Live Below the Line

For five days in May some friends and I are going to try living on just £1 of food a day. We're doing this to raise awareness of global poverty and the 1.4 billion people on the planet today who have to exist on the equivalent of £1 a day for everything they need. In addition to making lots of noise about what we are doing and why, we're going to be giving all the money we would usually have spent on food to support Salvation Army International Development, who resource, empower and support developing communities to defeat poverty and injustice and enable them to build a better life and future.

If you've been reading this blog before, you'll know that I am involved in establishing a community of restless idealists and faithful activists, each passionate about bringing social justice to our hurting world. We've been meeting in locations around Finchley every fortnight since the start of the year and we're using this week of self-enforced poverty to live out the words we say. 

I'll be posting updates on my Twitter feed and Facebook status, as will others, so watch this space. Maybe you'd like to join us in this experiment? If so, drop me a note or comment below.

We can't end poverty overnight, but we can't stand by and ignore it either.

The counterfeit bailout

"We spent hundreds of billions of dollars to save the richest companies and people in America, offering them a safety net that we had long since decided not to grant the poorest Americans - lest they 'take advantage' of it... What the banks were supposed to do with our money was to start lending again - which they had stopped doing - to credit-worthy businesses and homeowners for whom critical capital had dried up.

The American people were asked to trust the smart people who knew best and to count on the banks to restore the credit flow to individuals and small businesses that needed it. But some banks bought up (with our money) stocks, bonds, and other assets at rock-bottom prices and then made a killing in profits as the stock market stabilised and began to rise again. Then, to congratulate themselves for seizing this opportunity for making a profit, they gave out record compensation bonuses to themselves whilst wages for the rest of the country continued to fall and more and more people found themselves without a job at all.

It was amorality play almost too unbelievably bad to be true ; yet that is exactly what happened."

From Rediscovering Values by Jim Wallis, 2010 (Hardcover, p220)