Whatâs
Wrong Today:
The 39th G8 Summit will be held on 17â18
June 2013 at the Lough Erne Resort, a five-star hotel and golf resort in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. It will be the sixth G8 summit held in the United
Kingdom.
To prepare
for the arrival of the special global heavy hitters, the town of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland is getting spruced up. As
part of the plan, the town is putting up fake storefronts on shuttered
businesses:
Marco
Werman of PRI’s
The World spoke with Irish Times reporter Dan Keenan about the efforts to make
the town look prosperous. The audio feed is at the PRI link.
Marco Werman: (Emphasis by the Wrongologist)
We all do it…Fresh towels in the bathroom, give the counters a wipe, maybe
even hide our dirty laundry in the closet. Well, the town of Enniskillen, in
County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland is sprucing up… In a little over two weeks
they and other leaders will gather for a G8 summit at a golf resort in
Enniskillen. And as the date approaches the cleanup is moving into high gear.
It includes new coats of paint on houses, tidying up lawns, and putting up fake storefronts on
shuttered businesses. Irish Times reporter Dan Keenan visited Enniskillen
and saw the cleanup process.
Dan Keenan:
empty shops that are being now made to look as if they are thriving businesses,
and theyâve done that in a very clever fashion indeed.
More from Keenan: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
the shop front window with a picture of what was the business before it went
bankrupt or closed. In…grocery shops, butcher shops, pharmacies, you name it,
they have placed large photographs in the windows that if you were driving past
and glanced out the window, it would look as if this was a thriving business.
Itâs an attempt…to make the place look as positive as possible for the
visiting G8 leaders and their entourages, and itâs really…a mask on a recession that has really hit this
part of Ireland really very badly indeed.
Werman:
citizens of Enniskillen reacting to this?
Keenan:
Weâre inclined to take a very light-hearted look upon it but the residents of
this part of the world are looking upon the arrival of the G8 positively
because at the end of the day, itâs not often you have the eight wealthiest and
most powerful leaders on Earth visiting your part of the world. But on the other
hand, they are a little bit skeptical of really very shallow attempts like this
to make the place look better than it actually is. They would rather that it
was an honest attempt to promote Fermanagh in its most positive light and
really they would prefer if these problems were not masked in the way that they
are.
Werman:
coming from for all these very accurate-looking photographs of meat and other
thing for sale?
Keenan: (emphasis by
the Wrongologist)
Foreign Office in London. This is David
Cameronâs gig. Itâs his invitation, itâs his decision to host the G8 in County
Fermanagh, which is, donât forget, part of the United Kingdom. Itâs also on
the island of Ireland, itâs in Northern Ireland, but he will be the hosting
head of government and itâs his say so. Much of the money that has been spent
in…the host town of Enniskillen…more than ĂÂŁ300,000 worth, thatâs getting
on from half a million dollars, the bulk
of the cash and certainly the driving force behind the plans to tidy up the
place, thatâs all coming from London.
Who
gains from this? Certainly not the G8 moguls, certainly not the people of
Enniskillen, where single home prices have fallen
24% in the last year and the official unemployment rate is 17%.
Unemployment
throughout Europe shows the triumph of the Economic Austerians over the stimulus
by government spending favored by Keynes and many others.
If
you are a contemporary of the Wrongologist, you may remember that the Sainted Ed Koch did the same thing in the
South Bronx when many of the buildings fronting the Cross Bronx
Expressway were burned out shells. Koch put cute little pictures of windows
with flower pots and curtains on abandoned buildings.
From
ArtNet.com:
venetian blinds in the windows of abandoned buildings in order to hide the
blight. By 1985 the Bronx was considered the poorest congressional district in
the United States
It
was profoundly offensive then and looked fake, probably the way
these phony storefront windows in Enniskillen look today.
Letâs
force the G8 men and women to hold their meetings at real soup kitchens until the official unemployment rates
here and in all the other G8 countries fall below 5%.
Let’s give them some practical input for their decision-making.
