It’s What Jesus Would Do,
Right?
By Raúl Ilargi Meijer
March 19, 2015 "ICH"
- "Automatic
Earth" - 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.
© 2008/14
The Automatic Earth All Rights Reserved