Slums …


Nicole Foss — Stoneleigh — recently published an article about the recent electric blackout in India where hundreds of millions lost power. The article is very comprehensive and well worth the time to read it. As informative as the article are some of the photographs;

 

 

A slum is a favela is a shanty-town. Here is a typical slum in India/anywhere in the world (unknown photographer). The canal in the foreground is both sewer and source of drinking/washing water. Life in this slum is brutish, nasty and short. How can it be otherwise?

Slums are a product of modernity just the same as automobiles and jet airplanes. They are economically segregated areas, places where society’s losers are swept. Modernity washes its hands of the slum-dwellers then moves onto other business … the creation of more slum dwellers. Slums are the end product of social Darwinism, the necessary ‘yin’ to business success ‘yang’.

More success = more slums. Failure of the process also = more slums. Modernity asserts that it eliminates poverty. Slums stand as evidence that modernity creates poverty. More modernity = more poverty.

Anywhere from 800 million to 2 billion of the world’s citizens live in shanty-towns, many within/surrounding sprawling modern mega-cities. A few older slums are stable, their inhabitants are transforming these places into functional urban neighborhoods with land title, utility services and permanent structures. Most slums are temporary pop-up collections of plastic trash and worn packaging materials, that only last until the landowner, flood or other disaster wipes them away.

Creating neighborhoods is something humans have done for thousands of years, are generally good at it. Third-world slums are city building on a human scale: they are non-automobile habitats. In this sense they represent both humanity’s past and future.

Slums appear where there are people desperate for housing, where a piece of land can be occupied at little- or no cost. Often these are industrial spoil dumps or city garbage pits, border-area refugee camps, abandoned- or contested development sites. Some slums are a single building or collection of older, obsolete structures.

Ad-hoc landlords divide the space into shack-sized lots or ‘rooms’ that are rented for pennies per day to the poorest of the poor. Because slums are ‘unofficial’ there are generally no services other than the odd street light and perhaps a water tap. One tap may be the only source of clean water for five thousand- or more people. Many slums have no clean water supply at all and require trips by residents to distant wells or periodic visits by (expensive) water trucks. There are scarce- or no toilets or sewers, few rules, no police or government authority, no medical care. There are improvised micro-economies of interrelated small businesses many of which are tinkers’ trades. Like the slum itself, its economy is both anti- and postmodern. Interface with ‘regular’ finance and industry takes place at the margins of the slum.

Because slums are not automobile habitats they can be confused by some with traditional city developments that emerged before the auto-industrial period. The ‘traditional city’ has high density human dwellings and small businesses with all areas accessible on foot. This kind of development is also refined: inhabitants are prosperous, there are excellent services available.

 

 

Mallorca street (Nathan Lewis) This is an economically segregated area but cannot be considered a slum. It shares many of the physical characteristics of one: narrow streets, buildings up against the street, the absence of a central ‘plan’ or developer. Narrow streets allow more living space in a given area. At one time this village might have have been a slum, if this is so these beginnings were left behind once original shacks were replaced with permanent structures and the owners given property rights.

Stewart Brand believes slums have something to offer: they are ‘efficient’:

 

How Slums Can Save The Planet

In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organise neighbourhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.

Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of the new urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.

 

How precious: Calthorpe “introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities.” What did people do before marketing? People have been walking in cities for as long as cities have existed. People live in slums because they cannot afford to live elsewhere, not because they are walkable. Persons with sufficient incomes exit their slums without hesitation. There is no upside to living in squalor, no matter how much the concept is ‘redefined’.

Every year millions are swept out of the countryside by agricultural colonialism and industrial expansion. There are insufficient opportunities in rural communities to employ displaced agricultural workers. A lure of the cities is factory jobs, both in- and outside of urban sweatshops: labor migrates toward income as it has since the dawn of mankind, it also goes where it must.

 

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”

 

The informal sector in slums is drug dealing, robbery and kidnapping, punctuated with battles fought with automatic weapons between gangsters and the police.

 

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities (slums), previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.”

 

Slums carry with them the constant risk of displacement, generally slum dwellers have no property rights. It is difficult for those with small means to divert some of them toward improving places they have little or no interest in.

Life in the slums is anchored in modernity, consumer demand is taken wherever it can be found:

 

Life In The World’s Slums

In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle. (From research for UN report The Challenge of Slums.)

Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes (Janice Perlman, author of The Myth of Marginality.)

In the slums of Medellín, Colombia, people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in used bleach bottles hung from windowsills. (Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.)

The 4bn people at the base of the economic pyramid—all those with [annual] incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes… are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet they have substantial purchasing power… [and] constitute a $5 trillion global consumer market.

 

Population growth gallops ahead of the ability of development to deliver anything more than cheap, energy gobbling consumer goods. These give the illusion of ‘progress’ while inflation suggests that the poor are earning more money when in real terms they aren’t.

