Journal: CBC, the Housing Bubble, and Class War Propaganda

Author’s note: in the NIDC lexicon, a Journal is a type of informal writing, with few citations, that is typically based on personal experiences. Originally I published this type of article over on our Facebook page, but given the Zuck’s recent hostility to anarchist content, I’ve started simultaneously posting them here on ninaillingworth.com.

Well folks, as I mentioned in my last writing schedule update, I’m currently focusing on shorter and less formal content so I can make spare time to work on an ongoing project to significantly expand the content available here on NIDC. Originally I was going to include this post inside an upcoming edition of The Skinny, but ultimately it ran a little long for that.

Although the article itself is about the CBC, pro-capitalist propaganda, and the Canadian housing bubble, it touches on a number of topics we discuss regularly here on ninaillingworth.com. Including the housing crisis, neofeudalism, the use of inversion in capitalist propaganda, the mainstream media’s role in maintaining a propaganda system, and observations about the class war. Hopefully my US readers will still find the discussion useful, but as always your mileage may vary.

Please note that I blame Facebook for the formatting here; I tried to fix it but it’s so deeply embedded in the HTML it would be easier to just write it all out again. Which I’m not doing.
 

Every Day is Halloween at the CBC

 

I really don’t know why I listen to CBC anymore, given that the content tends to rotate between neoliberal interventionist cheer-leading, both sides-isms that humanize greedbag capitalists or their fascist minions, and straight up suffering porn. I suspect the truth here might simply be that it’s the only radio news station I can get clearly from my garage.

 

Anyway, I was listening to CBC this evening when to my surprise, they announced the news that the Canadian government was intervening to cool down the red-hot housing bubble; a situation that currently looks an awful lot like pre-2008 crash Florida. That’s not a good thing by the way; nor is the problem isolated to the normally stable Canadian financial system – but we’ll get back to that in a minute.

 

Well the news clip starts, and to my utter bafflement the always bloodless hosts begin breathlessly describing new proposed lending regulations that force everyday borrowers to prove they could survive an interest rate hike up to five and a quarter percent, before they can be approved for a mortgage. Astoundingly, the neoliberal muppets on air cheerfully noted that the measure would target first time home buyers specifically, and they seemed to think this was a good thing somehow.

 

Don’t get me wrong, there is an argument to made here that this measure will make it harder for banks and other lenders to enter into predatory mortgage practices to bamboozle poor folks into taking out mortgages they can’t really afford. Just like in 2008 however, the reality is that these types of loans are only a very small symptom of a much larger problem that propagandists in the mainstream discourse are dutifully ignoring.

 

The truth is that Canadian homes, much like homes throughout the Pig Empire, are skyrocketing in price because rich people, corporations, and institutional actors are buying up all the houses. Furthermore, while the munificent financial support offered by the state is certainly less bountiful for the rich in Canada than it was under Trump in America, the global nature of the truly wealthy means rich people everywhere are swimming in keystroke hot money and subsidies regardless of where they’re based in the Pig Empire. As in the UK and the US, tax breaks and coronavirus subsidies for the investor class, are transforming Canada into a nation of renters.

 

In other words, the Canadian government is “cooling down” its overheated housing market by further restricting access to housing in favor of the rich. And while that might make it harder for banks to commit suicide on the public dime, it sure as heck isn’t going to bring down the price of houses in Canada.

 

Now maybe you’re thinking “jeeze Nina, it sounds a bit like you’re mad the CBC is just reporting a solution to a different problem than the problem you wanted solved.” Unfortunately, you’d be wrong, as the rest of the news item presentation demonstrates succinctly.

 

Immediately after cheerfully sticking the knife in first-time home buyers, our beloved anchors turned the microphone over to a housing market observer (not activist; please note the difference) who happily noted the move would have a material effect on home buyers, effectively reducing their buying power by five percent. Except that restriction really wouldn’t apply to the rich, or corporate actors would it? They can certainly afford to pay purely hypothetical higher interest rates and thus their access to financing won’t be impacted at all. This is explicitly about the bottom of the market; labor class home buyers.

 

This point was further hit home when they played soundbites of some poor schlep in Windsor Ontario, who described his failed attempts to purchase his first house despite having good credit, and a full twenty percent deposit to put towards a loan. Noting that Windsor’s housing market is hardly known for its boom-town price fluctuations, the man revealed that he’d been out bid repeatedly by folks offering as much as a hundred thousand dollars over the asking price in what amounts to a run down, Canadian suburb of Detroit.

 

Upon prompting, the man seemed to feel the government’s new proposed regulation would be a net positive and might help him finally purchase a home, although he did admit that he’d since stopped looking because the prices were too high. At no point in time did anyone at the CBC interrupt him to point out that it was highly unlikely first time home buyers with mediocre credit scores were the ones outbidding him by a hundred thousand dollars; that reality was left blissfully unexplored as the segment ended.

 

Do you want to know what real power is? Do you want to understand how the rich win the class war every single day, and how effective a pro-capital propaganda system can really be?

 

Well look no further than a news segment on the Canadian public broadcaster, in which a poor working stiff from Nowhere, Turtle Island is thanking government regulators for locking folks just like himself out of a housing market that has already priced him out, and is never going back regardless. That’s without even mentioning that these folks did it all with tax breaks and subsidies that effectively mean the public (including our every-man interviewee) picked up the tab for all of this.

 

The sad truth here is that most of the folks around you are still pretty sure there might be five lights after all, Winston.

 

 

• nina illingworth

 

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”