In the Commonwealth, which is to say the countries which at one time were part of a certain empire on which the sun never set, we have the habit of every four years wasting a massive amount of money on a thing called The Commonwealth Games – think Olympics with all the big threats like the U.S and China eliminated and you’ll have the right picture.

Not surprisingly the event is held in one of the participating countries, and this year the task fell to the poor bastards in the Indian capital of New Delhi.

This in itself is offensive, in that the ruling elite of such a poor country is being allowed to waste on a mere entertainment money which could instead be put into helping the people starving in its over crowded streets.

But to make matters worse, the authorities have decided to lie to the rest of the world by hiding the city’s poor.

Not only are the fetid shanties in which Delhi’s poor are forced to live being hidden from view by brightly colored facades, but beggars – 70% of which are male and 30 % of which are younger than 18 years of age – are being rounded up, packed into trucks, driven outside the city and told to not come back until the games are over!

The authorities deny this of course, but places that usually teem with hundreds of beggars are now seeing only a handful. And to buy the authorities’ take on the situation one would have to believe that Delhi’s poor are so stupid as to decide that rather than stay at home and cash in on the influx of middle class Indians and well-heeled foreigners, it is instead time to take a holiday in the provinces!

Some of these people have been put into shelters, but according to activists Delhi simply does not have enough shelters to house more than a fraction of the city’s poor. On top of this, several slums have been demolished in the lead up to the games, which means that even if the poor are allowed to return once the middle class and the rich have had their fun, they will be facing even worse conditions than before.

India is not a welfare state in which these people can go out and collect a government benefit that affords them a packet of noodles and a leaky tenement. For these people, you beg or you don’t eat.  But that’s just how it is, isn’t it? In India as elsewhere, the rich get to party down while the poor get to starve to death in a cardboard box.

More here.

And I’m not just talking about the way she hoards the cheesecake and baked ham at the Christmas party either.

At the urging of filthy rich philanthropists Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, dozens of America’s biggest moneybags have pledged to give away at least 50 % of their fortunes to worthy causes.

Since most of the seriously rich are men it comes as no surprise that there are so few women on the list, what does come as a surprise is the absence of supposed do-gooder Oprah Winfrey!

Apart from Gates and Buffett, other well known billionaires taking part include Michael Bloomberg, George Lucas, Ted Turner (who I’m glad to say has recovered from his disappointment at not being cast as the Mad Hatter in the recent Alice in Wonderland movie) and Barron Hilton, who it would seem is a far better person than his notorious granddaughter.

Yet despite having to a great extent built her fortune  on her image as someone who cares about humanity and helping others, no Oprah. Clearly what Winfrey does with her ill-gotten gains is her own business, but if she isn’t willing to put her money where her mouth is she should drop all pretense to moral superiority and stop telling everybody how bloody wonderful she is!

Winfrey was a prominent guest at the billionaire’s dinner at which the initiative was launched in May of 2009. Here we are more than a year later and she still hasn’t signed on to the list, so it is starting to look as if  America’s richest manatee isn’t about to give up any more of her moolah than is necessary for PR purposes.

List of apparently decent rich people (did I mention Oprah isn’t on it?) here