It’s hard to compare life in a medieval European village or a yacht harbor in the San Francisco Bay area with living in a shanty town in Bangkok, Mumbai or elsewhere in this world:

 

Paul Fenn

I unintentionally found myself living (flat broke at 34 years old) in a slum off Jalan Wahid Hasyim in downtown Jakarta in ’94 for two months. It was the most disgusting, scary, dark, bleak, psycho, messed up two months a person could have. I’m talking about swarms of dengue-infected mosquitoes from dusk till dawn, cockroaches slapping off the walls like flying moccasins nightly, bloated ticks on the walls, intense heat and 100% humidity always, an auto body shop that started banging hammers on car panels at 6am 7 days a week, a mosque on each side of our house, complete with blown-out speakers calling locals to prayer 5 times daily, a disco behind us thumping on till 7am every morning, rats, dogs, cats all of them wild, mangy, diseased, flea-and-tick-bitten, puking and hunger-crazed, regular power failures, single-mom hookers lurking, screaming, pot banging food vendors day and night, storm-triggered floods of black, stinking filth, the toxic stench of burning plastic and vegetation always. And that was just down the alley I lived on.

Walk out into the streets and it was thousands on thousands of cars, trucks, motorbikes, buses and two-stroke Indian-made Bajai taxis all jammed up, barely moving, all churning out black and blue smoke. Fold in rotting, burning garbage piled randomly with no hope of ever being collected, missing sidewalk covers over canals filled with what looked like black snot and choked with a billion plastic bags, coconuts, palm fronds, trees and Christ knows what else, plus disfigured, heartbreakingly filthy beggars here and there, the sick and aged homeless selling their trifles to make ends meet, corruption from the parking mafia on up to the president… and this wasn’t the city’s worst slum. Though I went there too and saw people bathing babies and brushing teeth in rivers you wouldn’t dare throw a lit match into.

Sorry, Mr. Brand. This is the most insane, out-of-touch pile of white-guilt-assuaging crap I’ve come across in decades. You have no idea what you are talking about, sir. Stay aboard your yacht in Marin where you’ll be safe in your delusions. I’ve also spent time on a yacht in your marina, and can tell you that that life couldn’t be any further removed from the reality of slum living, unless you moved it to the moon.

People in the slums hate their lives (no matter how much they may smile at you as you pass by in your Indiana Jones hat and cargo pants full of candies for their kids), and for thousands of sound reasons. There is nothing happy or applicable to be pulled out of slums other than the knowledge that they are cesspools of tragedy, misguided dreams, unimaginable filth and evil.

 

In slums there are no regular sources of power. Instead, there are jury-rig connections to the grid from street lighting cables along with small generators. The generators are dependent upon a steady supply of diesel fuel or gasoline, the connections rely on periodic blackouts:

 

 

A rigger makes a new connection to a street light circuit (unknown photographer): jury-rigged connections are found in every slum around the world. Making unofficial connections is a dance with fiery death unless the power is off during a blackout. There is little information about how many are killed making unsanctioned connections to energized circuits. In most poor nations there are periodic blackouts during which time do-it-yourselfers and hired riggers climb poles and attach lines.

 

 

A rigger connects a house to live wires in the Rocinha slum in Rio. (Fred Alves, Washington Post)

 

 

Unknown photographer: the wires bring lighting, refrigerators and air conditioners: at the end of every single wire there is a television set. The desire is for all to buy and buy: the fantastic world will be the slum-dwellers’ tomorrow as long as they endure the unendurable today …

Support for the business lords’ agenda springs from the underclass’ misery and human desire for ‘improvement’. The television puts form to the multitudes’ fantasies …

 

 

Photo by Kevin Frayer (AP): a man walks past temporary high-tension power supply cables in New Delhi. It is unfair to characterize the entire country of India as a gigantic slum but the photograph is indicative. The drainage canal is both sewer and water supply for those in the surrounding neighborhood. Note the garbage dump to the left sloping into the canal. The infrastructure of India and in similarly situated parts of the world cannot support the growing human mass that depends upon it.

The lack of clean water for drinking and cleaning as well as proper waste sanitation are gigantic health problems. Large slums housing thousands often have latrines that are nothing more than open pits with boards over them. New pits are dug when the originals are filled. When the rains come the pits overflow with human waste which floods into the housing.

Slums are considered to be green due to density however the hundreds of millions who live in them are without waste-water treatment. This pollution ultimately winds up in the ocean, beaches in Rio have been closed by sewage floods from the city’s notorious favelas. Along with sewage is millions of tons of indestructible plastic waste.

The concept of slum is expandable, some forms are purposefully created and are not to be confused with anything else.

 

 

Unknown photographer: the dystopian nightmare without end, humans as lobotomized rats running in a sewer … a canal sluicing with a torrent of mechanized waste, every occupant a slave to auto manufacturers and the petroleum industry.

