TRASHFUTURE - In John McDonnell’s Navy feat. Grace Blakeley

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

Finance-driven growth: It’s not good, folks! This week, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Hussein (@HKesvani) join special guest Grace Blakely (@graceblakeley) to discuss the financialisation of the past 40 years and the post-2008 reckoning that we’re cursed to live through — which is the topic of Grace’s new book ‘Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation.’ We also discuss an amazing hit piece in the British tabloids that wants you to believe the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has a private navy at his cabin in Norfolk. You can buy Grace’s book from the publisher here: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/stolen-how-to-save-the-world-from-financialisation/ — and if you buy it from Repeater Books you get a free e-book version as well. If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* Guess who’s going to play live at The World Transformed in Brighton this September? That’s right, your favourite podcast lads. We’ll be on at 1.00 pm on Monday, 23rd September. Buy a ticket here: http://theworldtransformed.org If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

The American working people have a right to eat pussy at work that is enshrined in law But for years they have been forced to opt out and employment contracts from their pussy-eating rights The millionaires and the billionaires in this country have been hoarding all the pussy for themselves And the workers have been left with nothing but butthole Under my presidency, this will stop Oh We are here with In studio, it's me Riley. I'm here with Milo across from me with the gold mic. Hello

I was doing that before we recorded the podcast and then it's just as a random bit that were made sense in context But then we were just like hey, let's just do it again with no context at the start of the podcast Absolutely that you know it's backwards context. We're also have Nate on the boards ably. Hello. Yes ably no longer disabled It's first bike ride in two weeks after the big crash, and I'm feeling great I'm ready to get sights wiped on the roads in London and not produce a show ever again. Absolutely So and podcast is death Podcasting Valhalla I Live I die I record again and also joining us by phone line is Hussein Hussein

How you doing? What's up? Good all good? I was actually I I wasn't even sure that Milo did that impression I thought it came from a democratic debate from last night Yeah, it was maybe one of those things that was overlooked because Andrew Yang was too busy talking about how he knew loads of doctors who came from quote Asia Yes, a place known as Asia where doctors are naturally occurring and of course that bit where um or talk than as doctors Yeah, we're Joe Biden wandered on stage in his bathrobe and he had to be taken back home by a kind of a passing police officer It was great junior junior Biden. Yeah, he's he's just uncle junior. I'm surprised no one else has seen this yet And we are of course joined by three Pete Returning guest returning champion grace Blakely author of stolen which is out now on every fine bookstore grace. How you doing?

I'm doing super good. Could you do well into the microphone? Sorry. Sorry Riley. I've done this before, you know It's so great to be here with all of the lads every last one Before today exception Hussein who's in the distance, of course He's here in spirit Well, all I can say to grace is that I hope that this podcast gives you as much fulfillment as the one that you did with Douglas cars Well Did you like that? It was interesting. I enjoyed how he got more and more red as the video went on

One where he talks about like anime and calm or something My favorite thing about Douglas cars. Well, is that he clearly At some point read a book that said you're going to be taken more seriously if people need to struggle to hear you Which is why he is so he just sort of whispers his insanity is all the time But he can't speak with the diaphragm. He's just says If Britain I doesn't leave the European Union. I'm well, of course most of the electorates going to kill everyone else He had a really fun line, which was that he thinks He was like, you know, look Grace, I agree with you that, you know, we don't don't live in in real capitalism

He thinks that we live in like in like crony capitalism, which is some sort of perversion of this pure form of capitalism Where politics and economics are separate like they should be Yeah, I mean to libertarians like crony capitalism basically means capitalism, but with age of consent laws Yeah With the capitalism you get now is you don't know what you're buying, you know It could be cut with anything But when you do a line of that pure real Bolivian capitalism, you know, oh, yeah That's that's that's how most businesses start. So

There's a bold new labor manifesto that's taking shape because there is going to be an election soon almost certainly and Some of it's very interesting. It's all developing day by day. I'm sure by the time this is out more stuff will have changed And so we're so day to day. Yeah, things are happening. I'm sure by the time you hear this more things will have developed Over to you on the development center So what we're gonna but we're gonna talk about what's here so far and especially how these are these Measures are going to go some way to solving a lot of the problems that Grace talks about in her book stolen How to save the world from financialization? Do you want to give us like the the two-minute summary before we leap in sure? So that you've never been asked to do this before I really haven't this is the first time

Thank you guys for giving me the chance to shine So Stolen is basically about how the UK economies changed largely over the last 40 years from about 1979 when obviously we got the lovely Thatcher into government And how the rise of finance that resulted from a lot of the changes that happened then so bank deregulation retail bank deregulation The stock market boom the removal of restriction on capital ability all these sorts of things venga boys the venga boys Yeah, you know that sort of stuff. The venga boys is financed. You did say I could have two minutes Yeah, sorry, you're gonna give me two minutes without interruption

Absolutely Okay, sorry, please go ahead. Okay, and so the book goes through how businesses households the state and The kind of states relationship with the rest of the world have all been financialized So you've had like the rise of shareholder value in corporations. You've had rising household debt and rising asset prices you've had kind of PFI and The rise of the bond vigilantes when it comes to the state and you've had the rise of financial globalization And then it talks about how all that that whole model collapsed in 2008 So 2008 wasn't just a banking crisis. It was a collapse an entire system

Which I refer to as finance like growth and then the period right a came out correlation causation. We don't know And that the period we've been living in since then has been the kind of Period between the death of the old and the birth of the new and a lot of the shit that we're seeing at the moment are kind of morbid symptoms that result from the collapse of narratives institutions Like norms that underpins the logic of finance like growth and we have yet to come up with something new And I say that there's something new should be Socialism logic. I mean, Venezuela

Something we should all move to Venezuela Those are all the ideas from the 70s grace when socialism was invented But I think one of the best examples of something that has been thoroughly financialized Relationship with my ex-wife am I right guys? Have you guys all read the Article about the Liberty University in PolitiCo where they did this exposed expose on this evangelical Christian college and in the article it says one of the Jerry Falwell Jr. The guy in charge of Liberty University said this isn't a university. It's a real estate investment trust

