Doomburgers On The Menu In The UK

By: Andrew_McKillop

French Like Hamburgers
One way to talk around the problem of food no longer having any taste – called the Malbouffe crisis in France and dating to the late 1990s – is to dumb down and eat what everybody else eats. So French today eat hamburgers. Adding a regulation dose of French hypocrisy, this comes down to selling hamburgers – at well over 20 euros ($27) each - by calling them Gastro(nomic) Burgers made from Organic Foods and “elaborated” by French cooking experts called Les Toques.

With a Lite Salad (about 50 grams or 2 ounces), the Organic Dessert (not much heavier) and 1 small glass of Organic Wine you can count on north of $200 for 4 persons. The menu tells you that if you are stupid enough to pay that much, you will also help fight Climate Change. If you want to spend more than $100 on 4 burgers, Paris is the place to be!

Following the May 25 European elections the PS party added a new variety to the overpriced and overhyped list. The ruling PS government's candidates received 6.5% of the votes of all eligible voters (14% of the ballots cast) prompting PS Party Capo (also called Prime Minister) Manuel Valls to officially tell French they must not fear Doom.

Doomburgers are now on the political menu! And they are really Lite.

Over in stoic England with its feet in the mud and “very concerned” about climate change, an adviser to David Cameron's coalition called David Boyle, cited by the 'Daily Telegraph', 28 May, said “The middle classes will die out within 30 years because of rising property prices, which will rob our children of their dreams”. Middle class animals will not be made extinct by global warming but by the property price scam, eh?

Fighting Sanity
David Boyle was addressing the Hay Festival when he warned that Britain will be left with a "Tiny elite and a huge sprawling proletariat" who have no chance of "Clawing their way out of a hand-to-mouth existence". He predicted that the average UK house price will reach £1.2 million by 2045, putting a home beyond the range of almost everybody as flagging wage increases fail to keep up with huge house price increases.

Possibly Boyle never heard of the US subprime crisis of 2007-2009? This operated by allowing would-be middle class dreamers to occupy a house for a few years – and then throw them out. This particular scam also destroyed the banks, but that was a detail. The US Fed was there to save them.

Boyle suggested that the near-extinct middle class animal would soon need “three or four wage earning jobs” obviously putting them in direct competition with the Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, Kurds, Somalians and Senegalese – and the Ukrainians are coming! - who want to offset the travel costs of their Benefit Tourism by taking a job that a British person could have. Wages will have to decline. Why would that not drag down house prices?

Boyle spoke up for the English middle classes. He said: “We cheered the rise of property prices not realising that it would destroy, if not our own lives, but the lives of our children”. Wasn't that sad? When the casino game turned against the greedy middle classes – they want to change the rules!

Mr Boyle is described as a member of the UK Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee. One very simple question for that Committee, presumably studying “Britain's place in Federal Europe” and a Federal Britain, is that if its OK to spend $27 on a Paris burger, why not a million dollars on a plasterboard and plastic, poured concrete house or apartment whose materials-and-labour costs came in at way below $100k?

Way below that.

Constrain Our Dreams
Or the nightmares of real human beings. David Boyle's doomburger watch only proposed patch-solutions such as house prices being fixed at their initial sale price for “the first 100 years”. He said that unless measures like that were taken, the UKIP would go on taking votes from the Two Party system in the UK because of the “ruined dreams of the middle classes”.

Only the most-incredibly naïve can separate the housing and real estate bubble, from the general tradable asset bubble. Relative to Apple or Facebook shares, for example, housing is very cheap!

A house is a depreciating asset like cars, airplanes, boats, machine tools and other capital equipment, your shoes and clothes and the milk you drink.  It may produce income or value – but it will crumble to the ground eventually.  Buying into a house price bubble – for as long as the bubble can be kept popping -  painfully underlines mass stupidity, and nothing else. To be sure if you walked into the overpriced house you just bought with a 30- or 40-year mortgage (the concept of 300-year mortgages is being bandied around in the finance “industry”) and turned on a tap – and crude oil spewed out -  there could be case for your stupidity being good sense. Thanks to shale oil and gas fracking your faucet could do that, Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga have all the details, but only in that case would it be reasonable to imagine your house is going to double in market exchange “value”.

Taking only the UK “long emergency” of riotously overpriced and overvalued housing, this has fixed and specific starting dates and events. Overpriced and overvalued housing is not “eternal”. What goes up does come down – not “may come down”.It is only the mechanism and process of a return to reason – the end of the greedy middle class dream – that concerns us.

Supposedly, the dramatic electoral victory of Britain's Mrs Margaret Thatcher in 1979 against the “Soviet minded” Labour Party of the day was a triumph of middle class common sense. To reward the greedy middle classes, a house price boom was organized and unleashed by Thatcher herself. For as long as the greedy middle classes thought they gained from the scam – and ignored the economic and human collateral damage, the unemployment, the homelessness – this was Hunky Dory. For the greedy middle classes and their minders, high up the greasy pole of power..
Now they have changed their tune – while they still exist as an endangered species.

The Mass Proletariat
David Boyle says that British society is being rapidly “proletarized” to have-a-lots and a mass of have-nothings. For as long as they vote for that, it is their fault. Today, their own elected minders or “leaders” have decided that supporting the Kiev Flash Mob government of western Ukraine and its new Chocolate Billionaire president is “the democratic choice” necessarily placing the western proletarized “middle class societies” of negative equity holders with unpayable mortgages against Vladimir Putin's Russia. Armed with thousands of nuclear weapons!

This is a totally different choice for the cynical middle classes than declaring a war against Iraq in the hope of sucking down oil as the “peace dividend”. The middle class voters are necessarily “concerned and dismayed” about no cheap and easy gains, for them, being on offer from potential war with Russia. Also necessarily, the dying middle classes of countries like the UK will scrape around to find New Enemies on which to venge themselves and vent their spleen. And they have them at home!

This is mass psychology and ends up having a political impact. The English middle classes were never anything else but “vote fodder” for political fixers and chancers like Mrs Thatcher. They had their long day in the sun of insane property price rises – and now it is over.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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