 

 

Jericho Turnpike in Long Island, NY (Scouting New York)

 

Sleepwalking Into the Future

James Howard Kunstler

Years from now, the denizens of Long Island may shake their heads in wonder and nausea as they attempt to repair the mighty mess that was made here during the 20th century. My term for this mess is the national automobile slum. I think it’s more precise than the usual generic term suburban sprawl. A slum, after all, is clearly understood to be a place that offers a very low quality of life. And the mess is everywhere. Every corner of our nation is now afflicted. The on-ramps of Hempstead aren’t any more spiritually rewarding than the ones in Beverly Hills. We’ve become a United Parking Lot of America.

We have utterly relinquished the everyday world of our nation to the automobile. I don’t think it is possible to overstate the damage that this has done to us collectively as a civilization and as individual souls. The national automobile slum is a place where the past has been obliterated and the future has been foreclosed. Since past represents our memories and the future our hope, life in a car slum is life with no memory and no hope. How many of us can gaze out over a typical highway strip like the Jericho Turnpike and imagine a hopeful future for it or for the people who will have to live with it?

 

Slums are variation on the theme of dehumanization. Humans are reduced to being cogs in gigantic machines or waste products. Individuals in the waste category sometimes lift themselves up by becoming drug kingpins, informal ‘mayors’, celebrities or shills for Ponzi schemes. The rest are trapped, the slums swallow them.

What is underway is the slum-ification of the entire world. The great machines cannot provide middle-class lives to all because the necessary materials are absent. If the slum-dweller cannot regularize the status of his ‘house lot’ if he cannot afford the materials to craft a permanent structure that does not leak whenever it rains, there are no others who will gain these things for him.

 

 

An abandoned, unfinished skyscraper in downtown Beijing (Glen Downs): where did all that money go? The industrial ‘solution’ is always more development but this shifts costs around, it doesn’t eliminate them. Every slum that is developed out of existence in China pops up in Africa or South America. With more humans there are more slums, eventually the new developments become slums as well.

When the fossil fuel becomes unobtainable the great auto slums of America and its wannabes will become the real things or places of ruin and abandonment.

Consider all of our precious infrastructure without the means to keep it maintained. Here are your shining cities on the hill: the slums beckon, the default future for what remains of the human race in a world that is stripped of all accessible resources.

34 thoughts on “Slums …

  1. The Dork of Cork

    Watch out for those narrow streets – they can be dangerous places.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGs6BS-q1E4

    The later footage in this film was shot in the Fenouillèdes…..a true French Backwater.
    The area has poor scruby land by French standards yet the villages still hang together ……just.
    Its best to walk through this land but if you don’t have the time take the slowest train in all of France.

    The Anti -TGV………..

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stcPt5gjUAs
    Go to 4.30 to see the hi tech signaling system.

    fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_du_pays_Cathare_et_du_Fenouillèdes

  2. Ken Barrows

    TPTB are so deluded. They won’t keep up the current infrastructure and don’t think about the energy and resources it will take to build a new one (you know, for electric cars and the like). But it will all work out in the end, right?

    And slums relieve TPTB from upgrading the infrastructure for that segment of the population.

    1. John D. Wheeler

      TPTB know exactly what they are doing. Slums are a very “good” solution to the “problem” of “excess” population, if you have a sociopathic mindset. Running out of resources? Just cut the population down to match, say, half a billion. If you understand that TPTB see the rest of humanity as cockroaches, everything they do makes perfect logical sense.

    2. p01

      It’s always been this way. Slums are a built-in feature of civilization since the first pyramid system has been created and its physical representation worshiped as a wonder of the world. Whoever thinks otherwise is a hopeless romantic. There’s no TPTB Grand Conspiracy (this also comes as a built-in feature), it’s simply the way civilization works in meatspace, as opposed to people’s imagination, nothing more, nothing less. I know it’s crude and extremely inconvenient, but it happens to be the observable truth.

      1. steve from virginia Post author

        I’m not sure that’s true. pre-industrial and non-industrial civilizations were less materially productive. The gap between product of labor and that of capital was small. Societies had different ways of organizing themselves, there were castes as well as categories of occupations, the outcomes for those toiling at the social bottom were not always what we would expect.

        Conditions for the ‘untouchables’ were not materially different from the rest. Some were better: Jews in pre-industrial Europe, Chinese natives in Malay South-East Asia. These ‘outcast communities’ were often more prosperous than the hosts which left them vulnerable to periodic pogroms and associated looting.

        You have to keep in mind that one of the ‘undesirable’ businesses of the underclass was the lending of money at interest.

      2. enicar333

        What do you think was the fate of the diabetic? The stroke victim? those who had a heart attack – or those born retarded, deformed, or simply not wanted?

