I’m stepping right into it.
Joseph Muscat’s phone call to Xarabank to announce a 5 million euro donation to the child cancer fund raiser is despicable. It is a low moral point reached by someone for whom morality is barely a memory.
It is a sociopathic scheme worthy of the Brooklyn gangs who ‘took care of the neighbourhood’. It is a replica of Pablo Escobar’s populism, basking in the applause of villagers grateful for the local football ground he funded and unable to connect his charity to the blood he has made them shed.
The man is cynical, callous and manipulative. No one needs that 5 million euro more than families facing child cancer. But the reason they are pushed to ask for it is because the state has left a gap for their poor lambs to languish in.
Those 5 million are ill gotten gains. This is not a dividend from state action. The state must be a force for good and the redistribution of its wealth is the work of social justice.
But a state that sells its own identity to people whose own identity is a barrier to their pursuit of personal wealth is no longer a force for good or for social justice.
Just because feudal lords threw coins at starving supplicants at the gates of their castle, we can never by contemporary standards judge feudal society just. Those coins were crumbs from the wealth extracted from the supplicants themselves.
And we are dared to fall into the trap of criticising the prime minister for giving money to those poor children so they can make a meal of the criticism on their media. They will present this as the ultimate evil: wanting to prevent children from receiving help when fighting cancer because it would make the prime minister look good.
Five million euro: the product of the effort to sell 5 passports of hundreds sold to Russian plutocrats dodging international sanctions for corruption and embezzlement; five passports on which kick-backs were paid to officials of our government; five passports manufactured with no effort and no cost except the hard work of generations that secured for us our Independence as a nation and our membership in the EU.
That’s what Joseph Muscat handed out yesterday. That’s how hard he worked for child-cancer patients. He gave them 5 passports.
Instead of doing a proper job of administering a just society that generates wealth honestly and redistributes it fairly to make sure no one needs charity for their medical needs.
On Good Friday, Joseph Muscat violated the efforts of a community to seek solidarity where their state has failed those among them in greatest need. He has turned a house of prayer into a den of thieves.
