I picked this up from CNBC, not a place where one would expect to find any kind of social conscience. I take it to be reported there under the category "Additive Concerns About Stuff That Might Lead To Peasant Revolts, So Let's At Least Think About How We Spin The Facts To Deflect Anger From The 0.001%." Here's the link: http://www.cnbc.com/... , and here's some text:
As the euro zone debt crisis deepens and austerity measures take their toll across Europe, the number of young children and babies abandoned across the region has increased, according to local charities.
The rise in the abandonment of infants across Europe is most visible in the spread of “baby hatches” or “boxes” across Europe, where unwanted infants are left anonymously. And guess what? In a world where everything else at the bottom seems to be shrinking and shriveling,
The phenomenon was previously more prevalent among immigrants, but it is becoming more widespread among financially desperate members of the local population.
The hatches are sensor-activated so when a baby is placed, an alarm is activated and a carer comes to collect the child. Despite the practice being widely viewed as contravening the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights, of the 27 EU member countries, 11 countries still have "baby hatches" in operation, including Germany, Italy and Portugal.
In those countries where hatches are illegal, the number of infants abandoned in hospitals, clinics and churches has also risen, raising concerns among European charities, the UN and the European Commission that austerity measures and increasing social deprivation are the catalyst for the rise in child abandonment.
According to SOS Villages, a European charity that attempts to help families in financial hardship before abandonment occurs, in the last year alone 1,200 children in Greece and 750 in Italy have been abandoned. That is almost double the 400 children abandoned in Italy a year ago, and up from 114 children abandoned in Greece in 2003.
The basic story is that "the eurozone debt crisis [a gigantic scam by the 0.001%]" and the banksta-imposed "austerity measures," code for stealing all the wealth of Europe to enrich a few banks and their bondholders and do what the Right Wing greedhead faux conservatives did to the Civilized World back in the 1930s to create and extend the Great Depression, are resulting in people simply abandoning their children, as too expensive to support.
The goal is to extirpate from what's called political economy any tiny hint of Evil Keynesianism, the silly notion that "government" and "freemarket bidness" are a Siamese twin that requires the one to "do stuff" to balance the potential excesses of the other. And of course do away with any element of that other evil, "social justice," with its baggage of redistributionalism and silly, unproductive, "inefficient" notions of fairness and honor and community. Back to the good old days of serfdom and the "droits de seigneur." Not a hint of "noblesse oblige."
So people, ordinary people, stripped of jobs and of hope, are dropping their kids off in "baby hatches," http://www.guardian.co.uk/... or just leaving them at daycare with notes saying "Sorry, can't afford, not coming to pick up," or in churches or at hospitals.
Thus reinforcing and expanding, and forcing into what should be the most caring levels of the public behavior, the horrific notion peddled by our Kleptocratic Rulers that "you people" are fungible and expediently expendable.
What the heck is with us?
We have these notions, most of us, of ourselves as decent, caring, humane critters. Forget about the conflict with reality, all the folks who, from the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum, yak about family values yet are all good with "policies" that lead only in the direction of conversion of the strands of the "safety net" into money, to be handed over to the fucking banksters and "investors" who produce nothing, add nothing to the culture, "leverage" the dollars they steal via stuff like foreclosures and the dollars they COUNTERFEIT, yes, COUNTERFEIT, through all the derivativized securitization of their Casino crap. A Casino where they get the sexy thrill of laying bets on both sides of the table, with the knowledge that the rest of us will be forced to pony up REAL WEALTH to pay their markers, without having the tiniest chance of getting any of the payoff on the bet. And where does all that wealth go, again? Ask Mittens, he's got a tiny fraction in Offshore Banks and knows how it works: http://www.democracynow.org/...
We are stupid enough, and bamboozled enough, by the Kleptocrats and their subtle, sophisticated and smarmy "people", who promote all the worst of our behaviors, from aggressive, combustion-based consumption, to divide-and-conquer tribalism. to rooting for Imperial drone-and-proxy-warrior militarization of the whole damn planet, to fail to see what's being done to us AND OUR CHILDREN.
So the most vulnerable of us, the ones that our "Family Values" (pre-Kleptocratic disinformationalism) tell us we are most advised and obliged to protect and support, are getting dropped off in "baby boxes" across Europe, by desperate people who rightly can see no hope of improvement in their circumstances, no stability or sustainability in the future, no way of simply making a basic living. Despite the fundamental facts that get so baldly painted out of public discourse:
1. We really are all in this together, for good or ill, present and future generations.
and
2. There's more than enough of everything that matters, food and clothing and shelter and even information, to go all the way around the table, were it not for the tiny number of Pigs In Suits who grab all but one of the chops, all but one of the broccoli spears, and all but the last chocolate chip cookie, and then sucker all the rest of us into fighting each other to the death over the scraps.
Is this the best we are going to do? Telling our children that there just ain't enough for them and us, and good luck with the integrity of the safety net, the notions of communalism and comity, we are letting the Kleptocrats pull out from under them, and ourselves?
When does the infanticide begin? (Well, in all honesty, it's been going on forever... but the incidence, covert and patent, is on the rise.) A real measure of who we are, as opposed to who we pretend to be...