no doubt.

Slightly but only slightly off topic, this does my head in:

"The controversy over the scheme continues as Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, prepares to announc eon Tuesday that the government is to spend £126m to target help for 55,000 16 and 17-year-olds not in education school or training in England ."
Why did you cancel Education Maintenance Allowance then, you cunts? Is it just because it cost more than £126m? One thing that can never be underestimated is the sheer breathtaking dont-give-a-fuck incompetence of government.
I see, it cost £560m. So...rather than at least being logical cunts and scaling it down, they cancelled it and then reinstituted some of it under a different name.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
However you slice it, it is outrageous that so much tax money goes straight into the pockets of private landlords via housing benefit. One sensible way to remedy this would be to build lots of affordable social housing, which would force down what private landlords could charge through price competition and increased supply, or even to place some sort of reasonable cap on what a landlord can charge for a property of a given size and type in a given area (don't they have something like this in Scotland?).

Or, of course, you could just cap benefits in despite of the massively inflated private rental market, and therefore cause landlords with tenants on benefits to boot them out in favour of people who can afford the extortionate going rate. Oh, they're doing that already. Hurrah, problem solved.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Not house prices as such, but destroying housing benefit. House prices of course are insane too. Edit: hucks, you got there first

yeah, I do think it's social engineering though.

Why do you think that?

Cutting housing benefits is entirely consistent with the general tory approach of cutting all other sorts of benefits, made populist by "mother of 17 living in million pound mansion in mayfair gets 500,000 a week in benefits" type tabloid press hype. If it didn't have the effect of forcing poor people out of central London but bolloxing them up in some other way instead, it would still be entirely consistent with everything else they do. So how do you deduce that it's motivated by social engineering?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm not sure it's particularly relevant whether benefits caps have been introduced specifically to clear unemployed/low-income people from certain areas or if that's just an inevitable consequence of the standard Tory attitude of free market good, welfare state bad. In moral terms I think doing [x] deliberately to achieve [y] is not much different from doing [x] for some other reason in the full knowledge that [y] will happen as a result.
 
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