Make BoBono History: Confronting the Geldof-Bono Obsenity

sufi

lala
interesting but deeply scary update on bob's benghazi escapade here: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/hisham_matar/2007/09/no_hope_for_change.html
hisham matar said:
A couple of days after Seif al-Islam's speech and Sir Bob Geldof's attempted gig, an eyewitness account, published in the dissident news website Libya Al-Mustaqbal, stated that around 400 young men, blindfolded and handcuffed, were seen stepping off an airplane in Tripoli International Airport. The men were packed into prison trucks and driven away. The plane had come from Benghazi.
:eek::eek::eek::eek:

international meeja finally catches up with dissensus, but still noone's saying wtf he was doing there
 
Bono's Egg-Head, 120-metre ego-mania to completely dominate Dublin's skyline. I think I'll go make an omelette [Where's Owen Hatterley when you need him!?].

British architect chosen to design U2 Tower

12/10/2007 - 18:06:25

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Internationally renowned British architect Norman Foster was today announced as the visionary behind Ireland’s first skyscraper – the U2 Tower.

The €200m scheme, which will soar 120 metres over Dublin’s docklands, will house the iconic rock band’s egg-shaped recording studio at its peak.

It was commissioned by Geranger Ltd, a consortium including property developers Ballymore and U2 members Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen Jnr and Adam Clayton.

Mr Foster, whose notable projects include the Gherkin in London and the Millau Viaduct in France, was chosen by Dublin’s Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) as the project‘s design winner.

Paul Maloney, DDDA Chief Executive, said: “We are delighted to have achieved our ambition of realising an inspirational landmark design, while at the same time maximising public usage and access.

“This design will be a very special building for Docklands and Dublin City while integrating the Britain Quay and U2 Tower buildings in a distinct and coherent fashion on the waterfront,” he said.

As well as the band’s recording studio, the inspirational building will include a public viewing platform at 100 metres, a public amenity area at the base, hotel, retail and residential accommodation including 20% social and affordable housing.

“It will also provide visitors the opportunity to experience spectacular views across Dublin city and bay, and for the community offers significant social and affordable housing potential,” Mr Maloney said.

An original U2 Tower plan – a twisting structure designed by a Dublin-based architectural firm – was to be built at a height of just 60 metres.

But following a recent planning amendment for the area, the tower was redesigned and increased to 120 metres in height with an adjoining site added.

The announcement of preferred bidder status for Geranger Ltd followed a EU tendering process where submissions from four short-listed consortia were considered.

Mr Foster is an internationally acclaimed architect, having designed some of the world‘s most iconic structures.

These include the Millau Viaduct in France – the tallest vehicular bridge in the world – the Bilbao Metro and New York‘s Hearst Tower.

The U2 Tower will be located in the Grand Canal Dock area, where DDDA is working with some of the world’s leading architects on projects such as the Studio Libeskind-designed Grand Canal Theatre, the Manuel Aires Mateus designed hotel, and the recently opened Martha Schwartz designed Grand Canal Square.

Work on the landmark project is due to begin next year with a completion date expected by 2011.​
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
That egg is quite strange. The tower as a whole is repulsive isn't it? Even for Foster this is a shallow slice of aesthetically ugly glass/steel "futurist" nonsense. I find it fairly difficult to believe this glitzy monstrosity actually got planning permission. And the arrogance of them at the top! Oh- it contains "affordable housing". As a literalisation of Bono's ego and its relation to the rest of the world its actually quite hilarious...
 
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That egg is quite strange. The tower as a whole is repulsive isn't it? Even for Foster this is a shallow slice of aesthetically ugly glass/steel "futurist" nonsense. I find it fairly difficult to believe this glitzy monstrosity actually got planning permission. And the arrogance of them at the top! Oh- it contains "affordable housing". As a literalisation of Bono's ego and its relation to the rest of the world its actually quite hilarious...

Oh, it is going to be followed by numerous other much worse Dubai-style fantasy horrors. After the Dublin Spike/Spire [at 145 metres] was erected some years ago, it unwittingly set the benchmark for future skyline-property projects, much like, many years ago, the Washington Monument set the (very low in that instance) limit for Washington's skyline, which is why Washington still has no skyscrapers. As for 'planning permission', ha ha!!: in Ireland certain party-political property developers totally control the political - and planning - apparatus [as public scrutiny of the prime minister/Taoiseach Bertie Aherne is currently revealing]: they're only building skyscrapers now ironically because of the collapse of the property market over the past year - they now have to build way higher in order to recoup their huge speculative investment at high prices in land and sites during the height of the property boom (of course there are also the libidinal economy factors too: class oneupmanship, ego-mania, etc). Las Vegas pastiche 'architecture.'

