When the Planning Authority betrayed us by granting a few families the right to pillage our environment, rob us of our views and make life miserable for neighbours of the four skyscrapers at Mrieħel and a mega-one in the midst of Sliema, aptly described as temples to Priapus by Archbishop Charles Scicluna, I wrote a screed in my timesofmalta.com blog titled “Those who lord it over us”.
“It is now official: Malta is ruled by a few mega-millionaire families; and current public policy dictates that everything is done so that they become richer.”
A reader of timesofmalta.com posted the following comment: “And while getting away with it, they provide work for thousands. Now how could the humble worker provide work for at least another fellow worker?” The gentleman, a certain Joseph Sammut, is one of those who have been indoctrinated to believe that we should be grateful to these big-moneyed bullies, as I described them in my commentary last Sunday, because “they provide work for thousands”. It is as if they are benevolently bestowing their largesse on us poor peasants for which we should be eternally grateful!
Sammut is one of those who swallowed line, hook and sinker the myth that the public owes the private and that the public depends on the private. I don’t blame him as right-wing politicians have been repeating this untruth so often that it became mainstream in public discourse.
This attitude is part of the shameful legacy of the neo-liberal economic policies of Thatcher and Reagan. This regressive view was then taken over by Blair’s New Labour and is the cornerstone of Premier Muscat’s policies. As a consequence, today we still suffer from the social injustice created by these conservative policies.
I have just finished reading George Lakoff’s 2014 edition of Don’t Think of an Elephant. Lakoff is an internationally acclaimed American cognitive linguist who has written extensively about the use of metaphors in political discourse.
When the world goes round just on money (as the powers that be want us to believe), greed takes over. Then only the big-moneyed bullies will be the real winners
In this book he shatters to smithereens the conservative dogma that the public owes something to the private. Lakoff rightly writes that public taxes provide public resources like education, hospitals, roads and bridges, an army to protect the country, a parliament that enacts laws, a justice system and a system for the public to choose government. The public provides the electric grid, the communications infrastructure and more. Individuals depend on public resources like clean air, clean water, public safety, and so many other things.
“Without such public resources there could have been no satisfactory private life and no functioning business community… and no democracy. …Without such public resources, you are not free,” writes Lakoff.
The same sentiments have been expressed by Democrat US Senator, academic and one-time Presidential hopeful Elisabeth Warren. During her 2012 election in Massachusetts for the US Senate, she said:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.... You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.”
Both are right. And they would have used harsher words were they to be in Malta where, for example, besides doing all the above, we, through our taxes, guaranteed a loan of €360 million so that the big-moneyed bullies would risk nothing while building a power station that will make them even richer. Moreover, we promised them that through our hard-earned money we would buy all the electricity they produce even if it can be bought more cheaply elsewhere.
If the towers face a problem, a pro-business government would then be asked to bail them out, just as the government effectively bailed out the owners of the towers perched over the Addolorata Cemetery. A similar argument was made in the statement of the Church’s Environment Commission against these monstrous buildings.
Perhaps big billboards should be erected near the power station and these towers, stating: Another project partly financed by the people’s taxes.
While this uncontrolled gluttony goes on, organised spin tries to persuade us that as the economy is doing fine and most people are earning more, everyone should be happy that they could fulfil the mother of all dreams: becoming part of the nicely dubbed ‘new middle class’.
Money has become the justification of everything. Everything has a price and can be bought: citizenship, the environment, medical visas, one’s silence and one’s principles. It is true that money can make the world go round.
But when the world goes round just on money (as the powers-that-be want us to believe), greed takes over. Then only the big-moneyed bullies will be the real winners.
Mahatma Gandhi’s words provide a very appropriate reminder: there is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
■ I spent a few days holidaying with family and friends. One of us uses a wheelchair because of mobility problems. It is shameful that in this day and age, cities that pride themselves on their past glories and present prosperity do not cater well for people with disability. Venice is such a city.
The boat that took us from the mainland berthed on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Five bridges separated us from our destination: Piazza San Marco. Only one of them had ramps. We could only make it because we were 11 and could help each other carry our relative in her wheelchair up and down the stairs of each bridge.
People without mobility problems feel it is their right that bridges are built over canals as this facilitates their moving around. If bridges over canals are their right even though they can swim, are not ramps a right people with mobility problems should enjoy? Or is it that because they are a minority their needs are considered to be a superflous luxury and not a sign of rudimentary civility and a basic right?
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt