Albert Freeman Mrs. Alice White at the War Fund Victory Store, Hardwick, VT 1942
On the day that Mario Draghi opened the ECB’s overly opulent new €1.3 billion palatial building(s) in Frankfurt, which led to fierce and fiery protests with hundreds arrested, amongst others from the Blockupy movement, and the IMF for some reason found it necessary to tell the eurozone that Greece is its most unhelpful client ever (really? let’s see the others) and to leak that finding to the press to boot, the Greek parliament voted in an anti-poverty law with a huge majority.
Oh, and it was also the day that a San Francisco church decided to dismantle an elaborate system of outdoor showerheads it had installed to get rid of those pesky homeless on its property. The showerheads would get the ‘rough sleepers’ soaking wet every hour or so. As one tweet said: “It’s what Jesus would do, right?” Anyway, enough protest was enough to get them backtracking.
I don’t know what the shower system cost, and who really cares, but I do know the price tag for the Greek law to help its poorest: €200 million. Or about 14% of what that one building cost (the EU has much more construction going on). Which, by the way, was announced as, I paraphrase and kid you not, “an example of what Europe is capable of”.
No comment there, I couldn’t have out it any better myself. One thing’s for sure: the building is not meant for the poor. There were thousands of cops at the opening alone to prevent them from entering. Cops paid for with taxpayer money, including that from the poor.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras labeled the new Greek law a “humanitarian crisis law”, and responded, when warned by the European Commission that Greece ‘should not act unilaterally’: “If they’re doing it to frighten us, the answer is – we will not be frightened.”
Still, EU Economics Commissioner Pierre Moscovici managed this: “We completely support the objective of helping those who are most vulnerable in Greek society; but there must be consultations on new measures. We have to be able to evaluate the budgetary impact.”
In other words, the Greeks no longer have the right to alleviate the misery of their poor. If it were up to Brussels, those poor now solely rely on people who find €1.3 billion palaces more important than them.
There must be consultations, which would take God knows how long, on a $200 million law aimed at relieving the worst misery for people that have been suffering for years INSIDE the same European Union that has the gall to build €1.3 billion palaces, and let their suffering continue as those consultations go on?
While at the same time there are negotiations going on over more than 500 times that amount in Greek bailouts, which only effectively helped global banks, especially in France and Germany, from facing their gambling debts?
We’ve not just lost Jesus, we’ve lost our way. That SF church has, the EU has, and most of us have too. We were never ‘blessed’ with some divine right to let people suffer, no matter who they are. There’s not a single religion I can think of that says it’s fine to do that, or even that you’re superior to your suffering brother or sister, so it can’t be a religious issue.
Therefore, I’m going to have to guess that it’s all down to sheer hubris, to people being so full of themselves they will never ever be able to pass through the eye of any needle, no matter how big or wide.
See, my problem is, I don’t want to live in this kind of world. It doesn’t just degrade Greece’s, and San Francisco’s, and the world’s, poor, it degrades me too. And I’m not even a religious person.