Tiny (URL) Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

"The anti-Semitic Jobbik party captured 16.7 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Hungary, next to the Socialists. Unknown vandals defiled the Holocaust Memorial with bloody pigs’ feet. The television channel Echo TV showed an image of Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertész together with a voiceover about rats. Civil servants can now be fired without cause. Krisztina Morvai, a member of the European Parliament for Jobbik, suggested that “liberal-Bolshevik Zionists” should start thinking about “where to flee and where to hide.” http://tinyurl.com/36stz7e

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“These are dark-skinned people, not Europeans like you and me,” said Riccardo De Corato, who is Milan’s vice mayor. He later added: “Our final goal is to have zero Gypsy camps in Milan.” The campaign here is part of the most intense wave of anti-immigration sentiment to wash over Western Europe in years": http://tinyurl.com/2vesbpq

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"Some 200 of France’s expelled Gypsies come from Barbulesti, said Ion Cutitaru, mayor of this town, 60 kilometers east of the capital Bucharest. Not all share the view that life is more bearable back home. Cutitaru, a Roma, said about half have already returned to France or other EU nations where begging brings in more money that the meager social benefits available in one of the EU’s poorest members. Long-term unemployed here receive the equivalent of just €10 a month for each child plus other monthly benefits of around €45". http://tinyurl.com/337eeww

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"Ricky Baking is hunched over a tomb with a hammer and chisel. After several determined blows, the lid cracks into three pieces. He opens the rotten coffin to reveal the skeleton of a 65-year-old man, dressed in his burial suit and shoes. Baking steps into the tomb with bare feet, and reaches for the bones.

This isn’t a grave robbery – it’s an eviction. Like everywhere else in Manila, the North Cemetery has run out of space. Up to 80 funerals take place here every day, and demand for plots is so high most people can only afford to rent tombs. If your relatives fail to keep up the payments, another body will take your place. It’s Baking’s job to clear this grave so another coffin can be lowered into it later this afternoon. He’s done this so often it’s almost mundane to him. Land is precious in Manila, and people are prepared to endure incredible circumstances to claim their own piece. Baking’s family is one of hundreds that have set up home in the cemetery, jostling for space with the dead. “It’s much better living here than in a shanty town,” he assures me…" http://tinyurl.com/3y9uzhr