Is that true? Yes, which is funny because that's a criticism that gets levied against New York University But they just came out and said it. Yeah at Liberty University Yeah, so it's like so all of the activities that are not financialized are becoming more and more vestigial Most of the activities that are financialized are core to the operation of the thing and all of the things So a real estate investment trust is like it's a company that you can invest in all it does is buy real estate And then your dividends are based on either renting or selling that real estate as an owner And a lot of real estate investment trusts are actually second or third two or three levels of abstraction up mostly They just invest in one another. I was gonna I was gonna say that but like you

Sounds a lot like a cool company. I know it does flavored water where they have cucumbers that give you motivational messages Oh, yeah, their valuation got cut in half recently They're 47 billion to like 20 billion overnight Do they give you cucumbers that talk to you? They they spell out words with that'll be cool But in the we so in the in our we work office in New York They have like this big water tank where they do like flavored water and every Friday They have like they spell out a motivational message using kind of various fruits and vegetables. Wow

Does that motivate you? You know, I was I was there just hating my life and then I read a mess in the cucumber We're about to literally drown yourself in that pool and then you saw the cucumbers And you were like, yeah, so it's like hustling is bae this week I took a tour of a we work and they were trying to get people to eat cucumbers, but I asked them. Where is the pussy? Getting things back on track voice So Right, so he said getting things back on track so we're gonna we're gonna go through some of the

pledges of the labor platform and talk about how they're going to reduce the power of finance capitalism to De-risk itself by making our lives terrible So let's let's do some of the quick hits and then we'll go into some of the ones that are described in more detail quick hit number one ministry of employment rights Addressing the TUC conference in Brighton Jeremy Corbyn said labor would appoint a secretary of state for employment rights and a workers protection Agency to enforce rights standards and protections so that every job is a good job and also will map vastly empower trade unions by Basically consulting with them all the time. What do we think about that? I mean, this is obviously really good. There's builds on the stuff we've had already with Laura Pidcock's work on the Ministry of Labor

and mandatory collective bargaining, I think sectoral collective bargaining Which is all really good because you know, we've spent the last 40 years of successive governments mainly Tory governments repealing sorry, imposing anti-union legislation and Successive labor governments failing to repeal it. So this would really be, you know, the unions basically started the Labor Party And for a very long time that relationship has been somewhat taken for granted and as a result we've had falling union membership falling pay and a general kind of disempowerment of working people

So this is obviously a very important thing and without widespread like union membership then there is no one really to resist the capacity of massively levered firms to try and you'd de-risk themselves so like lower their insurance premiums or increase their next quarter's growth outlook Or whatever, but then there's no better thing to do for them than smash unions because then their pay packets They're gonna have to pay out are gonna be lower the possibility of industrial action is lower and so finance hates unions So yeah, there's a bit in my book where I talk about how this model emerged how this model of finance a growth emerge and It was on the back of Thatcher's war with the unions in In the 80s and particularly with the miners

So thatcher came to power with this thing called the Ridley plan where she had like a series of Interventions that she had planned to do to take on the UK's unions one after another To basically destroy the labor movement and there's a there's a good film That's called still the enemy within that I reference in there because there's an interview with a miner that was involved in the strikes And he was like that you knew that the only thing that was getting in the way of her project of like privatization You know neoliberalism was us and she had to destroy us if she was gonna get this model to work hmm and I think

Concomitantly with that then we also have promises of a minimum wage hike to 10 pounds an hour for all workers age 16 and over Banning on and banning unpaid internships again. I think we kind of lumped that in with the previous one finance loves Low minimum low wages and it loves being able to not pay workers would also one thing because we surprisingly have a large American fan base may not realize that the UK's minimum wage is graded or graduated based on age Which doesn't exist in the US and so it's just one of those things where when you explain it to me You're like, how does this possibly exist? I thought all European countries were socialist But you can't find yourself in a situation if you're an apprentice or you're what I think it's if you're under 18

Yeah, yeah, if you're under 18 if you're if you're an apprentice you earn even less you can earn like a couple of quid an hour It's ridiculous and that's why the UK could never produce a movie like boss, baby. Yeah I Love the movie boss, baby. I watched that on an airplane once. I thought it was absolutely Brilliant, but it could be boss, but they wouldn't be making enough an hour to sustain the company I like that they brought in the thing at the end though the classic The classic movie set up of it was all a dream That's the present I haven't even said I just use it for me

So I've never even seen the boss baby movie before Wow I can't believe you're dumping on this movie without having seen it. Sorry that libel I think that might be libel. Yeah, you've you've just exposed the fraud at the heart of our podcast So we don't actually would consult any of the source material sued by the boss, baby Ignominius way to get council I bring up the thing about the low minimum wage because of the fact that that's a huge gonna be a huge jump that if you have a Standard wage across, you know regardless of age or or or trade and also going up to ten ten pounds an hour

That's that's gonna be huge Especially for places where people's earnings are especially like in the north or northern Ireland or in Wales where people's earnings are Really low compared to London. Of course, we the the counter-argument you often hear is oh my small business won't be able to afford to pay a wage Well, yeah, I mean this is what they said when they first introduced the minimum wage at all And there are no small businesses left. Yeah, I mean it had it had no impact. Also. I mean you have to look at They always say this there was the the argument about when they brought it into 1987 the argument when Osborne raised it a couple of years ago And it never materializes and at least part of the reason is because at the moment a big reason that businesses aren't investing And why the economy is kind of slowing down is because well

I mean partly it's because of brexit obviously but partly it's because there's such low levels of demand in the economy because the government isn't spending and people are not spending because Their wages are not going up because we've had a decade of wage stagnation and they've been using debt instead to fund their consumption and You can only take out a certain amount of debt So at some point we're gonna reach a point where people aren't gonna be able to spend as much anymore And that means businesses aren't gonna be able to sell things and that means that the economy is gonna stop working as well This is just like you know Keynes 101 and

