Much political posturing today at the news that oil firms might have colluded to drive up fuel prices.
The real fuel scandal is that prices are driven up and that we are ripped off every day, because most of the price is the cut the state takes. We can’t do anything about it because they have a gun to our heads.
It’s not just the CIA dropping off the cash. Now we find that MI6 is doing it too.
British intelligence is handing “bundles” of cash over to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai for special peace projects despite warnings that handouts are promoting corruption at the heart of his regime.
Gosh, do you reckon that the Karzai crew might not be accounting for every penny of our cash? How shocking it would be to find out that our cash is being trousered by a bunch of Pashtun gangsters, which is all the ruling class is over there.
Kabul will fall five minutes after we leave. I fully expect Karzai to pop up in Switzerland just in time.
For some reason, the CIA has been dropping off tens of millions of dollars to Karzai’s office for over a decade. The payments – cash packed in suitcases, rucksacks and plastic bags – are still being made. The New York Times reports:
For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the .
All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President , according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
But without government, who will make Karzai stinkingly rich?
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”
Someone thinks this is good policy – for themselves. Goodness knows the useless Karzai isn’t worth it. I can only imagine alot of cash has been channeled round to American-owned bank accounts in exotic places.
Give me strength.
Pampered MPs are sitting on a taxpayer-backed war chest of nearly £6million that can be used if they fall on hard times.
The Treasury pays thousands of pounds a year into the “hardship fund”, which gives financial help to former members and their families down on their luck.
Please, someone, just make it make it stop.
The Mid-Staffs NHS Human Abattoir went into administration this week (so it wasn’t all bad news out there), prompting its useless staff to demonstrate today in defence of their jobs. If they’d got off their arses to demonstrate some backbone in defence of the weak, helpless and elderly then 1200 people wouldn’t have been bumped off. Three victims were the husband and parents of Heather Wilhelms, who held a one-woman counter-demonstraton of her own:
I’m on her side. Going by many of the comments beneath the piece, that childhood conditioning, where we’re taught to worship doctors and nurses as angels among us, doesn’t wash anymore. In Stafford they had a job to do, they failed it on professional and human terms and many lost their lives. Shut the place down.
Eurozone authorities pressured Cypriot banks into buying Greek bonds. Then eurozone authorities imposed losses of 75% on Greek sovereign debt held by Cypriot banks, setting off the Cypriot banking crises. They then grab Cypriot savings and bank deposits, to solve the banking crises, and now they’ve seized three quarters of the country’s gold reserves, a move which the Cypriot Central Bank knew nothing about.
“The Eurogroup don’t give a damn about moral hazard. They are thieves”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph.
Damn right they are. Someone in these here parts has warned that nothing you think you own is safe, and that ever more ingenious and desperate ways will be found to “tax” it from you. They’re becoming more desperate by the week.
HBOS went bust in 2008. We now know that it didn’t happen because of financial acrobatics with derivatives. HBOS went bust because it loaned too much money to people who couldn’t pay it back. It failed, doing traditional bank business, because it was run badly.
So Gordon Brown coaxed LloydsTSB into a rescue deal, tax-victims were forced to cough up a £20billion sweetener, and seven HBOS directors trousered almost a million quid each. Droit du seigneur, the modern way.
It’s important for genuine capitalists and free marketeers to call out the biggest welfare parasites and fraudsters of the lot – the inhabitants of the cozy world of crony capitalists and special interests whose access to power centres allows them to gorge on more of our wealth than whole armies of council estate unemployed can dream of. It’s important because it’s right, it’s important because something is not necessarily moral simply because it’s not illegal, and it’s important to make the point that it’s plain bad economics and business practices like this which damage everyone.
It’s a subject touched upon by Allister Heath today in CityAM, in which he makes the essential point that free markets have given way to crony, government-rigged markets, as evidenced in the HBOS deal:
Like all elite socialists, Baroness Ashton just loves to bleed tax-victims.
When the parasite leaves her position at the EU next year she’ll continue to be paid £400,000 over the following three years. Good, eh? Then she can park her arse on a bench in the House of Lords and trouser £300 a day. And when she retires a £61,000/pa EU pension awaits.
Two things: You will be looted for every penny of Ashton’s comfy life. If you decide otherwise then men with guns will lock you away. Also, remember that EU rules require her to remain loyal to the EU to guarantee her pension. She’ll do this while sucking up £300 a day from us in the Lords.
News break over, back to work peasants. Ashton’s rewards require your sweat.
Well done, Left Wing scum.
Thanks to you, the Parliamentary criminals who brought us the expenses scandal have agreed to regulate the press. They’re not alone. Millionaire actors famous for crap films and getting noshed off by $50 tarts are in full support. I’m sure it’s to protect the little person.
UPDATE: “Press regulation” includes bloggers, tweeters, facebook users.
But not me. I don’t give my consent.
Here’s Eric Joyce MP, last night, under a pile of coppers in Parliament. It’s not the first time booze has got him into trouble there. (BBC story here.)
When this happens on the High Street half of Parliament stampedes for the nearest microphone to call for higher booze prices. How many MPs today are demanding the end of cheap, subsidised booze in Parliament? Crickets …
