How Britain has sold more than half its companies to foreigners

By ALEX BRUMMER: Just for a moment, imagine being a tourist in search of the full British experience. Where would you start? Well, you might take a sight-seeing trip around London on a red double-decker bus.

You’d possibly visit a quintessentially British store, such as Boots the chemist, Selfridges or Harrods, before having a proper English tea at the Savoy, Fortnum & Mason or the Dorchester.

You’d almost certainly go home, via a British airport, thinking you’d seen a slice of the real Britain. But, in one sense at least, you’d be totally wrong.

(British icon? Most London buses are run by a Spanish company)

That bus you boarded at Trafalgar Square is run by a German company. Boots fell to the Italians in 2007. Selfridges, Fortnum & Mason and the Savoy are owned by Canadians; Harrods has been bought by a firm based in Qatar; the Dorchester by one based in Brunei. As for our airports, most of them are now run by a Spanish firm. 

Maybe a tourist wouldn’t care all that much, even if he knew. But should we? After all, does it make any real difference if a British company has a foreign master?

UK PM David Cameron is a menace, we need protecting

The Artist Taxi Driver

The President Of Iceland Tells Us How He Had The Balls To Stand Up To Britain

"Iceland kicks bankers in the balls. Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and the UK don’t (not to mention the USA)"
Adam Taylor: The president of Iceland sits in his study drinking tea from an immaculate china set.

“If a collapse in the financial sector can bring one of the most stable and secure democracies and political structures to his knees as happened in Iceland,” Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson says to me, “then what could it do in countries that have less stable democratic and political history?”

The tiny country is unique not only in its stunning geography but also in its open democracy. This democracy was pivotal in the choice to let three giant banks fail during the financial crisis.

Gold: Return Of The King?

The world has never been better positioned to use gold as a medium of exchange than it is right now. Source

The rise and fall of Al-Jazeera Arabic - Double Standards

The war of information and media of Syria as rival observatories fight it out. Why is this man begging for bullets and mobile phone? Could it be anything to do with Obama's $100 million handout? We also talk to Jihad Ballout, former manager of media relations at Al-Jazeera Arabic about why the station has gone so wrong. These and much more are all reviewed in this edition of Double Standards with Afshin Rattansi. Source

Double crossed: now the globalists gerrymander elections in Greece and Italy

Not content with wrecking their economies, the EU/ECB/IMF troika has now taken to open gerrymandering of the parliamentary systems in Italy and Greece.

Lukas Papademos, the Greek Quisling forced on his countrymen in order to empty their pockets, has called snap elections for May 6th.

The auguries are not optimistic that Greeks will cram the polling stations to endorse the scorched earth policy emanating from Washington, Brussels and Frankfurt. As I wrote in previous columns, Greek politicians are little more than venal kleptocrats helping themselves at the public trough for years. On the purely nominal left, Pasok; on the even more nominal center-right, ‘New Democracy.’ The latest poll reporting had neither garnering a sufficient number of votes to form a government with a clear majority. Forecast: heavy weather ahead for the despised austerity program. The response of the New Democracy leader, Antonis Samaras, was to level a gun to the electorates’ collective head, ordering them to vote for New Democracy, with the ultimatum that he would call a second election, and presumably a third and fourth, until they got the message.

Now something very interesting has happened: a controlled demolition job of Pasok and another smaller but significant right-leaning party, the Democratic Alliance.

Max Keiser on Mott Street with the Exorcism of Blythe Masters + The Philosophy of Max Keiser, pt 1: Boycotting Coca-Cola

Greg over at Backburner news was kind enough to share his video footage of Max Keiser and Reverend Bill Masters on Mott Street 4/12/2012. Max covers some important issues including fraud in the markets, Wall Street, the role of collateral, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, crap deals of JPM, congress, Goldman Sachs, fraud, ECB, IMF, Greece, Spain, Ireland, Germany, derivatives, financial terrorism, global raping-destruction of nation states, toxic securities, credit default swaps, and silver. This video is both entertaining and important.

Federal Reserve is paying banks NOT to make loans To Citizens - Kucinich

Kucinich: Federal Reserve No More "Federal" Than Federal Express!
"The fed is paying the banksters higher interest rates now to keep their funds parked at the fed instead of loaning the money to the American people." "True." In effect, literally giving the banksters the peoples money. "One fraud after another against the American people"

Why The Market Is Slowly Dying

Submitted by Tyler Durden: 

Three years ago, when virtually nobody had yet heard of High Frequency Trading, Zero Hedge wrote "The Incredibly Shrinking Market Liquidity, Or The Upcoming Black Swan Of Black Swans" in which we asked "what happens in a world where the very core of the capital markets system is gradually deleveraging to a point where maintaining a liquid and orderly market becomes impossible: large swings on low volume, massive bid-offer spreads, huge trading costs, inability to clear and numerous failed trades?" Subsequent to this, our observation was proved right on both an acute (the May 6, 2010 Flash Crash), and chronic (the nearly 50% collapse in average daily volumes since the 2008 top) secular basis. And while we are not happy to have been proven correct in this particular forecast, as it ultimately means the days of equity capital markets in their current configuration are numbered, we now note that none other than Morgan Stanley's Quantitative and Derivative Strategies released a note which, with a three year delay, effectively predicts the end of capital markets in a world where every declining retail participation (another topic we have been hammering for the past 3 years as it is only the most natural response to a world in which not only equities are openly manipulated by central banks, but in which perpetrators for massive market disturabances are neither identified nor prosecuted) is replaced by artificial high frequency trading churn, which never was and never will be a true liquidity provider on a long-term basis.

Accelerating economic collapse, move toward the dictatorship on both sides of the Atlantic

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, chairwoman of the German BüSo Party, calls upon the American citizens to fight and defend the Republic; the beacon of hope for mankind. Source

ARIZONA STATE MILITIA BUILD UP BEGINS

Senate Bill (SB) 1083 establishes the Arizona Special Missions Unit (SMU) for securing the safety and protection of the lives and property of the citizens of this state. The primary mission of the unit is to support this state in securing the border with Mexico and supplement the efforts of law enforcement and state agencies, including county and municipal leaders

Rocket War Video: Greek churches celebrate Easter

Every year on the evening before Orthodox Easter, the sky above Chios - a northern Greek island close to Turkey - is lit by hundreds of celebratory rockets fired between two rival parishes in a traditional good-natured rocket war known as "rouketopolemos."