It's it's crazy that we're even still having this debate. Oh, yeah, it's um, it's surely Keynes just needs to Google Venezuela Keynes needs to go to economics 101. Oh, okay. Yeah, because otherwise he'll write 1984 He needs to talk to a real economics professor like one a Rand Look you have to go to IEA class. All right. Yeah Here a couple of other other things we're to bust through these then we're gonna get to the rest of it Ending zero-hours contracts That's huge if you're because if you're like a private equity firm that owns a chain of pubs You don't want to have to pay workers for any time where they're not working

I think Mark Fisher was talking about this like if a If a pub could pay a worker not for the time that they were standing behind the bar waiting for customers to come in But only for the second in which they opened and presented a beer and collected cash They would because again that just that maximizes returns on capital when returns are hard to come by I remember when I used to work in a pub and they used to say sorry, I wasn't speaking to the microphone I'm not I'm not familiar with this this medium peak behind the I'm used to a lapel mic They used to say if you have time to lean you have time to clean That was something that my manager used to say to me all the time to be fair you your manager was Lil John

I Was under the impression and just just to clarify I was under the impression that zero hours contracts meant that like you weren't guaranteed a certain number of hours per week or per month So that's basically it like so you get hired But you have no knowledge of your schedule like you don't know for certain how many hours so you can't like plan your own budget Basically, it's also it's based entirely. It's the relationship. It's there's this idea There's this abstraction that the relationship between employer and employee is one where they bargain They figure out something that works for both them and they enter into a mutually beneficial deal

But every single like policy move that the past sort of several governments have made has just been Stripping away the already minuscule power of the employee to do anything about it zero all zero hours contracts is is by the way You have no say over when you work. It's purely what we need Yeah, so it's basically your employed But you you might have no work on a given week or given month and if you have two jobs that with zero hours contracts and One conflicts with the other chances are you have to pick which one you're gonna get fired from I I love Negotiating my wage with an app that some for some reason keeps asking me to put my brain circumference my Conference in it. That's I mean what that's that's a big part of it and also to abolish the lords. That's the last one

I like this one a lot. This one just came out today And Richard Leonard said we are gonna abolish the lords and have a federal constitution We just obviously at least partly to do with the You know rising sense of nationalism in Scotland Wales and various other places But also a very important step, you know, we've been having this like these weird hysterical Crazy people like for a long time that not for well for the last couple of weeks being like we need to Defend democracy from this kind of horrible stuff that's happening that's been happening literally over the last year because Boris Johnson is taking control over Otherwise perfect institutions and it's been like, okay

You could say defend democracy as a tagline or for the vast majority of people who live in this country who feel like for the last several years They've been completely ignored and shut out of a democratic process that completely fails to represent them because it's just representing the interests of big money You could say let's actually deepen democracy or build democracy by getting rid of all these like Arcane insane institutions that exist at the heart of our constitution. You say so you go ahead I was gonna say well, let's turn like the House of Lords into a big print of Monje Think I think I'll be good. I think I'll be like it. Well, I'll be like a good way forward for The lords working in it and put them on zero hours contracts Well, I think they have to do it all zero hours contracts except in the House of Lords

Else is gone. Let's keep the gradey the gradated minimum wage But the more titles you have after your name the less you can get paid That's what we're doing. I like that and the higher tax you pay. Absolutely. It's it's it's indentured servitude for lords, folks You know, they say lords built the pyramids So let's let's move on to the Deep cut the tent poles So this this is a cobbled together that I've done from several articles in the FT and associated acts Seems like you've been doing quite a lot of work here, Riley

Riley actually researches now. He puts together a phone. Are you the researcher for the show? I I have the I think I'm basically the showrunner So here is the here is here here proceeds the discussion of labor's plans the tentpole plans the big guys and this is in an Article in the FT that set starts with UK labor would seize 300 billion pounds of company shares Yeah, that's what we're gonna do the labor leadership is determined to shift power away from bosses and landlords Who need the power? Because they wouldn't be yeah, because they're great big babies and if they don't have enough power

They can't hold they can't hold their own heads up Milo. What are they gonna do? Supported have a stranglehold over the economy because that's how they develop their grip strength The gigantic babies that run everything Anyway, they're determined to shift power away from them and give it to stupid workers workers and tenants They already have you know amazing grip strength, so they don't need any more power Yeah, they're all adults. They have jobs, you know, you can't get a job if you're not an adult so QED Winner and wait, yeah, absolutely the landlords and bosses need that money This is this oddly enough this is this is not far from what the British landlords association is actually said

Oh, yeah If landlords aren't given money, how can they bankroll their sons to run bizarre t-shirt companies? How will any of the sort of stupid art projects get funded that happen in East London? Tower are cheap. Is that what you think? Do you think we're not spending any money on the cardboard and poster paint and things on building this huge 20-foot-high cardboard model of grandfell tower that we're saying like to do you think do you think we just found this stuff at The side of the road, of course not this required hours of work Yeah, we while our ungrateful ungrateful tenants just transfer money on their out of their phones by the way on their phones

They transfer money on their phones and then sleep in our houses And My my as a landlord my tenants as a class have like 40 houses and I just I'll have the one So who's the real oppressed minority? Yeah So grace you I've also you know you talked at length about financialization so far And this is where I think we're gonna get the biggest hits to the power of finance capitalism is in this plan So a labor government would confiscate about 300 billion pounds worth of shares in 7,000 large companies and hand them over to workers And one of the biggest state raids on the private sector to take place in a Western democracy