        Were those who had “medical emergencies” simply allowed to suffer, or put out of misery. Would any Community jeopardize it’s existence or spend resources to maintain a Down’s Syndrome child?

        Unless you were rich, and were able to force others to provide for you – good health meant you lived – poor health and accidents were a death sentence – for most. Never before in the history of man – and never again – will so many souls simply be kept alive while all they do is drain resources. The time will soon come when eliminating one group will ensure the survival of another – it’s time.

      3. steve from virginia Post author

        Obviously, it was impossible to treat many diseases if for no other reason that they were poorly understood and the means to treat them did not exist.

        Modern ‘lifestyle’ diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. were not widespread. There was no ionizing radiation, toxic chemicals, processed food or automobiles. Greatest problems in European and Western hemisphere societies (after the Europeans took charge) was the absence of clean water and good sanitation and accompanying infectious diseases such as cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, etc. These infections plague the ‘poor world’ today. At the same time there were fewer people generally, fewer in urban centers and less demand for water/sewers.

        Asian and African societies human (and animal) dung was fertilizer and fuel.

        Pre-modern societies had no choice but be more accepting of death: there were no tech fantasies about escaping it.

      4. Ross

        Compassion. Humanity. Selflessness. Civilization.

        Naw, fuck it.

        Eugenics. Barbarism. Survival of the fittest.

        You want to be a beast? No one is stopping you from moving to the slums.

  3. Phlogiston Água de Beber

    What is underway currently is the massive expansion of slums. Their continued growth is evidence of the failure of modernity and industrialization.

    Failure? Hardly, it is exactly what industrialization came into the world to do. Get those excess bodies out of the hinterlands and into the cities where some use for them ‘might’ be found. Modernity smacked headlong into the Great Wall of Finitude and that ‘might’ turned into ‘get thee over to the garbage dump.’

    We are where we are because we are not what we like to believe we are. In a monumental act of arrogance and hubris we gave ourselves the label sapiens (wise). Craig Dilworth suggested homo artifex, which he translates as the clever ape, would have been a more appropriate choice. No matter what you call the naked ape, wisdom seems far from a universal characteristic. IMHO almost every animal on the planet exhibits more wisdom than we can muster, on average. In so far as I can tell, none of them worship imaginary sky gods.

    Modernity and industry (M&I) were demonstrably not wise. You do have to give lots of points for cleverness though. Just like all the previous ‘solutions’ to the too-many problem, it works until it doesn’t. Even the cleverest eventually run out of workable ideas and I think we are there. M&I are clearly NOT the final solution, which is probably next up and perhaps not too far off.

    The slums are not the future, but those pictures and descriptions do give good reason to suspect that the slum dwellers may be the future. If they can survive that, they must be psychologically tough and have immune systems to die for. Once we poseurs are gone, life might be a piece of cake for them. No way to predict whether they might produce a sapient mutation, but the odds aren’t good. One thing we can say with certainty. None of their descendants will ever do M&I.

  4. The Dork of Cork

    Irish oil imports Jan – June…….+ total yearly oil imports expressed in Ktoe

    Y2012 : 2,709 Million Euros (latest est.)
    Y2011 : 2,628 Million Euros…………………….Y2011 : 8,776 KTOE
    Y2010 : 2,087 Million………………………….. Y2010 : 8,912 KTOE
    Y2009 : 1,574 Million Euros (price slump)……. Y2009 : 9,019 KTOE
    Y2008 : 2,545 Million Euros (collapse level ?)…..Y2008 : 10,386 KTOE
    Y2007 : 1,954 Million Euros……………………..Y2007 : 10,291 KTOE
    Y2006 : 1,936 Million Euros……………………..Y2006 : 10,793 KTOE
    Y2005 : 1,469 Million Euros……………………..Y2005 : 11,180 KTOE
    Y2004 : 972 Million Euros……………………..Y2004 : 10,184 KTOE
    Y2003 : 816 Million Euros……………………..Y2003 : 10,171 KTOE
    Y2002 : 757 Million Euros……………………..Y2002 : 10,476 KTOE
    Y2001 : 410 Million Euros……………………..Y2001 : 10,353 KTOE
    Y1998 : 303 Million Punts……………………..Y1998 : 8,886 KTOE

    We typically reexport 1000 -1600KTOE of oil a year so imports do not quite accuretly express our ability to do work but you can see from these figures we are paying more for less.
    We had 2 old style Bakeries in the Medieval streets of Cork in modern times……we lost one of these in the early 90s and the last in the mid 00s…….
    European health and safety laws were as much to blame as anything…..absurdly strict really.