The 'affordable housing' PR is of course a myth: those who would genuinely qualify couldn't possibly afford such housing/apartment accommodation. They get to own half of the flat, purchased at full market skyhigh prices and mortgage funded, while the other half is owned by the local council, so ending up paying both a full mortgage AND a full rent. It's just a bad joke.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Yes I know a lot of people in those part buy/rent schemes. Quite why Ireland/Britain can't move on from the dubious practice of home owning all together and embrace Berlin style cheap rents 4 life I don't know... (Thatcher is implicated somewhere in all this though I am sure...)
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
and so many are brainwashed by this sickening pile of bullshit... sometimes perfectly nice people. just very short on the critical thinking capacity... bugs me to no end :mad::mad::mad:
 

swears

preppy-kei
I think the main argument against renting put foward by a lot of home owners is that you're paying the landlord's mortgage and giving him a wedge for profit on top, so you might as well cut out the middleman and get your own place.

But...it's apparently cheaper to rent than buy now, since most landlords bought their property before the current boom and perhaps have even finished making mortgage payments themselves.

Buying/renting, it's all a racket anyway.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
But Swears you read Momus' blog right, I think he's definitely on to something when it comes to correlations between creative fecundity and a rent over buying culture...
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
I think the main argument against renting put foward by a lot of home owners is that you're paying the landlord's mortgage and giving him a wedge for profit on top, so you might as well cut out the middleman and get your own place.

it's bollocks though, innit- over the 20 years of our mortgage we pay nearly £2.00 back to the butt-fucking nazis that are the bank for every £1.00 borrowed AND we have to pay for repairs and upkeep!

fukkaz
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
it's bollocks though, innit- over the 20 years of our mortgage we pay nearly £2.00 back to the butt-fucking nazis that are the bank for every £1.00 borrowed AND we have to pay for repairs and upkeep!

fukkaz

No way, really? A quid of interest for each quid borrowed? That's awful. Did you just get stuffed with a really shit mortgage, or is that actually a pretty standard situation (for a home-owner) to be in?
 

swears

preppy-kei
gek: I haven't read any blogs for ages, been busy with various things.

That sounds interesting though, I suppose if you are renting, you're not shackled to living in any particular area, you don't have to worry about long-term financial security as much, things like that could stop you from pursuing unprofitable creative activities.

Is that what he was on about? Link plz.
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
No way, really? A quid of interest for each quid borrowed? That's awful. Did you just get stuffed with a really shit mortgage, or is that actually a pretty standard situation (for a home-owner) to be in?

we got a good deal, because i managed to blag a graduate mortgage (5 years after completing a pgce), but it was a 100% mortgage. i know people who are paying above the £2.00 mark with a deposit.

such is the nature of the beast.

you could sit down and work it out properly, but i reckoned at the time we got the mortgage that saving the same amount and putting it in an ISA would reap higher returns than you would get from the increase in equity, but judging that over 20 years is nigh on impossible.

in addition, you always have the issue of a landlord being able to kick you out of the house you are renting (ie, your home) at two points during any year.

that to me is the problem, and as others have mentioned, this isn't an opportunity landlords have in contintental europe.
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
They can't do that in mainland Europe?

afaik in germany, tenants leave when they want to, landlords can't kick you out like over here, but i studied this over 10 years ago. i assume there's been no great change because most people still rent in germany.
 
But Swears you read Momus' blog right, I think he's definitely on to something when it comes to correlations between creative fecundity and a rent over buying culture...

I haven't read Momus' piece, but nevertheless there is indeed an increasing body of research linking high levels of home ownership with increased unemployment, with homelessness, with stagnancy, social retreat, and squalor. Just to take two recent examples:

Reducing home ownership cuts unemployment

Larry Elliott, economics editor

Friday September 28, 2007

The Guardian

Increasing the supply of rented homes is a better way to bring down unemployment than labour market reforms designed to weaken unions or weaken employment protection, Professor Danny Blanchflower, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, said last night.

In a speech in London, he said countries with the highest levels of home ownership had the longest dole queues, and that there was no evidence that deregulating labour markets was the cure for unemployment.

The MPC member said that despite calls from bodies such as the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development for radical reforms of European labour markets there was no data to show a link between supposedly unemployment-unfriendly measures and the length of dole queues.