State raid I mean my new indie band Yeah, so what do we think of what do we think of this wording first of all? I mean, it's great, right? Like what we need to be much more aware I mean, this is a Bernie line, right? Is that there's been a class war going on in the country? It's time Sorry the working class one it I mean that should use this the apparatus of the state to wage class war from above There is now time for socialists to use the power that they have to wage class war from below just to kind of you know

basically Undermine an unfair illegitimate and now completely unsustainable system. What you're saying is we need to be a power bottom. Yeah Um, so I think the other things right is that a lot of the moral arguments that say well All of these companies worked hard to have all these shares and all these profits Just sort of assumes that all of these things come to you as a measure of your moral worth that like well We need this this executive, you know, Jerry Falwell, Jr. Who owns that university or whatever they need they're entitled to their like Outsize rent. I mean the problem is the problem is that the you know Like most classical economics doesn't have a coherent theory of value. It doesn't really get where value comes from

There's just an assumption that you know, the market determines what Anything is worth whether that's labor or a good or whatever else and there's no real analysis of how the market is shaped by States by private interest, etc And there's no Yeah, there's no kind of analysis of of what the value that is being created the people are paying for is and of course Marks does have a theory of value and according to that theory of value the people who own the stuff are not doing anything They're not creating any value They're not doing anything to deserve what they have which makes sense given the you know

Most of the people who become wealthy from their ownership of stuff in this country That's like landlords, you know investors, etc. Can effectively just buy an asset and wait for its value to increase Or you know trade it with other assets and make money from kind of arbitrage or on that later Value is what kicks up the Johnny sack and no one else So the other the thing is work is create value basically, but what I find interesting in the sort of classical economic That's classical. It's still very much around today. Just no one takes it seriously except for pundits Is this idea that with what value is just almost this social is purely a construct where it's just preferences that arise from just generally just preferences that arise from nothing

And they're just expressed by players in a market and we can't say what they come from and we can't say that anything Underlies them because that would be interfering in a complex system, which we couldn't possibly understand my sex life Yes, exactly rising from nothing and interfering in a complex system, which you couldn't possibly understand exactly Yes, but like there's a read that yet this it basically comes from, you know, the moral philosophy of utilitarianism, right? There is the reason that John Stuart Mill, who was one of the most favorite famous liberals was also a theorist of utilitarianism they have this idea that you know happiness is the great You know the greatest good for the greatest number is the kind of only moral duty that we have I mean the idea here is that

This plan would then grant workers the right to have a say with like the same rights that shareholders would have and also to receive Dividends from from profits generated. So in fact, this is what it says It says shares will be held and managed by workers who would receive dividends up to 500 pounds each year and come beyond that is Redistributed to the Exchequer and then spent on things that things that the state spent on things That was actually the one thing I did think about that was like 500 pounds a year isn't really that much money Like if you're really serious about redistributing the workers, why don't just give them all the dividends? I mean, it's it's a not enough money and it's been not enough control. I mean if you think about the shareholdings in certain corporations controlled by a tiny number of asset managers then the combined weight of

Finance capital is always going to be used to outmaneuver workers in terms of the decisions that are made on behalf of the company and that's really the most important thing like the wealth thing is I mean it is important in the sense that you want workers to be wealthy enough to be able to leave their job if they want to or You know to be able to kind of have the basic means of subsistence available to them so that they can organize But the main thing is that sense of control in order to direct these companies not to do bad things and not to abide by the logic of maximizing shareholder value, which is a big part of the financialization story So yeah, it's not enough. It's not enough control. It's not enough money And I think then there's like a there's a way to go on this plan yet for it to be something really transformative

Now the Adam Smith Institute, of course has called this move expropriation and I was just wondering because isn't this sort of what already happens in Germany with regard to like the number like Boards company boards have a certain number of shares that are reserved for workers Yeah, is it that they have shares or is it that they just have Votes they don't have shares Representation on boards if they give them shares then Germany will slowly start moving to South America Or as they know it Brazil

Argentina sure I guess I just asked that question because this doesn't seem particularly radical I mean it does in this sense that people are gonna be hysterical about it like right-wing columnists are gonna be hysterical about it Here doesn't surprise me But like in terms of the actual change being represented ownership is change is representation is not the radical change The ownership is the more I mean it really in many ways It is kind of radical in a sense that you can completely understand the logic behind Why this has been done it has been done as part of you know You would hope a longer-term project basically to socialize ownership in the economy II to create

Socialism to undermine the distinction between owners and workers So in that sense it is really radical in the sense of the impact that it would have I think it would be more of like I mean obviously it would have an impact It would be good to have workers having these shares and we could have them having a voice I think impact would be more psychological in the sense that it would happen the world wouldn't start burning and people would be like Huh, maybe the people who run the corporations aren't actually the ones that you know need to have all the power because they're so much cleverer than the rest of us Yes, but grace the Adam Smith Institute has said that the largest investors in the country are pension funds We'll see billions of pounds wiped off their books in a stroke. We'll see the value of all our pensions fall

It's the biggest raid on all our nest eggs and living memory. Well, this is actually a really important thing because a big The privatization of pension funds was like a massive thing in Building support for financialization because it kind of created this model of like property owning democracy You have in the same way that you know privatizing the social housing stock and Transferring it to private owners gives people a stake in Continuous house price inflation and therefore the stability of the system and therefore the creation of lots of debt You have this same logic in that, you know Private individuals owning shares in corporations via their pension funds or individually gives them an incentive to support an

Economy that's broadly run according to the interests of you know Other shareholders and where companies are run based on the logic of shareholder value So doing any of this stuff does mean we have to massively reform the pension system as well I've got some arguments in my book about just how we might do that So I argue for a people's asset manager Just like you have investment banks at the moment that have asset management arms So like the investment bank will lend to a business and then the asset management arm will then invest in it because it knows it The business is going to grow as a result of that lending

We would have the National Investment Bank And alongside it a people's asset manager that would on the one hand invest a kind of national fund That would be like a citizens wealth fund invest on behalf of that to like steadily socialize ownership throughout the economy And on the other hand, you would have like tax incentives for pension funds rather than sending their Capitals of BlackRock send it to the people's asset manager and the people's asset manager Invests it and then acts as a kind of responsible shareholder in these corporations Yeah, of course that means that all of this shared prosperity It means that we're all gonna live in a gulag one big gulag

