Why No Punishment For The Guilty Bankers?

Cannes Is A Cultural Con.

Cannes film festival bosses are being accused of rampant sexism after women were turned away from the red carpet for not wearing high heels.
Actresses including Emily Blunt have registered their sadness at an artistic festival that is supposed to be on a different cultural plane to the sex-mad, bimbo-obsessed Hollywood.
Are they joking?

Twenty years ago I reported on Cannes and found that far from celebrating avant-garde masterpieces, every hoarding had a poster of Pamela Anderson straddling a motorbike with her heaving breasts hanging out of a leather jacket as she promoted a piece of junk called Barb Wire.
And by far the most photographed moment was 70-year-old Tony Curtis doing a crawl of the Croisette bars, wearing a medal organisers had given him, with a busty blonde on each arm.

In one bar he caught me marvelling at the weirdly coloured three-inch-high wig on his head, winked and said: “It’s made from my old casting couch. And has the same effect”.
Then launched his tongue down the throat of one of the blondes to universal cheering from the locals.
Cannes is a cultural con, Emily.
And sleazier than a TOWIE-themed Bangkok knocking shop with Edwina Currie as madame.
( Brian Reade, 23.05.2015 )

Thatcher Declared That Greed Was Good.

I hope you heard the recording of the 1983 phone call between Reagan and Thatcher in which the old cowboy owned up to invading a Commonwealth country.
Because it showed the Iron Lady in an intriguing light.
Instead of lambasting him for sending troops into Grenada (head of state The Queen, national anthem God Save The Queen) without informing Britain, an action the UN condemned as “a flagrant violation of international law,” she fawned, forgave and asked, “How’s Nancy?”

Yet when Argentina invaded a Commonwealth country the year before, she was so apoplectic she sent our armed forces half way across the world on a killing spree.
So why did Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands make her declare war while Reagan’s gave her a wargasm?
Because Reagan was ‘us’, a fellow right-wing ideologue she was in thrall to, and the Argies just ‘them’.

She played a similar game at home.
Traditional industries with their dirty jobs and even dirtier trade unions, were ‘them’.
So they were eviscerated.
The free-marketeering City bankers were ‘us’.
So she liberated them with a Big Bang, turning London into the speculator’s world capital.
To the bonus-splurging winners she declared that greed was good.
To the jobless losers, that there was no such thing as society.
Look where it got us.

A devastated manufacturing base, an irreversible North/South divide, long-term social problems and a banking system which at first financed tax cuts for the rich then turned into the most corrupt mafia on earth.
And the British taxpayers, bullied into buying bent endowment mortgages and protection plans, saddled with bloated credit bills and a tab for the longest recession on record, were taken for a ride.
While we stumped up £850billion to keep the bankers in business they carried on dipping their hands in the till.
( Brian Reade, 15.11.2014 )

Why No Punishment For The Guilty Bankers?

How come, now that Barclays and RBS have been hit by a fresh £2billion fine for rigging the markets that affect every pension fund, none of the guilty traders will face criminal charges?
Worse than that, the identities of these gangsters who organised themselves into crews called “The Mafia” and “The Three Musketeers” are being kept secret.
We can’t look at photos of the Barclays trader caught on tape saying: “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying”.

These crooks who were rigging the market as late as last September won’t be in the dock like the Hatton Garden mob.
In seven years since they caused an economic crash which ruined millions of lives, not one banker has appeared in court and not one judge-led inquiry into the countless proven acts of criminality has been set-up.
Indeed taxpayers have stumped up £850billion to keep them in business.

All the CEO’s hand-wringing about “sorting out the few bad apples” and “changing our practises” has been proven to be lies.
As Barclays was apologising for its part in the Libor scandal, these latest crimes were being committed on their trading floor.
And we wonder why they believe they are Masters of the Universe?

Bankers have been found guilty of flogging bent endowment mortgages, protection plans and bonds to vulnerable pensioners that would never mature in their lifetime.
They’ve been found guilty of rigging the stock market and the price of gold yet nothing has happened to them.
But if you watch details about this rigging scandal on the Six O’Clock News without a TV licence, you can go to jail.
( Brian Reade, 23.05.2015 )

Jeremy Hunt Is Typical Of A Tory Breed.
Multi-millionaire Jeremy Hunt is typical of a Tory breed who bank a fortune while lecturing workers and families on why they must tighten their belts.
The Health Secretary’s near £1million windfall from a private venture on top of his £135,000 Cabinet salary leaves him open to a charge of sickening hypocrisy when he then squeezes the salaries of nurses, doctors and everybody else working in the NHS.
Hunt has no idea how most people live their lives, and just as little sympathy when he’s gliding by on more than 40 times the average wage.
The loaded Tory couldn’t be any further out of touch with real life if he was an astronaut orbiting Earth.
( Daily Mirror, 18.05.2015 )

