Should We Re-Possess People's Homes?

A friend of mine Emma Harrison (she's the social entrepreneur who runs A4e which manages a lot of the government training schemes) was explaining to me recently about understanding the 'lifetime value' of every member of society.

All the time you are in work or enterprise or producing in some way you are adding value to an economy, and every time you are in education, training, hospital, prison, on benefits, drawing pension and so on you are a cost.

Therefore your lifetime value is all the value you bring over the years minus all the cost of supporting you along the way.

It follows that ensuring people are healthy, happy, secure, well-trained and employable is the best way of creating long term value and prosperity.

So WHY OH WHY are we allowing all these state owned banks to re-possess people's homes? (Not to mention HMRCE being the main initiator of so many bankruptcies...)

When someone loses their home they are an immediate and long term cost to society.

The likelihood is that they will go on benefits, need council housing, their security confidence and happiness are immediately destroyed and the stress is the most likely cause of long term illness. It takes a long time to recover from that kind of meltdown.

It is simply not joined up thinking to allow these re-possessions to happen.

The Government should be taking immediate action to prevent banks making people homeless so easily. And if the court does order a re-possession there should be an obligation for alternative accommodation to be sourced (this could be council housing, but a better option would be to provide a guaranteed tracker rate re-finance over a cheaper property to replace the old, more expensive mortgage).

Yes this may cost. But compared to the long term cost of making tens of thousands homeless and/or bankrupt along with the associated social meltdown it is surely worth it?

Emporer's New Clothes type question...

OK so the US has bailed out the banks to the tune of $700 billion, the UK has put up #50 billion to invest in ours, Ireland has guaranteed unlimited protection for savers in Irish banks and Iceland has just nationalised one of its biggest banks.

My question is, where is all the money coming from?

How much money do we actually have in the kitty - and how much have we now got left? Basic housekeeping type questions which I haven't yet heard anyone ask.

How long before the countries themselves go bankrupt?

Why things must change...

My last post generated some interesting comments; here's my take on what's going on.

Mass consumerism is a very recent thing, it started post-war and really gathered momentum in the 1970's - suddenly it seemed you could have anything you wanted, but at a price. People started getting very rich - and as those of you have been rich will know - it is very addictive; you always want more.

So us entrepreneurs found cleverer and cleverer ways to entice you to buy more - brilliant marketing, enticing ads, messages that our product would make you sexier, thinner, more attractive. Fashion cycles accelerated and as soon as you had the latest thing, it wasn't the latest thing anymore - so was given to Oxfam. The world's resources started being consumed at an alarming rate.

And of course people's earnings could not keep up with the rampant demand, so a handy little thing called credit was introduced to enable the whole machine to continue being fed. The economy continued to expand, Gordon Brown crowed about his 'stable economy' and 'record growth' and for a while everything in the garden was very rosy.

But in the gold rush for more business, the financial institutions started getting a little reckless and started lending to people who really, really couldn't afford it. And so the inevitable started - defaults on loans, people posting the keys of their houses back through their bank's letterbox, thousands forced into bankruptcy and thousands more choosing it as an easy option to wipe their debt.

And the cancer of this 'sub-prime' debt spread throughout the banking sector as institutions swapped liabilities, undermining the whole financial system.

Hoping the problems were isolated, bits and pieces of government and institutional intervention followed; Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, RBS, Barclays, Merrill Lynch, AIG all bailed out in some shape or form. And now the US suddenly finds $800billion to try to solve the problem once and for all, the stock market shoots up, the traders breathe a sigh of relief - and everyone starts gambling again.

But it's obvious that this rampant consumerism can't continue.

There isn't enough money to feed the monster (especially now people are losing their jobs as well as their homes), there aren't enough resources in the world to feed the monster (especially now people are running scared through global warming), there isn't enough time to feed the monster (people are working harder and faster just to stand still) - and what's more, none of it is making anyone happy.

Plus how many crises and wars can the US rustle up the money for before the country itself becomes bankrupt?

Meantime, there is a growing awareness of the unfairness of a 'many to one' system in which capitalism allows a small number of individuals to share the spoils at the expense of the many billions who live on our planet in poverty, too weak to be able to fight their oppressors.

So, to me, the predicted 'Apocalypse' is not anything about an asteroid colliding with Earth, it is about the necessary breakdown of the current way of working to allow a new world order to come in.

My view is that this new world order will be able to meet every one's needs (not greeds) in a much fairer and collaborative way, in harmony with the planet and one another. Already there is an awakening of the 'collective consciousness' which is calling people towards a more spiritual way of existing.

Our human efforts to change things (what one might call the 'low energy light bulb' approach) are not enough to cut it; when the Universe finally delivers the solution mankind needs (and we are just starting to glimpse the changes now) it will deliver in a spectacularly powerful and infinitely intelligent way.