I think it's good In the sense that you know, we will be in control of ourselves So we will be running our own gulag and then the the argument I'm very happy with a people's asset manager as long as that said asset manager sounds exactly like Bain Yeah The gulag The other the other thing one of the things also that you that this brings up for me is the fact that the useful idiots have capital The of the Kristen Nemitz's and stuff

Their whole premise seems to be well, you couldn't do anything intentionally in the economy, of course This is a Hayekian line. Yeah, which is interesting actually I touch on this in the book a bit which is the the economy is a complex system and they're right The economy is a complex system and therefore they say it needs to be Free and not subject to any centralized command and control But what's fascinating is that they have such a blind spot about the mechanisms and command and control that already exist within the economy Like near classical economists don't really analyze what goes on inside the firm They have no understanding of the way in which the kind of really like

rigid mechanisms of control that are exerted by owners over workers Actually do kind of you know create problems like the fact that you know firms don't pay their workers enough or they are like emitting tons of carbon and Looking after the planet and also the way in which the state does that same thing You know the capitalism is supposed to be this complex self-organizing system, but it's not it's organized entirely by the state and by Firms and by finance and all this is saying is actually that system is inefficient and wrong if we want things to work You know better if you want to save the system We want to save the planet then we should have a self-organizing system in which workers the people who actually exist in the system and

Make up the vast majority of its numbers are the ones with the power and the control and can therefore shape its direction now not everyone has been sort of as Pleased with as we are with Corbyn's plan and Corbyn McDonald's plan where ours our line seems to be good, but do more This is from an article in reaction magazine Entitled yes, it's called reaction magazine folks reaction race. Yes. Yeah, like the proud reactionaries nice Entitled even Marx would be shocked by Corbyn's plans for a socialist revolution You know how Marx called for the Nash the workers to take control of two to four percent of the companies That was his famous line. Yeah

Workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but certain of your chains I mean all the things that like exist in this current time I think that Marx would probably Corbyn's plan probably would not be necessarily so high on the list And what I really want to find out is what does mark what would Marx think of like dual pods? Yeah, I imagine if marks for here today, he would say what the fuck is an iPhone. Yeah Yeah, he would be like people are investing in something called footsie So here's the line from from reaction This outrageous raid which we have argued before amounts to theft and could prove to be illegal

Cuz you know damn hate that legal if if parliament makes a law and then people obey the law It's actually morally illegal still Natural law folks It's a mad proposal and one that is a stealth tax in all but name It is also deeply flawed because such a plan would not give workers wider share ownership as they would not have the right to buy and sell Their shares which is ostensibly the point of the exercise Wow Why aren't we making the Britain a nation of day traders everything is just busy town Buying and selling it's the entirety of Britain just slowly turns into the floor of the stock exchange with guys in little coats

Running around giving each other pieces of paper buying and selling and buying and selling Endlessly buying and buying and buying and selling and selling it all off and buying it all back again And no one actually makes anything. It's all just fun with monopoly money I should just realize that trading floors are just like the coked up version of the Henley royal royal regatta Because it's like the same blazers and a bunch of dude. It's the same dudes ten years later. Just more coked up I also just I love the idea that we've talked about this before that like the performative Dumbness in order to miss the point of the exercise is obviously like a big thing in Particular but my god way to miss the point intentionally here. It is mad

I mean it just implies did they do it on purpose today Oh, they actually think that that is what the point of owning a company is That's not even the point of owning a company to the people who actually own companies Yeah, like it's not just that you know They've got all like the big asset manager like BlackRock owns these shares and they can buy and sell them They own them for control and for returns Yeah Shares only actually even have buy and sellable value on the expectation that you would get dividends from owning

Yeah, and also from like the residual value if theoretically you close down the company and divided up its assets They don't have inherent value. They're not like it's like that's like that's like we script with which you exchange money Like monopoly dollars. Yeah, it's The in order to defend this this the financialized system you have to have such an abstract view of the economy That you can read a busy town book and be like yep That's a doc. That's a factual book about a real factory I don't even see shares. I just see blonde brunette red head It also comes back to the fact that they don't get what value is so they can't be like well

Of course the value derives from the buying and the selling because they haven't got a theory about buying and selling is fun Numbers go up and down there at graphs you can you have computers with multiple monitors you get to win and lose It's like a little game some of those games you play in ICT when you're like 14 years old It's like the buying and selling game. Yeah, we made it an Excel Although to be fair it would be hilarious if workers decided to go on strike and also took a short position in their own company So let's go back to the FTPs for the second plan The UK's 2.6 million landlords would also face a moment of reckoning down one of my favorite minority group Would face a moment of reckoning if labor won the next general election as

McDonald's said he wanted to introduce a right to buy scheme for private tenants as well as higher taxes on landlords So he said specifically is that he wants to tackle the burgeoning by-to-let market to make it easier for workers to buy the homes They live in and suggest to the some paid by tenants would not necessarily be the market price And even if we don't fully think this proposal is well thought through I really like the sentiment of fleecing Expropriating expropriating the landlords is a good idea. Yeah, um, I mean Like yes, this proposal is a potentially a step in the right direction But it's not gonna solve the housing crisis on its own because no matter what you do no matter how much credit you create You are never going to be able to get to a system where

Everyone is able to own their own home unless you literally transfer a home to everyone and if you transfer a home to everyone fine But I mean, it's the same like then you've actually got a situation in which it's much more difficult for people to move homes It's much more difficult to figure out what happens between generations It makes much more sense to have a system of socialized property alongside a system of private ownership for individuals, which is basically what we had during the Second World War when you had like a large chunk of Housing tenure that was represented by social housing and then you had a tiny number of private landlords and private renters and the rest kind of owners You know, that's what they all want to go back to of course is the period during and just after the Second World War But with many more private landlords

