A Wunch of Bankers?

The recent news that UK banks receiving a further tranch of bailout money (strange how £40 billion no longer seems like a lot of money since the banks became too big to fail) are to have restrictions place on bonus payments has spurred the usual bullshit from the banks.

Stephen Hester, chief executive of RBS, said the bonus requirements made it more difficult for the bank – which has a large investment banking division – to recruit the right staff.

Really? This excuse is trotted out whenever any reduction in the bankers' ability to pig out at the corporate trough is in any way impeded. Note, the actual restriction being discussed here is not the ability to pay bonuses for 2010, it's the mere deferral of those bonuses for a year. I think bankers must live in some strange world that's almost entirely devoid of any contact with the real world. Hester might have been better (or at least more honest) to write

“You people just don't understand that a good banker will insist on the right to huge payments before even sitting down at his or her desk. If we can't recruit the right sort of greedy bastard then we will fall behind the banks who are fully staffed with rapacious, backstabbing self-serving minions, and our shareholders will buy their shares instead. It's not easy being a banker, you know, and bonuses are a right, not something you have to earn”.

When I was a kid this sort of assumption of entitlement was chiefly associated with the output of the nation's public schools. In today's classless society anyone, even a lad from Easingwold comprehensive school, can apparently get in on the act. Oxford apparently did Mr. Hester no good at all.

Your Trash is Killing Things

If you happen to be one of those people who doesn't think this litter is a serious problem, please look at these pictures and think again. This is a graphic demonstration of the human race's careless abuse of the environment. Please stop it.

Polanski Case Highlights Us-Them Divide

The case of Roman Polanski, who thirty years ago drugged and raped a 13-year old girl and then fled the US before sentencing after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, has brought into sharp relief the fact that some Hollywood celebrities appear to feel that artistic accomplishments should give someone the right to stand above the law. Quite why the fact that Polanski has made great films, or that his crimes were committed a long time ago, should allow them to be ignored is a little bemusing. If he really believes these charges should be dropped then let him return to the USA and face the courts he fled from.

To me it doesn't seem unreasonable that Polanski is having to suffer for his admitted misdeeds, though it's a shame that the operation of the media publicity machine inevitably means his victim will also have to face renewed exposure. Her public statements have an unusual poignancy: she probably just wants the whole matter to be forgotten (I believe, but thankfully cannot know, that I would want the same in her situation).

I don't claim to know all the ins and outs of the case, though I find the facts repugnant. But it is reassuring to know that failure to submit to the courts at the time of the crime doesn't give you a free pass thirty years later. Polanski's rich and powerful friends can screech all they like about his achievements, but if his current incarceration makes even one potential child rapist think again it will be serving some purpose. At least in Switzerland (though not in the minds of his Hollywood apologists), it appears, the rich and the poor are subject to the same law.

Pay More, Die Younger

Well, here's a hard look at the American health care system that makes it pretty clear that some change is required. Paying more to die sooner doesn't sound to me like what people really want. Unfortunately many people in America don't realize what a crappy system they have got. This article tells it like it is.

The "healthcare industry" is interested in maximizing profits, not in taking care of the people who pay its premiums. Inserting the profit motive between the doctors and the patients that they care for seems to me like a recipe for stupidities like a declaration that a bleeding breast is not an emergency - a declaration that was reversed after media publicity.

Who needs death panels? The insurance companies already have them.

Fox Hypocrisy

I don't tend to go in for media-bashing, because experience has taught me that those who listen exclusively to a single source of news are unlikely to question it, because it's telling them what they want to hear.

But when Fox News takes out a full-page ad chastising other channels for not covering an event (which those channels did cover) the lie is so blatant that it's worth publicizing. Perhaps just a few of those who swallow Fox News' "fair and balanced" coverage might actually start to ask themselves why they daily swallow the Fox garbage hook, line and sinker. They even used full-page image from a CNN camera as the background to their ad!

Fortunately CNN's Rick Sanchez publicly called Fox in their lie far more effectively than I could.

I always used to wonder why I disliked Rupert Murdoch, without ever having met him. Now I understand. It's because he creates powerful media enterprises with no respect for the truth, to serve his own crass commercial ends. The Times in London used to be the UK's journal of record. Since Murdoch took over it's become a sleazy muckraking tabloid.

If you really think that Fox News is, as it claims, fair and balanced please watch the video and think again.

Idiocracy

There's been a lot of evidence that the Republican party, despite paying lip service to bipartisan politics in the interregnum between president Obama's election and his taking office in January. Since then there have been precious few signs that Republicans have interest in anything other than obstructing the social progress that will highlight the irresponsibility of the Bush administration.

So it was fascinating to come across this list of contradictions in Republican thought. I would never claim that Democrats have a monopoly on rational thought, but at present the Republican senators and congressmen need to hear from their constituencies that it's time to stop the doublespeak and start to consider the needs of those who voted them into power.

On a day when America finally learns that it will join all other Western democracies in providing universal health care, it would be nice to see some cooperation in government. Maybe next we can start to send fewer people to prison than China.

Drug War Stupidities

So the Atlanta police have killed another innocent person in their attempt to keep illegal drugs off the street. When will the citizenry of this country wake up to the atrocities that are being committed in their name? Well, not just wake up, but actually start exercising democratic control over the "forces of law" who can apparently do this kind of thing with immunity. This guy gets it.