Auckland has no homeless shelters. Zero. The other night it dropped to 6C, while it's mandated by law that "healthy homes" be a minimum of 18C. On Queen St security guards were seen taking blankets from where homeless people slept so that the upmarket foodcourt the blankets were out the front of didn't look "untidy". The poor do not enjoy the same rights as the rich.
It's because they're sneaky little buggers those rich people. Take Jeff Bezos. His net worth is about 75 per cent of New Zealand's entire GDP. That's one man compared with an entire country. And yet his company will also fight like hell to stop the people working for him - and earning him all that money - from forming a union. He doesn't want his workers to work together to better their own situation, despite the fact that he has literally more money than you can spend. Despite the fact that actually Jeff it's the people working in slave-like conditions in your warehouses that are generating the money you seem to treasure so badly. Despite all this, you want to keep them as downtrodden as possible because the people are much easier to control when we're poor and hungry and not unified.
Those in favour of helping, not eating, the rich will shake their fists at that single mother on a benefit who bought a bottle of wine on her weekly shop instead of just making sure all that money went on the bare necessities. Because they think poor people don't deserve to enjoy life. They must only live it. Or politicians might demonise immigrants coming in, saying they're taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to hard working Kiwis. There are eight people on Earth who have as much wealth as four billion others, but sure it's the immigrant trying to make a better life for themselves who's the one that we should get angry at.
The Panama Papers revealed an international network of mega-rich people deliberately hiding their wealth so they wouldn't have to pay tax. And we were outraged! So what happened? Well the journalist who helped expose it was murdered by a car bomb, so there was that.
And a lot of the world's mega-rich have become rich off the back of things that shouldn't even be commodified. If you're going to gnash your teeth at poor people spending money on alcohol or going to the movies or buying a smartphone instead of the bare necessities then maybe make those bare necessities free. Healthcare, housing, healthy food, education. All free. People's subsistence should not be a profitable venture. Have the State buy all those items and then give them to people. We can pay taxes to cover it if we don't let things like the Panama Papers happen (ha). Take homelessness as an example, study after study has shown that the best cure for homelessness is to give the homeless a house. And if housing was free then landlords wouldn't exist to exploit those in need of a roof over their head. Getting rid of the landed gentry is no bad thing. People could then invest their money in something actually useful and less exploitative.
And maybe there shouldn't be a for-profit "camp" for refugee children in Florida where kids are being detained longer than the 20-day legal limit that the government argues is not subject to state child welfare regulations. That camps, concentration or not, shouldn't exist where detainees aren't even given toothpaste or soap and people are dying because of the lack of humanity and treatment on offer.
And maybe we shouldn't have for-profit prisons in New Zealand like National put in place in when it was last Government and which we're stuck with until 2040 because of some top-class negotiating over the contract terms.
Profiteering off misery, profiteering off people's bare necessities, profiteering off survival: these are the sort of awful things some of those bloody rich people do. And why should we cater to the whims of such a small group of people who aren't like us? Bloody minorities. I think it's time they gave the homeless back their blankets, got kicked out and left the country to ordinary Kiwis.
