Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

medication and treatment programs. So why should prisoners who like
their alcohol not receive their free glass of wine a day?
This matter of dividing a society into criminal and non-criminal does not
ring true anymore, especially since the recent global financial collapse when
the US government, among others, bailed out major banks. A common
criminal who robs a bank is sent to prison for years while bank directors,
who pay themselves millions in performance bonuses and continue to
squander their shareholders’ money, get a helping hand from governments
thus enabling them to continue their immoral activities.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s, people picketed outside their
banks with signs reading: Jump you f-----! Nothing like that happened this
last time when the long anticipated collapse of American and others’
financial institutions failed. Why not? It seems that individuals have no time
to protest because they are trying to ensure their bank balance is not going
to ruin their life by slipping into debt.
In Adelaide the newspapers do not report a growing tragedy and only
through the Internet has it become well known. Every week the local courts
grant about 100 foreclosure notices to banks; this means families are losing
their homes as they default on their mortgages. The clever banks have built
into the whole matter a deceptive mechanism whereby the ‘fault’ of such
foreclosures is sheeted to the families concerned. It is maintained that such
individuals should never have received a mortgage loan in the first instance;
hence it is all the fault of workers who, for no fault of their own, lose their
jobs because industry has been re-located overseas or closed down.
Small businesses are going into voluntary receivership because the world
economy is closing down despite, or in spite of, government stimulus
packages. The suicide rate in rural Australia is also rising beyond the norm.
Recently a long-time administrative shire worker I went to school with at
Edenhope hanged himself, then a Murtoa small café owner hanged himself
because of his business failing. That is the tragedy of it all, when individuals
end it all because they judge themselves to be failures and financial disasters
– when, in fact, it is the financial system’s fundamentals that cause it all.
Fortunately, there is some hope, as those in the financial sector who have
also lost their jobs, realise that the economic downturn will end their lavish
lifestyle. This hurts, especially those who have done nothing but seek to
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