"Unemployment is positively correlated with changes in rates of home ownership," Prof Blanchflower said. "Of the major industrial nations Spain has the highest unemployment and the highest rate of home ownership and Switzerland the lowest unemployment and the lowest rates of home ownership. During the 1990s there were three European countries with unemployment rates close to 20% and these three had the highest home ownership rates (Ireland, Spain and Finland).

He added: "Higher home ownership raises unemployment, presumably because it reduces labour market mobility. Homeowners are relatively immobile, partly because they find it much more costly than private renters to move around."​

I'm always amazed how certain theorists and academics become so convinced of the truth of their hypothesis that they unwittingly twist, distort, and engineer selective data-sets to bolster their theory: Ireland did not have 20% unemployment in the 1990s, on the contrary, by the late 1990s it had the lowest unemployment rate in the world, labour participation rates having nearly doubled during that decade, combined with net immigration for the first time in the country's history. This, of course, does not undermine Blanchflower's thesis; rather, it is that his empirical evidence just misrepresents the underlying socio-economic dynamic: the vast increase in employment in Ireland during the 1990s (from 1.1m to around 2m) was largely filled by young people living either in rented accommodation or remaining in the family home, for the very simple reason that inflated house prices were completely beyond their means to acquire. The average price of a Dublin-based house increased from around €50,000 in 1990 to €500,000 in 2000, while wages averaged from €20,000 up to €40,000 over the same period, making home purchase impossible for young people (in the absence of very substantial parental assistance). Paradoxically, home ownership has actually declined per capita (35% of the housing stock, alarmingly, lies idle/vacent, precisely because these properties were built purely as mindlessly speculative investments during the delirial property boom, as second, third, or fourth 'homes' by well-off equity-leveraging home owners). In other words, the thesis still holds, the larger levels of growing employment being associated with a decline in home ownership, and a greater proportion of workers living in rented accommodation. This does, however, provoke massive passive-aggressive resentment and social antagonism among younger people. As Dominic Fox recently argued, "The shed sold for three quarters of a million in central London stands in for every wretched hovel placed far beyond the reach of even the most financially masochistic nurse or schoolteacher. Resentment and anger seem eminently reasonable responses to such circumstances."


And another recent study:

The public housing policies of many European countries promote home-ownership. It is argued that the best protection against poverty in older life is the ownership of a house and that owners are more likely to take better care of their dwelling and to invest in the immediate environment. There is abundant academic evidence against these arguments, especially for vulnerable groups of the population for whom the lack of resources make it difficult to sustain home-ownership and invest in the maintenance of their dwelling. FEANTSA believes, therefore, that home-ownership is not the one-fits-all solution to the complex problem of housing exclusion. The current housing challenges, such as the increasing levels of housing exclusion, can only be effectively addressed when there is a large enough social rental housing stock.

It is clear that rates of home-ownership do not always positively relate to the wealth of a country and its population, and that too high rates of home-ownership are usually unsustainable.

Countries with very high rates of home-ownership (around 90%), such as Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic States, have to cope with deep and widespread poverty, also amongst homeowners. Countries with relatively low rates of home-ownership like Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, are amongst the wealthiest countries in the world with rather low levels of poverty and housing exclusion. FEANTSA believes that, depending on the country-specific context, the rental sector should probably represent a minimum of 25%-30% of the housing market.

For some people, home-ownership will never be an option. The costs of ownership of an adequate dwelling - next to the mortgage payments, the costs of repair and renovation, and the price of energy - are often largely underestimated, especially by vulnerable people. The situation in several Eastern European countries, where poor home-owners who do not have any mortgage duties anymore are still accumulating housing related debts, is indicative for the limits and the danger of home-ownership
.​

And this, alas, is now the problem: the neo-lib privatization policies of both Sarcozy's France and Merkel's Germany will see a huge increase/move away from rental accommodation towards the reactive Thatcherite cult of home ownership. Will Scandanavia follow?
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A few quick points:

Static (and unreliable) statistics tell us nothing about either economic dynamics or the historical trajectory of such economic indicators. The fact is that during the entire post-WWII economic booms in Germany and France, the rate of home ownership declined (the point I was also making about Ireland throughout the 1990s) ie. home ownership moves in inverse proportion to the strength of an economy. Japan is another classic example, home ownership increasing during its recession, as is present-day China, home ownership declining during its present boom So, for instance, during the post-war years, home ownership in Germany was the lowest in Europe, notwithstanding the huge success of the German economy since the Second World War. Germany's higher recent unemployment rate - and recession - can be directly attributed to the dampening effects of its re-integration of 20m people from the former East Germany during the 1990s and to a growing rate of home ownership since the end of the 1980s (ditto in France and Japan: in the Japan of the late-1980s the move towards increased home ownership became so crippling that many people took out 50+ year multi-generational mortgages, condemning not just their children, but even their grand-children to an oppressive future of crippling debt and immobility).

