The Beeb’s shortest-ever lived DG got a sizeable sum, no doubt: but his public humiliation because of the idiotic, slapdash actions of one small part of his organisation mean (a) he was the Patsy and (b) he will never work again in broadcasting because (c) a scheming Peer decided to turn nasty.
All blame, no responsibility, less than zero spine. The correct thing for our legislators to do would’ve been to condemn utterly the £185,000 paid out to a man who felt wronged but had a weak case. But our MPs don’t want to do that, because they don’t like the BBC. Labour has never forgiven them for questioning Iraq policy, and the Tories would rather have Murdoch in their stead. Our MPs would rather applaud lachrymose tripe about one Peer’s as yet unproven reputation for spotless honesty, while covering up the abuse meted out to vulnerable children. They would rather drivel on about austerity and cutting the deficit, than jail and then tear apart the criminal bankers and institutions that doubled it. They would rather ignore the civil service embezzlement of pension rights that doubled the National Debt than take on the feather-bedded sociopaths in Whitehall and Town Hall.
What a bunch of useless onanists they are. And how expensive this industrial scale Portnoy’s Complaint is – wherever you live in the world. In late 2011, Greek finance minister and Cyril Smith wannabe Evangelos Venizelos made an impassioned plea for help from his countrymen to rescue the country from financial ruin…which had been caused by his class, and its corrupt menage a trois with Brussels and banking.
“We need a national collective effort: all of us have to carry the burden together,” said Bunteropolopolous “We need something that will be fair and socially acceptable.” The huge one’s answer was a new tax on property, levied via electricity bills: no pay tax, die of hypothermia in winter. The public labelled the tax ‘haratsi’ after a hated levy the Ottomans once imposed on Greeks. Now a new industry has been born: illegally reconnecting decent people who’ve been cut off….and naturally, corporate tax evasion.
Two months ago, a Greek electricity industry source revealed that some of the biggest businesses in the land, including media groups, were paying less than half the full rate, or not paying the tax at all. It can only be a matter of time before one of those broadcasters condemns Alexis Tsipras charging his motor-bike petrol bills to the State as ‘a cavalier waste of public money’.
Over in the US, for the last four years the Fed Treasury top chap Ben Bernanke has been quantitatively easing the US economy out of recession. He has spent over three trillion dollars doing it (both on and under the radar) and while it has certainly eased the contents of the US Federal resources (aka public money) very quantitatively indeed, it has worked with reducing effectiveness over time. In fact, at the moment it involves buying real crap and giving away real money to no useful effect whatsoever beyond keeping the Wily Coyote US stock market up at its currently ridiculous levels.
Obama likes to claim that he has created jobs, but that’s bollocks: he’s created people working shorter hours for less money per hour. This is all he could do given that the neocon economic model so beloved of Republicans isn’t fit for purpose. Yet those same GOPers never seem to make the connection between banking failure, manufacturing export failure, and Bernanke failure when it comes to fighting a guerilla war with the White House about the Debt ceiling.
The US is haemorrhaging money because it consumes too much Asian crap, keeps bailing the banks out, won’t reform the banking system or restructure the economic balance, and doesn’t have any ideas beyond jerking the Executive knee to every scam suggested by the guilty. Where are the Representatives of the People on this one? In the pockets of big business, banking, and Newscorp.
According to Vern McKinley, research fellow at the Independent Institute and author of “Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts” the 2008 U.S. investment bank bailouts were the result of an inadequate understanding of banking history, hasty decision-making and hysterical rhetoric from the heads of banks and the U.S. Federal Reserve. (Especially one Hank J Paulson, who to this day has never adequately explained what he did with the 800 billion bucks Congress eventually gave him).
Anyway, McKinley made the case that the contagion theory — which states that if one large bank fails it endangers others — is not born out in past financial crises. Historically, the failure of one major bank has not led other major banks to fail, nor is there reason to believe that banks that were bailed out would have pulled others down in a domino effect. I don’t think anyone can ever say that for sure. I just know for certain that had all the dominoes fallen over in 2008, we would be in better shape today…simply because everyone at every level would’ve had to face reality, and all the jerks who caused it (and will cause it again only more so soon enough) would be in jail.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting – it won’t take long – for the first wannabe GOP 2016 Presidential candidate to step up to some mic somewhere and say that giving people food stamps is ‘a cavalier use of public money’.
You can never find a Roundhead when you need one, isn’t that so? Ron Paul is a Roundhead. Angela Merkel sounds like a Roundhead, but she’s really a Stalinist Squarehead. And Wolfgang Schäuble is a headcase.
Pretty much everyone else is a Cavalier. The Cavaliers from the English Civil War are depicted in most films as overdressed daredevils buckling their swashes and bedding the wenches. It’s all BS: in truth, the Cavaliers supported a system that consisted of one bloke called King sitting in an ivory tower and saying he had a Divine Right.
Nothing much changes.
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