This is what England has taught me.
It makes zero sense for one third of the population to sacrifice their time and health and joys just to put a lot of money in other people’s pockets, people who are considered more valuable than the people who make them so “valuable”. It’s repulsive.
That’s part of what’s gone wrong in the western capitalist or industrialized, consumerist model of society and unless governments increasingly start taking daring innovative steps, this is going to escalate badly.
If you consider that it’s cheaper for governments to pay off people’s debts than to lecture them and talk down to them during debt counseling, which still doesn’t change the fact that people simply have no way of making enough to pay basic bills, the insanity of it hits you in the face really hard.
It’s amazing that this guy and his son in Hastings – at the start of this documentary – are allowed to live in tents on the beach. Criminalization of being without a brick or concrete home is far too common. It translates into criminalization of being alive and human. It’s flat out wrong.
In Amsterdam, a group of students got together and designed a plan for housing built and managed by them, and to serve them, not designed for putting a lot of money in other people’s pockets. To their surprise, the plan has now been approved by Amsterdam’s city council. In Germany too, there are groups who bought the buildings that they were living in so that they no longer are forced to finance other people’s fancy lifestyles. This is one option. I think it’s a really good one, but it requires the support of city councils and others.
Governments simply paying everyone 1000 bucks a month toward housing might be another one. It’s probably even cheaper overall as it will for example lead to lower healthcare costs. Currently, any support mostly increases inequality and takes agency away from people on low incomes. They also often get treated as if they are either learning-disabled when they’re not or dishonest when they’re not. It’s not helpful.
Let’s face it, how on earth can a McDonalds worker on 5.35 an hour support himself? On 20 hours per week, that’s not even 500 bucks a month. On 40 hours a week, it still isn’t enough. It’s unsolvable and it is not the fault of the people who earn that little. They are not to blame. It’s governments. They impose this on them.
If foreign cleaners in luxury car dealerships where cars can cost 300,000 pounds are on 7.50 an hour and ask for more because living in London requires at least 10 bucks an hour to support yourself get suspended without pay (while the English cleaners of the cars get 20 bucks an hour), that is supported and enabled by the government.
It means that people don’t have anything real left to fight for. They are vassals, and most have no way out of that position. (Some accidentally run into some kind of charity, some kind of foundation, that does things like front the sums that people need to get out of their situation, but it doesn’t change the overall status quo.)
This is what many other nations are headed for too now, I think, in view of so many right-wingers taking over governments.
(Me, I have developed a tendency to stay away from well-to-do people nowadays because I find it too hard to have to listen to their naive assumptions about how the world works for people who are less well off. Maybe, I shouldn’t. Maybe I should educate them instead.)