  5. The Dork of Cork

    Yearly oil primary energy supply gives a better feel for the situation in Ireland.
    As I said we are paying more for less ability to do work and also we have a higher population now operating in a credit hyperinflated envoirment where the input costs are greater.
    (oil)TPES(inc non energy)
    TPES Y2011 : 7,101 Ktoe
    TPES Y2010 : 7,690 Ktoe
    TPES Y2009 : 8,006 Ktoe
    TPES Y2008 : 9,243 Ktoe
    TPES Y2007 : 9,139 Ktoe
    TPES Y2006 : 9,305 Ktoe
    TPES Y2005 : 9,586 Ktoe
    TPES Y2004 : 8,931 Ktoe
    TPES Y2003 : 8,304 Ktoe
    TPES Y2002 : 8,719 Ktoe
    TPES Y2001 : 8,607 Ktoe
    TPES Y1998 : 7,278 Ktoe
    TPES Y1990 : 4,422 Ktoe

    The ability to print debt free money and subsidise the rail and bus system could do much to push out oil so that it could do some work rather then car consumption…i.e. build more rail & tram lines.
    But Ireland is a mere conduit , it is not a country in any real sense of the term…its one tiny cog in a gigantic satanic engine.
    Ireland is by far the most interesting lab rat in my opinion given its extreme credit nature and good data sets…..I am sure the powers that be will poke & tinker with its subject to see how different dynamics work their way through the domestic systems.

  6. The Dork of Cork

    I guess what people don’t get withen Ireland is that when the Irish state totally shifted over from a nation state to a Market state post 1987 the banking system would slowly have to liquadate the residents belief systems (formed by a earlier nation state banking era) as their culture would begin to resist even more consumption if their earlier belief systems remained intact.

    The banking system always need more people who believe in the systems they create…it needs hungry people.
    Not only hungry physically for more consumption but mentally.
    http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0830/4-000-become-irish-citizens.html

    For example The post Napoleonic Debt crisis of the early 1820s in Ireland was of a far bigger economic money scale then the famine period of the 1840s (indeed it was the biggest modern economic crisis on this island since 2007)…..because many of the poorest 2 million~ people still had potential economic value when the first trans continental war was in full flow.
    Afterwards their offspring needed to be shut out of the domestic energy flow either through death or forced expulsion to other areas of flow where the banking system was to continue to make money from Industrial expansion.
    (by the 1840s hundreds of thousands of families lived in rural slums of 1 acre a piece or less -living off potatoes and whatever else they could get their hands on)

    Therefore the Famine in 1840s Scotland and Ireland was not a especially big economic crisis as the peoples lives foreclosed on did not register very much on the books by that time except for the grazing land they displaced for the money animal crops of wool and Butter exported to more distant colonies.

    If the banking system is to make profits from the Irish conduit they need to create more sociological flux in the system as it cannot expand using the present population as they have already been burned by market state capital dislocations.

    In effect the culture needs to be destroyed just as in previous Cromwellian , post Napoleonic times and post 1914 times.
    For example The emergency measures HM treasury took to bail out the BoE in 1914 via the production of Treasury notes (10 shilling notes which became Legal tender in Scotland & Ireland ) was not of suffiecent interest.
    Just like in Post 1820 ~ Ireland they needed to kill or displace vast numbers of people post 1914 so as to recapitalise the credit banking system.

  7. James

    Perhaps slums are simply a manifestation of the Ponzi in which human factors crowd
    towards the center of energy use and expenditure, hoping to grab some of the excess or crumbs and, instead of consuming them, turning them into a growing business, or one’s own personal ponzi. The first in become the founding partners and are rewarded handsomely while those hired into the business later are usually fed with promises of promotion and greater income as the organism thrives and grows. Some will move up, if they are lucky, while others will earn only a living wage. Those that got in at the ground floor will obviously take much of the wealth generated by their employees.
    When growth becomes impossible for most enterprises, hiring will stop or reverse, to optimize cash flow to the “owners” of the enterprise. Incomes become stagnant for the middle class or disappear for those low in the hierarchy. Eventually the enterprise folds for lack of business that was generated by expenditures of those now dispossessed of their jobs. Stopping the cascading slide into penury is impossible without growth. The imagined sustainability will never occur as long as men strive to dominate one another and resources are available to manifest their desires.

    Even the hospitals are chop shops, with physicians and managers striving to maximize income to dominate their personal and business competitors. Are a few extra thousand square feet of living space, a house at the beach, and a new Mercedes worth taking someone’s life savings? You bet they are.

    1. enicar666

      That’s a great explanation – and it also applies to governments, and government enterprises, which are all CORPORATIONS. Your local elected official is just another Officer of another Corporation – managing the regulating the land and those who engage in business upon it. The Tax Farmer. Those elected officers are now openly looting and oppressing those who make the land profitable.

      Of course, making land profitable in human endeavors is always destructive – and eventually the conditions that made the land profitable change and the profit disappears – along with the jobs and the infrastructure. We are at the last stage in Empire – and descending fast, although in human terms, it seems slow.

