Linkage

Sergeant Simon Wren-Lewis of the Status Quo Squad, saying "Move along! Nothing to see here!"

Is Labour’s fiscal policy rule neoliberal? That is the charge some on the left, particularly followers of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) movement, have laid against Labour’s fiscal credibility rule (FCR). MMT stands for nothing very informative, but it is a non-mainstream macroeconomic school of thought aligned to the left. Bill Mitchell, one of the leading lights of MMT, has run a relentless campaign against the FCR through his blog. As my own work with Jonathan Portes helped provide the intellectual foundation for the FCR, I will try and explain why I find the charge of neoliberalism nonsensical.

A reminder to self that the difference between Corbyn and Starmer was, in this respect at least, not as great as I may have wanted.

The Office for Budget Responsibility - the government's economic watchdog - will be given new powers to "whistle blow" when it believes that the "credibility rule" has been breached.

And under the Labour plans it will also report to Parliament rather than the Treasury.

"We know now from the world's central banks that the world economy is looking at stagnation, and there needs to be a new rule," Mr McDonnell told me.

"And we want people to have confidence in a Labour government. That means we are introducing a new fiscal credibility rule.

"First, that a Labour government will always balance day to day expenditure.

"Second, that we will only borrow for the long term, and that means for investment - investment in our infrastructure, in the homes that we need, the railways, the roads, the renewable energy.

"And in new technology to grow our economy.

"Third, debt will fall under a Labour government over a five year period.

These people have no idea how computers work, how brains work, or how to define intelligence. They just believe that if they get enough transistors together, feed it enough data and the electricity requirements of a large industrialised nation, they will eventually create God. It's the ultimate cargo cult. They're drunk on they're own snake oil. And they're among the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, instead of being institutionalised for their own safety. It's so funny/scary.

 The video shows Sam Altman in talk with Connie Loizos. When Loizos asked Altman is he is planning to monetise his product, Sam Altman replied with: “The honest answer is, we have no idea."

Sam Altman further said that they had no plans to make any revenue. "We never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make any revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue," he said.

Speaking about the investors, Sam Altman said, “We have made soft promises to investors that once we build this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you."

As the audience laugh, Sam Altman said, “You can laugh. It's all right. But, it is what I actually believe is going to happen."

Despite the widespread harm caused by cars and automobility, governments, corporations, and individuals continue to facilitate it by expanding roads, manufacturing larger vehicles, and subsidising parking, electric cars, and resource extraction. This literature review synthesises the negative consequences of automobility, or car harm, which we have grouped into four categories: violence, ill health, social injustice, and environmental damage. We find that, since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility's violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with policies that reduce it. To that end, the paper briefly summarises interventions that are ready for implementation.

By popular demand -- a comprehensive review of all the ways car dependency destroys our communities, our health, and our planet. With gratuitous commentary by your host!

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that bombing Gaza into rubble is a reasonable response to a single Hamas attack.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and starving hundreds of thousands more is a reasonable response to a thousand Israelis being killed.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that criticizing the actions of the state of Israel is antisemitic.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that saying “from the river to the sea” is a call for genocide.

The participation of the internet companies in Prism will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

The current Israeli war on Gaza continues a long history of attacks on and elimination of the Palestinian Christian community in Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Since 2007, the small but long-standing Christian community in Gaza has declined from three thousand to about one thousand living in the Strip today; in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the larger Palestinian Christian community of about 50,000 has faced a similar decline over the past few decades.

In large part, this population decline has been driven by the stresses of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and siege in Palestine and facilitated by the greater welcome extended by many Western countries to Christian as opposed to Muslim Palestinian emigrants.

However, as Ramzy Baroud points out, the elimination of the Palestinian Christian community is also convenient for Israel, as it “is keen to present the ‘conflict’ in Palestine as a religious one so that it could…brand itself as a beleaguered Jewish state amid a massive Muslim population in the Middle East.”

“The continued existence of Palestinian Christians,” notes Baroud, “does not factor nicely into this Israeli agenda.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the housing crisis could be solved without building any more homes? There would be no carbon emissions from construction sites, no green fields covered over, no householders upset at dwellings appearing in their view. Instead, rents would become affordable and decent homes available through changes in government policy. Such is the promise of Against Landlords by the author and barrister Nick Bano, a man who has been described as “Britain’s top Marxist housing lawyer”.

[…]

Bano would like to return, with due allowance for the fact that public housing of the time was sometimes less than perfect, to the 1970s to complete the project of driving “landlords and house-price speculators from the face of the earth”. He wants to reinstate rent controls and end no-fault evictions. It’s not entirely clear how people currently privately renting would then be housed (though it seems likely that they would become tenants of the state), or how the transition would be effected. He acknowledges that it might be a brutal process, given the dependency of the national economy on property values, perhaps involving a monumental property crash.

Bano’s arguments have already taken a bit of a battering, both from more centrist commentators and, doubtless to his delight, from the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs (“an edgy Maoist rebel”, it called him). These critics question, with some reason, his basis for saying that there are enough homes, in light of the fact that studies tend to show that Britain has the smallest new-build homes in Europe.

Even the Tories’ political education department had no real objection to the further reduction of the tiny private rented sector that existed in the 1970s. It wrote: “The accelerating decline of the privately rented sector is quite irreversible. The private landlord, as he exists now and has existed, will, within a generation, be almost as extinct as the dinosaur. There is nothing that can be done about this.” Conservatives in the 1970s merely sought to retain a handful of petty landlords, who ought to be entitled to a “fair return” if they let out a spare room or two, but they recognised that private renting tends to be an expensive, poor-quality and economically wasteful way of accommodating the population. The near-death of landlordism was one of the good news stories of the last century.

But the task that Thatcher and her successors set themselves was to undo that progress. The present system was designed, as the supreme court noted in a tenant’s 2016 human rights challenge, to ensure that “the letting of private property will again become an economic proposition”. It should have been obvious to everyone that a market that had achieved such positive effects by its collapse would produce equal and opposite consequences as it was reinflated.

[…]

The yimby argument has always seemed flimsy. Its strange logic is that speculative developers would build homes in order to devalue them: that they would somehow act against their own interests by producing enough surplus homes to bring down the average price of land and housing. That would be surprisingly philanthropic behaviour.

When we complain, rightly, that cities such as Vienna are so much more livable than anywhere in Britain, we must acknowledge that landlordism is holding us back. Our insistence on pursuing policies that ensure that letting private property is an “economic proposition” not only drives up prices for would-be homeowners, but it stands in direct opposition to a programme of municipalising and decommodifying the homes that already exist. It also inflates land values, making new state-led building projects unfeasible. If we want a Viennese-style existence we can only achieve this, as we did 50 years ago, by driving the landlords out. Which is only fair: we have given them a very good innings.