A Nightmare On Downing Street.
Tory slasher Iain Duncan Smith returning to Work and Pensions is a nightmare on Downing Street.
The architect of the vile Bedroom Tax seems to take a perverse delight in making life unbearable for the disabled and unemployed.
But the truth is his £12billion social security cuts will hit hardest people in work who rely on benefits to top up scandalously low paid jobs.
The Tories’ victims will be the strivers who get up early to go to jobs while the curtains remain shut in the homes of the likes of David Cameron, George Osborne and Duncan Smith.
Dishonesty helped win the election for the Tories, Duncan Smith hidden largely from public view to avoid revealing where the axe will fall.
Many people conned by the Conservatives into voting Tory will regret their mistake when the full horror of Cameron’s cuts are imposed.
( Daily Mirror, 11.05.2015 )

Myleene Klass came up with the word “gobshite” on Countdown, which dictionary corner expert Susie Dent allowed because it was officially “vulgar slang”.
She didn’t say what for though.
Which is a shame, as one of the most up-to-date definitions for gobshite is: “A rich mansion-dweller who whines loudly about being asked to pay a bit more tax”.
Or “Myleene Klass” for short.
( Brian Reade, 02.05.2015 )

Badgering The Government.

Prince Charles.
Thanks to a newspaper forcing judges to release 27 of his letters to Tony Blair’s government in late 2004/early 2005, we now know the issues he thought most urgently needed addressing: Protecting the Patagonian toothfish, the evils of modern teaching, culling badgers, boosting herbal medicine use, preserving Antarctic huts, giving more subsidies to farmers and helping his architecture charity.

He made a good point about better equipping the army, but basically all the subjects raised in long letters which wasted valuable ministerial time were about his own pet causes.
They are only a snapshot of the many hundreds he has written over the decades attempting to interfere with government policy.
He is basically an aristocratic lobbyist who believes his unique take on the world is vital to the nation’s health.

In one of his letters he called opponents of the badger cull “intellectually dishonest”, ignoring the fact he was being about as constitutionally dishonest as you can get.
My favourite intervention is when he tells education secretary Ruth Kelly: “I remain convinced that the current approaches to teaching and learning need to be challenged”.
No member of his family has ever been to a state school, yet he’s telling the boss of over-stretched teachers in our under-funded state sector how to do their jobs.

He sent his own sons to Eton, where rich people are allowed to buy a leg-up for their children while using the other one to kick down the kids in comprehensives.
No wonder Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve fought the publication of these letters on the grounds they “would be seriously damaging to his role as future monarch”.
The fight to keep them secret cost taxpayers £400,000.
I might write a letter to Charles asking if we can be reimbursed.
Or better still, if he can donate £400,000 worth of produce from his Duchy of Cornwall estate to food banks.

Do you reckon he’s sent many letters to David Cameron on that issue?
Me neither.
Still, why try to save a million of his mum’s subjects from hunger when there’s the Patagonian toothfish to be saved?
( Brian Reade, 16.05.2015 )

A Desperate Shower Of Opportunists.
It was inevitable a senior Lib Dem like Danny Alexander would try and snare the Tories by going public on the Coalition’s slashing agenda, painting his party as the put-upon good guys who saved the country from a dark evil.
They have always been a desperate shower of opportunists who would sell their widowed mother into prostitution for a whiff of power.
Don’t be surprised if next week Vince Cable appears on a Jeremy Kyle special entitled “I’ve been cheating on the country for five years after I was forced into an arranged marriage by a shiny-faced sect who threatened to have Theresa May nail my balls to the floor with her kitten-heel stilettos unless I joined them in smashing the public sector, cutting taxes for the rich, raising tuition fees, selling Royal Mail for the price of a stamp and taking a £134,565-a-year ministerial salary plus a chauffeur”.
( Brian Reade, 02.05.2015 )

Just Assume That The Truth Is The Opposite To Everything He Says.

Project Cameron means more austerity for the working poor with a £12billion “reform of welfare”.
Tax breaks for the better-off.
Yet more curbs on the unions.
A sell-off of social housing, while millions wait years to be homed.
So-called “red tape” for business will be slashed, making it easier for private sector employers to sack workers.

As if it wasn’t easy enough already, with access to industrial tribunals available only to those with money.
For those with a job but on pay so low they can’t make ends meet, in-work benefits will be cut as part of a devastating raid on welfare spending.
Home services for the elderly and disabled will be hit.
The police budget will cop it.
Thousands more council staff face redundancy.

If this is, in Cameron’s words, a programme for “security and opportunity for everyone”, then I am the King of Bohemia.
Behind all the pathetic flummery of the state opening of Parliament, the shouting, the saluting, the stamping, the bowing and scraping, the humiliation of commoner MPs, the medieval velvet uniforms, the absurd rituals, the 16th-century carriages, the military pomp and ceremony, the wands, the train-bearers, the bands, the cavalry, the clunking rows of medals, the ceremonial Gold-Pillock-In-Waiting (I made that up), lies the merciless reality of Tory rule.
If you want to crack the code of Cameronspeak, just assume that the truth is the opposite to everything he says.
( Paul Routledge, 29.05.2015 )