Grenfell Tower: Stop Putting Profit Before People!

This fire should be the start of a bonfire of our stupid system!

We had £500bn to save the banks in 2008; we didn't have money to save all those people from their awful fate last Wednesday morning.

This insanity has to stop!

We have understood many things about the world through our science, and transformed the world itself with our engineering. We can build a society in which everyone has enough, no one is excluded, no children are left to burn in a death trap because it is cheaper to do so. BUT: we can't do that and let the market run our lives. We can't do that and base all our economics on growth without limit. We can't do that and let the massive corporations that own almost all of our productive capacities pay no tax. We can't do that in a broken economic system — and our political system long ago lost control and is no longer fit for purpose.

Let's make Grenfell a monunment to a past time. Let's make now the start of sanity, and of science for humanity, engineering for our needs, equality as a baseline, fairness as a given.

To start with, let's make June the end of May.

I just finished reading a lovely book called Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. One of the characters says this to one of the rich of the time: "We’re not making a world without greed... We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it."

We must liberate the rich from their prison, help them escape their demented guardianship of the terrible juggernauts that our corporate monsters have become, and use our miraculous technology for people's needs, not private profits.

And stop killing kids in London (and in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, and in every home full of nothing but poverty, and on every street full of polluted air, and beside every coastline that's staring to sink beneath the waves).

Come on. It's time.

STOP

People have stood on the moon
but we let children burn in London

We had five hundred billion to save the banks
but we let children burn in London

Five million can help says Theresa May?
All the cash in the world couldn't pay
that debt

And anyway: what about all the others who live
in towers or shacks or cardboard boxes?

We have money
but we let children burn.

Time to stop!