      The rise of “modern medicine” is evidence of the last gasp attempts for one group of humans to wring the wealth from another group of humans with “magic”. LOL. Modern medicine practice is predatory – with the object of keeping the body alive until the last $$$ can be wrung from the accounts of the patient – and then the merchants of death take the final crumbs with elaborate ceremonies and coffins that can survive a nuclear holocaust.

      Somewhere up there someone complained about TPTB viewing humans as mere cockroaches. Look around you – what are the primary endeavors of most humans? What are their practices? What have we built? Humanity is less than cockroaches. Enjoy your TV, Hollywood entertainment, cell phone, LA pornography, alcohol, tobacco, Pot, cocaine, carz and Mc Mansions.

      The Telegraph Road.

  8. The Dork of Cork

    Ahhhh yes the CSO has published another detailed study of the Irish Petri dish – Household /housing matrix ( I can’t imagine the Greeks doing this but I can’t read Greek so…..)
    http://www.cso.ie/
    Census 2011 Profile 4 The Roof over our Heads (look to the right of opening CSO page for this PDF document)
    Covering housing stock , nationality , home heating type , car ownership etc etc.

    Between 1991 & the 2011 housing stock significantly outpaced population (71% relative to 31%)
    During the 90s this was filled by smaller family units ,broken family units fractionalised under the stress of a extreme market state , outside immigrants , the dud sons & daughters of families who no longer became priests & nuns etc etc,…..essentially the proud products of “economic growth”.

    After Euro introduction many young singles from eastern Europe filled up apartments , sometimes living together under a small apartment unit.
    Any young people especially from Africa began to have families as 20 /30 somethings have a tendency to do …however Eastern European women are much less productive……..
    Still the population exploded from 3.525 million in 1991 to 4.588 million in 2011 (I believe this was the highest % growth in Europe during this time period.

    Our Justice Minister
    “Speaking at the National Convention Centre, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said that the country had been enriched by their presence”

    What he means by this is that he wants more people to fill the vacant housing units in this pseudo – state so as to prop up the market price of houses amongest other things.
    That my friends is the end game to the extreme market state – the present day oligarchs have no skin in the game of borders as in the nation state debt money system…..it matters not a bit if the GNP per population is crashing …once those units are filled with tenants.
    This is a variation of war to obtain a yield during the nation state era but by other means as Nuclear war makes playing one nation state off against another impractical to say the least.

    Anyway there is alot of Housing units to fill yet which is the strange goal of this slightly funny but very sick market state experiment as over a quarter of all dwelling in existence have been built since the Year 2000………which I guess is unprecedented in the modern western world.

  9. The Dork of Cork

    So key figures…..
    On census night April 2011 there was 59,395 holiday homes vacant
    168,427 Vacant houses
    61,629 vacant apartments
    even if you discount the holiday homes and conservatively put 3 people into each house thats 505,281 people places & put 2 people into each apartment thats 123,258….
    Total :628,539 vacant people places in a country with a current population at that time of 4,588,252 without a drop of domestic oil…….

    Back in the 60s they could film the Blue Max around Fermoy County as it looked much like the French countryside from high above…dito for Barry Lyndon in the 70s
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efc6Y6LCuuc

    Including that famous flying sequence below the Fermoy Viaduct

    They could not do so now – the countryside has been systematically raped – with hedgerows pulled out to service the European CAP food mountains of the 70s & 80s and more recently pockmarked by absurd trophy houses and crisscrossed with empty roads looking much like ugly Nazca Lines from a extreme distance.

    But most of the damage was of a post 1987 variety -much of the place still had a sad beauty in 1985…..indeed some mad people wanted to recreate this famous scene back in the depressed mid 80s
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdk2dQ5Qw70

    Now its just a sad place with no soul or common culture…..a country ripe for more marrow sucking as a less homogeneous societies are less likely to resist credit pillaging by the Venetian Banking system.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18519395

  10. The Dork of Cork

    In the above CSO report the use of electricity to heat apartments is quantified.
    This is of course the most catostrophic form of heating given the massive transformation costs……in Ireland its mainly a conversion of high value Nat Gas to electricity……..

    83,728 flats use electicity for heat
    37,326 (44%) of these were built after the year 2000……the scale of the junk production post 1994/5 in Ireland is absolutely unprecedented given the small size of the country.
    Also New EU laws now prevent communal heating of apartment blocks so the Apartments with Gas Central heating systems will switch over to individual electricity space heating…….

    Outside of Dublin & Cork terrace Houses which mainly use Nat Gas for central heating – much of the houses use oil for central heating….almost as bad as using electicity.
    Indeed its the equivalent of well over half the oil burned in Irish Private vehicles now.
    Irish residential oil use (heating)
    Y1990 :380KTOE (private car:926KTOE)
    Y1992 :300KTOE (delayed response to the Iraq oil shock of late 1990 or cold winter in 1990 ? ) (private car :1,012KTE)

    Y2010 :1,267 KTOE (peak year ,cold winter)…….(private car : 1,895KTOE)
    Y2011 :1,035 kTOE (private car : 1,843KTOE)

    In the midlands much of the fuel type is solid fuel ( the midlands is a Peat Bog)
    However the EU is now seeking to prevent people living near Bogs from cutting Turf ,perhaps with the strategic objective of making semi -independent people more dependent on the Irish & European pseudo market state.