Generally, I mean my thought on this is that like even if all they did was start out and say we're just going to Reacquire all the ex-council properties that have been sold off That would be a step in the right direction like assuming that it also comes along with ending right to buy Because which I have seen like I want to say that the some of the the figures that were put in in Like online what was being shared was that they wanted to build something like three million new council homes and and right to buy immediately And re-acquire council homes, but just doing that would be a start because yeah I mean at least for my extremely subjective not big sample margin of just looking for a new place to live It certainly seems like a lot of ex-council homes are fucking overvalued to a great degree

And those are all from what I can tell owned by by the let landlords And so the idea that the state built these things sold them at a pittance to people who have now become wealthy off the fact that they are They now own multiple properties like it's just such a mind-blowing concept I'm not saying America is better by any means, but it's just it's a concept We haven't yet happened upon the idea of selling off public housing although people would love to do it We're selling it off piecemeal like condo units And so the fact that this has happened has become the cornerstone of the sort of like a rental market here is so absurd to me that like the Idea of re-acquiring it seems like it would be less controversial

Re-municipalization is something that I have argued for that the state should step in to buy up And this is also like part of the part of the issue of course that labor don't want to talk about is that they know that if they Do tax by to let landlords and they do intervene more in the property market do rent controls etc Then obviously a lot of by-to-let landlords are going to sell and that could potentially take the bottom out of the property market So there needs to be a way to step in You know to prevent a widespread crash not obviously to prevent prices stabilizing and like affordability increasing somewhat Let's prevent a big crash that would basically like ruin the economy because of the links between housing wealth and spending Yeah, so you could just step in and buy up

It remuner supplies homes, you know a portion of their market value. So are you listening labor party change the second I have also curated some attacks on this policy that Again, just like our attack on the first policy not enough The attacks on the second policy. Let's say they're not the ones we're making This is from an article in the Telegraph by property editor Isabel Fraser Never mind the rather important point that this is expropriation of policy with landlords forced to sell their properties to tenants This is another glaring alarm bell ringing fundamental problem, and it's going to hurt the very people the labor party are appealing to So we said earlier, yeah, the bottom if they leave the market the bottom might drop out of the housing market and it will reduce people's ability to like do

Housing finance like spending all this stuff. That's not the argument. That's made in the Telegraph They make a much more economics 101 argument. Are we ready for it? Yeah? It's a simple problem of supply and demand. So don't worry. It's a simple problem. Okay, good Landlords, I hope you're ready to learn about it. It's also about trading Landlords what it is actually landlords will evacuate the market in droves selling up before they're forced to buy a labor government Thereby leaving many homes available to buy but a lower supply of rental properties in their foresoring rents Do these people know how do they know like They activate. Oh, Jesus Christ

Do they know how like houses work? They wink out of existence when they stop being owned by a landlord the landlords it's like it's like the Warhammer 40,000 Emperor their their concentration keeps the home together And if they no longer keep pouring their psychic energy into it the home just crumbles to pieces It's like all landlords just constantly rubbing their temples Visualizing homes Famously the thing that people hate is like, you know buying a place where they can like she like establish solid routes and like they hate that Love experiencing new neighborhoods with new restaurants

The poorest renters those unable to buy one of those right to buy a private sector homes will be forced to stump up for Unmanageably high rents the wealthier renters unlike now All the rents are so manageable because we have this amazing landlord class who were just looking after us all doing us all a favor by renting us the 10 homes that they own which otherwise they would live in with their huge They would expand their huge ass into every room of 20 homes No, they have confined their ass to but one small dwelling for the benefit of you So that you might live there for the mere sum of a thousand pounds a month for a fucking mattress with walls in shitting fucking Croydon

Wow, that was amazing the property markets a great way to see talking about the property markets a great way to see the veins in Milo's forehead. He went really red He went Subscribe to the great in favor of other people because that's the economy we live up to the patreon I could afford to live somewhere in Russia. You know, Russia has a better economy than we do I could afford to live there Sounds like something that Seamus Milne might have told you to say So wealthier renters, you know those wealthy renters driving around in their monopoly cars

Swatting in and out of houses that they could rent a shoe Renting any house they please being waking up and make I feel I shall summer in Croydon this year And then just swatting down to the wealthy rental areas of Croydon I'm going I think we shall we shall live in in the peep show house this summer It should be ever so droll you'll be mark and I'll be jazz and they do that You're the wealthy renters who were probably able to buy anyway, but didn't for somehow we'll snap up these newly available homes I mean, it's ridiculous but there is one point in there which is that unless they plan to move to and it like entire

This is what I said before unless they plan to get everyone owning their own home They will have to be affordable social rented housing as well The problem is the concept of ownership really Literally everything yeah Milo, I'd like to do your impression of Marx again, please because I really enjoyed that That's a problem with the concept of all the ship because suddenly I cannot own my pornography anymore I must pay a subscription. Yeah, this is then and then Before I could buy a lithograph of someone removing their blueprints now suddenly I must pay ten dollars a month to watch someone shit on the dash Oh, why I didn't realize that Karl Marx adjourned in Romania

It's also Karl Marx after being turned away from Berlin's most famous opium den by the 19th century Sven Marquardt No good better luck next time folks So well the 80s scheme saw the state hand its own property over to ordinary people You know Plan would see a Bolshevik style land grab a private property Wow, you know, and it was ordinary people either it would go to elites it would go to cultural elites The idea of like the rich renters is just like really funny to me It's like it's very like East Coast dumb guy vibe of just like being like no look all these idiots

They're buying houses. They got to stay in them. I'm renting houses because I can have a different house In my 80s, I'm gonna be fucking a different house every week It's gonna be old This is slightly off topic, but did you guys see a while ago that the lovely Ben Shapiro was like Always see whatever he does like small but perfectly for climate change isn't a thing But even if it is it doesn't matter because the people who have homes that are threatened by climate change Yes, can just sell their homes and buy and send it someone else Ground and buy houses on the high ground