The unemployment figures in that table are totally unreliable (and from the CIA Handbook to boot!), as every country makes radically different assumptions about what constitutes 'unemployment.' For instance, Britain's figures exclude the 2.6m on disability benefit, and those who take 'early retirement' (eg the cop or teacher who retires in their forties for whatever work-related reasons) and those who choose to struggle on entirely outside the welfare system, while other countries practically include anyone who isn't in a 9-5 job ...
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
A few quick points:

Static (and unreliable) statistics tell us nothing about either economic dynamics or the historical trajectory of such economic indicators. The fact is that during the entire post-WWII economic booms in Germany and France, the rate of home ownership declined (the point I was also making about Ireland throughout the 1990s) ie. home ownership moves in inverse proportion to the strength of an economy. Japan is another classic example, home ownership increasing during its recession, as is present-day China, home ownership declining during its present boom So, for instance, during the post-war years, home ownership in Germany was the lowest in Europe, notwithstanding the huge success of the German economy since the Second World War. Germany's higher recent unemployment rate - and recession - can be directly attributed to the dampening effects of its re-integration of 20m people from the former East Germany during the 1990s and to a growing rate of home ownership since the end of the 1980s (ditto in France and Japan: in the Japan of the late-1980s the move towards increased home ownership became so crippling that many people took out 50+ year multi-generational mortgages, condemning not just their children, but even their grand-children to an oppressive future of crippling debt and immobility).

The unemployment figures in that table are totally unreliable (and from the CIA Handbook to boot!), as every country makes radically different assumptions about what constitutes 'unemployment.' For instance, Britain's figures exclude the 2.6m on disability benefit, and those who take 'early retirement' (eg the cop or teacher who retires in their forties for whatever work-related reasons) and those who choose to struggle on entirely outside the welfare system, while other countries practically include anyone who isn't in a 9-5 job ...

Ok- forgive me for asking a dumb question: but does this mean that necessarily home-ownership is the key to all this? Or could there be some other factor lying behind the interrelation? The mere fact that they are correlates does not mean that one necessarily causes the other (Also: could we not say that increasing unemployment and a declining economy within a society might lead people to seek some kind of [false] psychological security in owning a home...?)
 
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Ok- forgive me for asking a dumb question: but does this mean that necessarily home-ownership is the key to all this? Or could there be some other factor lying behind the interrelation? The mere fact that they are correlates does not mean that one necessarily causes the other (Also: could we not say that increasing unemployment and a declining economy within a society might lead people to seek some kind of [false] psychological security in owning a home...?)

Absolutely right. It is always a (reductivist) mistake to conflate the coincidental with the causal (which is probably the principal reason why so much conventional mainstream neo-classical economics is so hopelessly redundant). Such trends are just associational and correlational - and from a perspective of radical immanence, occuring withing a nexus of necessity. To overdetermine the relation between home ownership and economic growth would be positively disasterous (ie simply abolish all home ownership and, ipso presto, a booming economy!!). There is a parallactic 'gap' between the micro and the macro (much [like the irreconcilability of, say, the (macro) theory of relativity and (micro) quantum theory, or the duality in psychoanalysis between the hermeneutics of the unconscious (producing symtoms to be interpreted) and the libidinal economy of the id (posited site of the unconscious)]: although the macro association between home ownership and an economy's strength is empirically evident, at the micro level this association breaks down, splintering into a much more complex and unpredictable multi-factorial phenomenon. So, for instance, in the US over the past two years there have been over 2m state-sanctioned, legally-enforced confiscations ('foreclosures') of peoples' homes by the unscrupulous corporate mortgage providers that helped to provoke the property crisis in the first place [but of course taxing the assets and homes of the wealthy dead is oh-so much more important, an unprecedented crisis!]. This has happened behind a background of increasing interest rates and unemployment, job-cuts, falling average incomes, which suggests that this might be a prelude to an imminent economic 'recovery' ...

Ok, forgive me for providing a dumb answer ... -:)
 
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