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Monday, June 18, 2007 |
Guardian: "Last year 4,500 people took home a bonus of more than £1m. But there are those who make a great deal more than that - £10m, £20m and £50m packages are not uncommon. The total amount paid out in bonuses last year was £21bn, about one third of Britain's education budget.
Whatever you call it - silly money or serious money - it is undeniably big money, and the world has never seen fortunes made so quickly by so many and so mysteriously.
Right down at the bottom, the underclass struggles away with few to champion its cause or lighten its despair. The Rev Paul Nicolson who runs the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust - named after a tax collector in the New Testament - told me how HM Revenue and Customs suspended a woman's benefit payments because they didn't believe she had six children.
It is argued that capitalism thrives on this ceaseless churn, yet there seems to be no reason why the House of Commons Treasury select committee should not, when it meets this week, demand frankness from the five big private equity bosses about their personal tax arrangements, the treatment of employees of firms taken over and the escalating debt. For there is something vaporous and untrustworthy about debt held in a kind of digital suspension It makes the boom no more solid than its predecessors, and maybe a lot more dangerous.
What to do with the super-rich? How can they be integrated into society? Obviously the private equity barons should be paying more tax. There should be a self-imposed ceiling on bonuses, with companies setting up, pound-for-pound, charitable schemes, inventing their own projects perhaps which involve the active participation of their rich employees."
I think the government should impose wage and bonus ceilings, because the money must come from somewhere and it is robbed from the poor and middle classes.
The ideal instrument for neocon capitalists like Tony Blair is an all-powerful Europe that bypasses national laws and regulations.
DailyExpress: "Tony Blair wants to hand the European Union radical new powers in his last act as Prime Minister, it emerged today."
Which also means Blair has the European presidency in mind with all its financial benefits for greedy neocons. In short, the rape of Europe (including Britain).
11:36:48 AM 
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Telegraph: "A British general is at the forefront of a risky American strategy to turn former Sunni insurgents into 'freedom fighters' battling al-Qa'eda in Baghdad.
Lt Gen Graeme Lamb, the deputy commander of coalition troops in Iraq and a veteran SAS officer, has forged contacts with insurgent leaders and tribesmen that has yielded key breakthroughs to turn them against their former extremist allies."
Well, well, the Britons are now fuelling the civil war. Perfidious Albion, indeed.
11:21:03 AM
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