That's what I was like who's gonna buy the houses Ben fucking Aquaman Well, they did a similar one where it was like if global warming is real, why does Obama own a house beside the beach? Checkmate checkmate Obama. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if you believe in global warming so much, how come how come you still drink water? Obama reading that tweet and going my god Michelle phone the lawyer I Love those tweets because like because turning point like try to make turn is a group like turning point And I whatever groups that like like low-tax Chloe runs like they make these memes and you can just see you can see in this image But like when they created it when they exported it to like, I don't know fucking thing or like PNG or whatever

They were just really proud about that. They were really just like, yeah, I fucking got Just like socialism is destroyed By epic memes. Anyway, um like it or not landlords play a crucial role in society They do they provide around four and a half million properties one in five homes of an all of Britain provide Those homes provided by builders the landlords they say they're providing leftist Donald Trump If you just told him that landlord said that his dick was small, he'd be like all over it folks very sad people landlord They say they're providing homes. They're not If you told Donald Trump

That the the government house building program would be all his houses But I can get everyone living in a Trump property Government branded these houses. They're gonna be filled with hot babes from the 90s people like Kathy Ireland I know great people like that Not like the women they have now better women 90s women with high thongs Such a sexy 90s woman I'm wearing a borat thong So like it or not landlords play a crucial role in society

They provide around four and a half million properties one in every five homes in all of Great Britain Great Britain, right? Until the government is brave enough to embark on a serious house building program the number of renters is only gonna keep rising They accidentally made a good point in the telegraph article They did that they do need but the telegraph would basically just say look the problem with the housing market is that There literally aren't enough homes not the fact that there's like a tiny number of people who are monopolizing lots of the homes And that some of the people who own the homes don't have anyone living in the homes And also that because we are able to like borrow shit tons of money to be able to buy the homes that that created a bubble that pushed up Housing prices and that since the financial crisis QE has exacerbated that problem. Oh, yeah

I mean, where else would I put my ass if I don't own these ten hoes? So the yeah, that's the thing the telegraph solution is for like Greenbelt Persimmon to build all those homes and for persimmon to own the like the freehold But also like the idea that that people can't afford new homes now So the only way you can get people into new builds is to have shared ownership like that But that should trigger an alarm bell, but instead there's like no, it's a good idea You know, half your home while you live in it

Yeah, we just it's more more just Rube Goldberg schemes to try to get people into the property market without giving them anything Yeah, because half your house is provided by your landlord and the other half of your house is provided by I don't know But this is the thing right and because people will sign up for these things and at least part of the reason is that if you don't own your home, right? you have like a very like a Particularly unbeliable unreliable way of saving for retirement like how are you going to save your retirement when you know your defined Contribution scheme is not giving you enough money when you can't put your money You can't probably put your money in stocks and shares because you know, that's not something that you have access to

and interest rates are low and You can barely afford to make ends meet as it is people feel the need to be like, okay I need to put some money in an asset that will retain its value for the future That's a symptom of insecurity and they're doing that even if it costs them tons of money and even if it's you know In somewhere where they have to commute literally two hours to get to work It's a symptom of the fact that we like people have literally no idea what's gonna be happening to them from one day to the next That's a solution. That's a problem that needs to be solved by like, you know Expanding social security and giving people proper pensions. You got to put your money in will be sticks

Yeah, you've got it. You know, that's what we're pushing we're pushing with a stick Personally anecdote again, but we were looking my wife and I were looking at a place to rent and it currently is on sale as well And it had the sale listings dating back to the 90s on there I tweeted about this couple of days ago The house was sold in 1997 for 60,000 pounds was then sold again six months later for 100 or for 80,000 pounds It's currently on they just took it off the market because no one's buying it But it but it was recently value or on sale at 800,000 pounds now in 1997 if you adjust 60,000 pounds for inflation, it was something like 107,000 pounds now

So the idea I get it they've renovated it that the areas become more popular the overgrounds been built But it hasn't increased your access to sourdough pizza It has it has an increase in value eight times and the idea that a normal house not particularly Standout in any way has increased in value that much should give you some indication that all is not well We work shit. It's we work shit where the everything they say as Increasing the value of the house by that much. It's just like, okay What so they they have like a digital analytics that says they want baristas on the coffee bar in the morning And then they have like water that spells out, you know

Every time you go to the bathroom you could be working harder or whatever like other than like well That's what's contributing to this like for insane like multi multi multi billion dollar valuation. It's the same thing with this It's like oh that you this house is now worth 800,000 pounds eight times as much as it was because there's a sourdough pizza place nearby and I forget the idea that that that some Instagram tory comes out with a solution to Britain's productivity crisis if people just on the toilet too much stop using the toilet shitting wear a diaper like a Landlord also, that's like a it's like a fig leaf what they really be able like hey rich middle-class people who are white Do you want to buy this house and pack them for 800,000 pounds like well not really and they're like are you sure there's now

Black people Talk to me more about this house Oh boy, we love gentrification So let's let's do it with the last response to the the this article here because this is my favorite one It's my favorite one. I found and it's sort of it was reported in both the Daily Mail and the Express So this is an amalgam of both the headline goes my favorite hybrid a bit rich Three boats McDonald plotting money grab on pensioners with second homes Yes, John McDonald is a character in a weird logic problem about getting a goat and a chicken and a bag of grain

His jackboot has been on the head of British working people for too long a goat a chicken a bag of grain and three boats Fuck you McDonald Three boats McDonald now I did some more looking into this and these boats are two of them are robots Surely they must be like tiny little Yeah, these are not big There are three holes on one boat John McDonald has a waterworld cosplay That is just been doing this for years. I'm McDonald is planning for the apocalypse He's got like one of those turn your piss into water machine

So one neighbor told the Daily Mail when I saw the news about him banging on Neighbor yeah, kind of neighbor who talks the Daily Mail. That's like all they do their professional snitches local neighbor When I saw the news about him banging on about punishing people for being private landlords that's again It's all a moral thing. Yeah, it's a moral thing. It's morally bad to be a private land It is but we're doing okay. You gotta say neighbor Yeah, how dare you punish me for being successful enough to own a second home as I think the the undertone here I thought hang on a minute. It seems a bit hypocritical and duplicitous for him to be targeting landlords when he and his wife Have their own second home in Norwich