  11. The Dork of Cork

    PS Milk production is down for 3 consecutive months during the productive summer season in Ireland (May , June ,July) as a result of one of the wettest summers on record.
    July figures were down 8.6% when compared to the same period last year.
    The UK probally also has similar milk statistics.
    – The farmers are the only guys getting bank credit in Ireland now.

    Irish farming oil use Y2011 : 212KTOE

  12. enicar666

    D.O.C. – Ireland makes the news here

    “Hospitals in Ireland will send some patients home at weekends after the country’s public health services announced a new round of deep cuts, according to a media report Friday.

    Cash-strapped hospitals will have to shut some wards on weekends as part of an effort to cut $44 million in spending on staff and overtime by the end of 2012, according to the Irish Independent.”

    and, THE HORROR!

    “Paddy Keogh, the chief executive, told the newspaper that the reductions would “push people back into their own homes.”

    Steve – I disagree with your assertion that the Elderly can pay for themselves (Mish) . They have elected the politicians who have set in law the largest intergenerational wealth transfer scheme in history – so they may live long recreational lives of luxury at the expense of their children and grandchildren. It is common sense to do away with pensions based upon unrealistic terms of growth and taking from the paychecks of their children, laundering the money through the hands of the government, then giving it to pensioners because of some proclaimed “merit” of service, or other terms of nonsense. It’s well past time to pull the plug on the dying and the dead and end the unsustainable intergenerational wealth transfers set as “law”.

  13. The Dork of Cork

    @Enicar
    Yes , they are pushing the weakest over the edge so that the strongest can continue to consume resourses and thus keep the price of oil / gas and stuff up.
    See above – the private vehicle oil use has not collapsed yet.

    The economists and journalist withen Dublin castle – serve this conduit system of control with no clear chain of command because it was designed that way , they always have since the days of Cromwell – see the latest farcical Dan o Brien article on the Irish Times (go to the Irish economy blog) and one of the economic priests withen the system (Mchale) defending this nonsense.
    Its almost Swiftian in its absurdity.
    They refuse to see Ireland as a Physical economy because it reality in many ways it is not now – they see Ireland as a series of debt contracts and nothing more.
    Their masters back in 87 or before instructed them to remove the last national economy protections which were little more then a fig leaf really and begin extracting all the equity from this bog.
    This including putting a motorway through Navan with some of the most important archaeological remains in the country.
    From a national economy perspective Ireland could go back to a 1990 like energy ration without much problems despite having a extra million on board this now sinking Atlantic ship if they could subsidise the railways etc with domestic goverment interest free money.
    http://www.broadsheet.ie/2012/08/17/irelands-zombie-train/
    But that is not the role of Ireland , Spain etc .. our role is to subsidise the city of London’s debt money system……and keep the oil flowing out of the North Sea as trains are far too efficient means of transportation to justify the capital input costs of the North Sea.

    If they have to kill a million of us – these servants of the system will do it.
    Ireland is now the prefect market state again , without the complications of domestic politics – the guys serving this system and getting their 30 pieces of silver can always blame external actors when things get a bit hot politically and thus throw the masses a bone while still getting Euros credited to their bank account.

    In many ways Ireland is the prefect market state – perfected over 400+ years now.
    The original and by far the Best Bitch on the planet.

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  15. The Dork of Cork

    Less glamorous but important given that it was probally the busiest single line railway in France -The Toulouse to Saint Sulpice line has been renewed costing 34 million euro and is now operational after a 4 month stopgap Bus replacement service.
    The track will now be doubled in 2013.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcOcAWWygzw

    The Midi Pyrenees region is renewing more then 500Km of track unfer its 2007 -13 regional rail plan.

    “Total Rail Plan spending is €820m, of which €400m has been provided by the Midi-Pyrénées region itself, €193m by the French government, €179m by RFF and €48m by the European Regional Development Fund”

    http://www.planrail.fr/

  16. The Dork of Cork

    People just don’t get how much money is going into French rail (I think its much bigger in real terms then the French nuclear capital budget of the 70s & 80s)

    You see its not just the French state directly , its SNCF , RFF ,companies such as SYtral ,PPPs, much of the regions taxes go back into rail……..indeed its difficult to get a grasp on the scale of it all.

    For example Google this PDF document

    [PDF]

    Présentation RFF – Le site info du Conseil Régional d’Auvergne
    41 million Euros is going into just one old lightly used regional railcar line bordering the Pyrenees & Massif Central areas.

