The crises of this world are evidently coming to a climax.
It is certainly no illusion that hard times are coming. Even if we consider the situation of the past decades a catastrophe, the new developments seem much more threatening. This may be because the Corona, climate change and the war in Ukraine are forcing us to look beyond Central Europe. The problems are getting closer and we are now more clearly feeling the effects here as well.
However, the effects of Corona, poverty and war in a city like Hamburg do not affect everyone equally.
As all over the world, marginalized and poor people are affected and forced to flee, starve and homelessness differently than rich people. This situation will only get worse in the coming period. If the rich get scared, they will be even more ruthless in defending “their” property and use even more violence to protect their privileges.
In cities like Hamburg, where the percentage of millionaires is the highest in the country, the social imbalances are much more pronounced.
Just over one in a thousand earns more than a million euros a year. At the same time, one in five children live in poverty. In the wealthy suburbs of the Elbe [Hamburg’s bourgeois district], not even one child in a hundred lives in a “Hartz 4 family” [a family receiving welfare for particularly low incomes], in the poorest neighborhoods almost one in two.
Nothing new, the world is unfair. Continue reading “Hamburg, Germany: You are the crisis. Claim for the incendiary attack on a government vehicle in the St. Pauli neighborhood”