Which they don't rent out and therefore not They come up here quite regularly for weekends It's like oh, it's pretty rich for you to be saying landlords are shit when you could be a landlord but choose not to be I've not thought this through They come here quite regularly on the weekends probably to do sinister lefty stuff Especially in the summer John McDonald's son finished university last year and came up University no, yeah, a university your children to university much money. Do these people have well that of course is very Daily Mail Isn't it it's like oh fucking ox bridge send your kids there? That is like

Yeah, that's coming up from university where they've been marxistly indoctrinated by the professor again The universities which are just big hedge funds at this point Well, it's the same thing that they did when when Boris Johnson's neighbors Recorded the argument with him and his girlfriend that like these people living in their 750,000-pound flat and camberwell Boxes valued at Imagining fucking a John McDonald his son came back from university. He's like damn even Marx would be shocked at how indoctrinated my son has become From under the watchful eye of capitalist McDonald

5% marks would bark exactly Tinkering in the private property market that doesn't abolish the concept of private property marks said to do something but not this Wait, did she say that in no, I'm saying my son just came back from university and told me to downgrade to two boats Well They come up here quite regularly for weekends in the especially in the summer McDonald's son finished University last year last year and Came up with three or four friends one week. They created bedlam making noise and jumping in the river Wow, we can't reform the property market because John McDonald's rowdy sons won't stop jumping in the fucking river Socialism for all of us

We can't get it all these big boys these rowdy boys coming back from university and just Swatting in to their daddy the Chancellor's second home in Norwich, which is worth and by the way the article says the Chalet is worth an estimated 170,000 pounds The Chalet in Norwich They're too large They keep jumping in the river It's bad for the river Particularly highly valued even for average house prices are

185,000 pounds on average It's a small cabin by a river and has two rowboats moored at it Damn, oh damn. Yeah. Honestly. I don't know He could live in a fucking moon palace if he's proposing good policies. I don't really care. Yeah. Yeah It goes back to my favorite thing when periodically some like news reporter who thinks they're really clever will like doorstep Jeremy Corbyn outside his house and be like Jeremy Corbyn And then his house looks like an absolute shithole and Jeremy Corbyn is wearing like a full Don a tracksuit looking like he's just come back from like buying scratch cards or something

They're like you the Lord of the Manor In your mansion, it's like a fucking like a perspex door and a pebble-dash house It looks like somewhere your Nan's friend Doris would live Well a spokesman for mr. McDonald told the mail John and his wife have a riverside holiday hut with a mooring for two small rowboats and a small sail Sail cruiser that he is restoring Oh my god, that's so cute John McDonald being like Grand Torino guy but with a boat

What just like doing doing the thing where he does the gravelly voice to landlords like he's racist away from my boat He's just racist against landlords. You don't touch my boat. I put the sail in that myself in 1975 Just come it just inventing all kinds of new slurs for bosses. I used to stack neighbors like you five feet high in Vietnam All right, all right, that's um, I think that's about enough for today grace Where can people find your book people can find my book in all good bookstores? I would recommend that they buy it straight from the publisher repeatabooks.com because you get a free e-book when you buy it from them A free book a free book free book. Yeah, we're taking it from someone We're actually taking the free e-book from a boss who has many e-books and we're redistributing it to you with a worker

Damn socialism giving away free stuff. Yeah, you can't get my book for free though. Sorry. No, you can't get her book Listen to this podcast for free though. Yeah, but you can't listen to every podcast for free. Oh shit Wait, you can't even do that now. You do need to pay capitalism folks Because it's sexier that way Let grace and us fend on you Great grace. I was gonna ask you. Have you been on books? I have has your book featured on like bookstagram. Yeah What's bookstagram? Oh my god? It's just like these like instant miss Instagram community of people that just take like

Obsessively like aesthetic pictures of books and sometimes like they're just like the most mundane and like boring kind of Not to say that yours is obviously because it's great It's a good Not yours on there. It was actually this is what was weird. Oh shit Well, if yours is on there, then mine should be on there. Someone took my book and they want to lose Someone took my book and they made like a whole like floral pattern around it and I was just like That's great I'm looking them up right now. That's nice. So take that next photo. It's like 12 rules for life

Here's the TF challenge Take buy grace's book take a picture with it put it on Instagram and also rate it I'll take a picture of it next to your dick or something like the opposite Take Grace's book Yeah thought thought ended up with stolen Sit on your ass also guys go online and rate it on everything Go give it five stars on like Amazon even though we hate them

Um, yeah, so do all that it's a good website Oh, don't do that and also also come yeah rate it five out of five on goat see Oh Common You heard it here first websites after a fashion The exception of stormfront. Yes Anyway, uh, so you also can come see us on the at the world transformed in brighton on the 23rd at 130

So do that a it's a monday at 130 The world transformed in brighton come see us so skip your job or Spend your lunch time with us before you go back today's entry come hang out with us over lunch Also, we'll do that friday 27th of september. I'm doing a special live performance of my enombra show pindos at the et cetera theater in Camden there'll be a link to buy tickets in the show notes I know that their ticketing website is very windows 95. It's not my fault in camden. Yeah, that sounds cool. That sounds posh Yeah, how can you afford to do a gig in camden damn one of us foiled again? Yeah, who's saying I hear you Yeah, can I plug something because I have to?

um I've got like one of my last ever book events for the year on the 26th at the asia house literary festival Um, there are tickets left my publisher is like you need to sell more tickets Stop, you know promote your promote your book and stuff. So come to my event and hang out and you know Yeah, it's asia house like so-ho house, but the only one in asia Yeah, it's the only one that andrew yang's are like, um, it's one of the like andrew yang kind of talks about all the time Yeah, it's the medical school where andrew yang finds all the doctors he's talking about Um, anyway, that does it for us here today at tf. So thank you all for listening and see you in the bonus episode

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