Dear Friends:
Reading the Guardian newspaper every day is one of the joys of living in London this summer. Of course the news has not been good most days. The plight of Greece is covered in great detail here, and that news is certainly not good.(From all I’ve read I think Greece would be better off if it exited the European Union. In this regard one can’t help but reflect back on how Germany, Greece’s biggest nemesis today, was bailed out and rebuilt after the Second World War, whereas Greece, so throughly destroyed by Germany during that war was not…and now Germany is leading the forces killing Greece again, rather than repaying the favors it received at the end of a world war that it started and that claimed Greece as one of its main victims.)
Then there is the daily news here about England’s new budget under the Tory government. Yesterday, following leaks about it carried every day in the Guardian, the budget was finally announced in Parliament. And it was every bit as Draconian as expected. When stripped of all of its misleading and contradictory provisions, the bottom line was as predicted. And in line with the conservative politics so prevalent in the United States today. Tax cuts for the rich. Tax increases for the poor. Inheritance tax relief for the super rich. (It was the increases in this tax years ago that served to balance the wealth of the rich and poor a bit better in the UK, thereby resulting in the US becoming the industrialized world’s most economically unequal population.) The UK’s new budget will, among other hardships, have the effect of creating several hundred thousand new poor children. And the Guardian pulls no punches in explaining the “rich win, poor lose” impact of this new budget. Or the misleading nature of its call for a “living wage.”
Oh, yes…the Guardian and “nipples.” Earlier this week it carried an article about a woman artist and activist who, in response to some English newspapers carrying pictures of women bathing on beaches topless with their nipples covered, created what she calls a “male falsie.” What it is is a picture of a male nipple that she says newspapers can use to cover the female bather’s nipples. It looks, of course, just like a male nipple…her point being that the nipples of both genders, when looked at in isolation from the rest of the human body look basically the same. You’ve got to love the Guardian!
Love
Jim