    Now much of the low land rail lines have agricultural potential such as the transport of Grain to ports such as La Rochelle which is receiving much more rail freight…….so much of these are classic mixed freight /railcar lines.

    But this is a hill /cattle country railway line !!!! 41 million Euros ? for a line that operates mainly single railcar X73500s ?

    fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_de_Figeac_à_Arvant

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNFGk9cVJsg

    France is preparing for a change in the worlds monetary system – whether it will happen or not – they are preparing for a change in input costs.

    Meanwhile back in la la land Ireland they talk about tax as if it was a national duty or something……
    You tell these bozos its all about a lack of domestic currency and the export of hard $$$$$$ and they think you are a teletubbie or something.

    http://www.irisheconomy.ie/ (go the the whinging article and the retarded comments)
    Its embarrassing….these people have no concept of sovereignty AT ANY LEVEL be it of a Physical or monetary level.
    (this makes sense as the current rulling party honours the first Finance minister who begged a private bank (BoI) for the right to produce a symbolic currency……………..
    The Story goes that eventually Churchill had to persuade the BoI to give us a few Bob – but who really knows what goes on in these Crypts)
    The Euro has all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of a national currency.
    Me thinks post 1987 Europe was a FED /CIA setup.
    But Ireland was always a lost cause……..

  17. The Dork of Cork

    Looking at historical Greek trade balance figures (in million Euro) published by the Greek CB……

    Y2000
    Trade Balance excluding ships & oil : – 18,940
    Oil : -2,986
    Ships : 0

    Y2008
    Trade Balance excluding ships & oil : – 27,189
    Oil : -12,154
    Ships : -4,705

    Y2009 ($ price drop of oil) :
    Trade balance excluding ships & oil : -19,813
    Oil : -7,596
    Ships : -3,356

    Y2011 ($ oil price rise)
    Trade balance excluding ships & oil : -12,833
    Oil : – 11,126
    Ships : -3,261

    And quarterly oil balance figures….
    Q1 2010 : -2,697
    Q1 2011 : -3,331
    Q1 2012 : -3,142

    Quarterly balance excluding oil and ships……(here
    it appears to be reducing its defecit)
    Q1 2010 : -4,945
    Q1 2011 : -3,544
    Q1 2012 : -2,372

    So a country must effectivally must shut down its rail system because it does not have enough Euros to run the system….this increases its oil imports / $ exports , so it must crush the lives of its former citizens…..hence the reduction in goods consumption outside of oil and ships…..

    Great is it not ?
    We have the same mentality on this Isle…..
    A “economist” who was deeply involved in Irish transport policey in the 70s – a one Colm McCarthy…the man loves concrete highways & wishes to shut down the railways because they are too expensive in Euro terms……

    But he must appeal to the lowest form of commercial banking nationalism – blame the evil ECB for not burning Bondholders yet preach domestic austerity at home to remain withen the Euro…….
    The word Scoundrel comes to mind.

  18. The Dork of Cork

    Still it has impressive features for Dorks….
    http://www.panoramio.com/photo/62324222

    It has lost much of its secondary railway lines linking little villages to its heartland via the rationalisations of the 70s where Buses replaced Diesel rail units to finance the TGV but they have put in some money to save the busiest of the local lines during the 2008 -2011 period.
    Indeed it looks like they spent 118 million relaying 170 km of track although they were a bit cheap … only using 50 %~ concrete sleepers in this example….
    http://www.region-limousin.fr/Modernisation-de-la-ligne-Limoges,967

    PDF]
    3ème opération du Plan Rail de la région – RFF

    Still they got more stuff then Ireland did post crash.
    This earlier film from 2010 shows work on the Limoges – Gueret line……….
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WKeN_CqyZ8

    http://www.panoramio.com/photo/52437740

    Incrediably a old little 2200 railcar continues from Gueret to the little village of Felletin.
    http://www.panoramio.com/photo/9708160
    But no serious work appears to have been done to the line.

    The area looks and feels depressed in this Late winter early spring U tube clip.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bviRkv_zr0

  19. The Dork of Cork

    Greek oil balance
    jan -june
    y2010 : -4,442 million euros
    Y2011 :-5,591 million euros
    Y2012 :-5,661 million euros
    meanwhile its trade balance in goods excluding oil and ships is down down
    2010 : -8,890 million euros
    2011 :- 6,742
    2012 : – 4,756

    This is the albainisation of the Euro periphery in action…..

    I see this happening in Ireland…….a guy with savings buys a 5-10 year old second hand Merc (its cheap if its a petrol model) off a broken businessman rather then a new car …..this Merc will function for anther 5 -10 years or longer as they are built like a tank….

    So goods imports go down dramatically but the oil bill remains…..
    Although it makes financial sense if you really need a car (little public transport) but do not drive it much.

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