Now here with us the center of gravity of war concerns has shifted somewhat in the heart of Europe (from ‘Attack on the world order! On the soul of the European Union! On everything the free West stands for! Zelensky, hero!’ to ‘Does it take quite a long time, they won’t really become members in the future and will it get along a bit with raking in gas for winter storage?’), the public and political debate here shifts to the financial needs of the common man.
Suffering from the rising energy bill, he has to switch from cranberry pâté to Saxon liver sausage, while the sunflower oil remains expensive and refueling is a painful affair. It seems like a lot, the recently negotiated wage increases in various collective labor agreements, but if you subtract inflation from it, progress crumbles. Nibud warns: 2.8 million Dutch households could run into money problems due to rising prices.
The situation has a lot to do with the war, because everything is attached to everything by countless threads. This is also related to the fact that we may have lived too cheaply for too long. On the puff, as it were, living on the illusion of everlasting peace, inexhaustible raw materials, a forgiving earth, never-drying supply of newer innovations, and an ideal shared by every world resident of being a happy consumer together.
That will be something with the money worries, when soon – someday, perhaps, if they dare – Western governments on a large scale will attach real consequences to their disgust at the genocide in Xinjiang, and do something about the flow of cheap stuff from China that living here so affordable and made the choice so rich, and who helped fund the repressive state of Xi Jinping there. (It should be noted that they probably don’t dare, not for the time being, maybe never, so we will be able to go to Kruidvat for a while longer for 3 and 2.)
While Minister Kaag of Finance is being urged here by parliament to compensate large groups – a majority in parliament now wants extra VAT revenues to flow back to the middle class – protests are also growing elsewhere in the Kingdom among another group that there is also a reminder every day in the supermarket that its purchasing power is less and less. On Bonaire, the consumer organization Unkobon is preparing a lawsuit against the Dutch state. Due to insufficient action against poverty on the island. It’s distressing, for a long time. This week, Unkobon had an angry letter delivered to Minister Schouten of Poverty Reduction, in which she is summoned to treat Caribbean Dutch people in the same way as European Dutch people.
For more than ten years now, Bonaire has been politically just a piece of the Netherlands, like Groningen, or Walcheren, or Zoetermeer. Just like Saba and Sint Eustatius. Here the islands are regarded as a kind of Groningen – interesting because of what can be achieved such as sun, sea, coral diving and handsome houses along the coast – but there the consternation prevails about the fact that the Dutch state is not prepared to offer the same subsistence level in the Caribbean Netherlands. guarantee as in the European Netherlands. While life there is at least as expensive as here. When the estate was rescheduled after the dissolution of the Antilles in 2010, an ‘acceptable level of provisions’ was promised. It never happened. While it hardly costs anything; less than 30,000 people live in the whole of the Caribbean Netherlands.
Curious whose purchasing power comes first.