They Got Away With It AGAIN!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Last week several of the ‘BIG’ banks – you remember, the ones that are too big to let go bust – were fined in the region of $5.7 billion for illegal manipulation of the currency markets.

The usual suspects were included, J P Morgan, Citibank, Barclays  and RBS all pleading guilty – but only after they were sure what the medicine they would be getting would be.

It’s a huge amount of money, there’s no denying that. And losing it will make the banksters hurt a bit. But only a bit.

And that’s the problem.

Yet again the United States government has failed to bring these criminals to justice after more of their deliberate fraud and theft.

In other words, they let them get away with it AGAIN!

Now, if I walk into a branch of, for example, Citibank and try to steal the money that their customers have deposited with them for safe-keeping, I would be videoed, photographed, and if I was lucky enough to get out of the premises, pursued by the police and even the FBI for as long as it took to capture me.

And I couldn’t have any complaints because that’s the way it should be. Thieves should be sought out, captured and after due process thrown into jail.

However, if I am a bankster, have good government contacts, and ply money and favors to those in government, then I am treated very differently.

I can embark on insider trading (which is essentially what the banksters were doing when they were illegally manipulating the currency markets), I can sell loans to people that clearly can’t afford them, then take their houses away or sell on their debt wrapped up in a ‘AAA’ bundle to my richer customers, and after all that steal even more of the money my customers have entrusted to me by awarding myself and my collaborators big bonuses that none of us have earned or are entitled to.

In this scenario am I pursued by the police and FBI?

Nope.

Am I thrown in jail to be the bitch of Skull-cracker Jones or Scarface Smith?

Nope.

Will I have to personally pay back the money I stole?

Nope, again.

So what will happen to me if I am a bankster?

At worst I will get a slap on the wrist and told not to do it again. Even though recent history has proved that this is no deterrent and I will do it again at the first opportunity I get.

And, of course, I don’t have to personally pay the government’s fine no matter how big it may be. Instead my company has to cough up on my behalf.

Not that the company is much bothered either because when it runs out of money it goes back to the government which hands it back at least the value of the fine and usually much, much more.

Think this system is fair?

Neither do I.

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Democracy Or Idiocracy?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Have you ever wondered how the United States of America has managed to accumulate debt of $18 trillion and rising?

Part of the answer is pretty easy really.

The country is being run by people who can’t count. By people who do not realize that you cannot indefinitely live beyond your means.

Try doing what the government does at home and see how far you get? You can’t print money (legally) as a short-stop measure so the effect on you will be immediate. You’ll go broke!

The government and has been printing billions and billions of dollars, but all this has done is to postpone the inevitable and pass on the problem to future generations.

But not being able to count is just one part of what’s wrong. It’s a big part, but it does not tell the whole story.

What is also wrong is the amount of money that the government and their stupid minions waste.

A small, but good, example of this was accidentally uncovered during the 2014 investigation into the handling of interrogations of terrorists by American intelligence agencies.

Here we discovered that $81 million of taxpayer money had been paid to a pair of so-called ‘psychologists’ who were at the head of these interrogations.

Not only that, but it turned out that neither of these two people had any prior knowledge of al-Qaeda, no experience in interrogation techniques and no background in counter terrorism.

That’s zero experience on all three counts!

To add insult to injury, they were also promised an additional $5 million in indemnity costs to cover all legal expenses for any potential criminal investigation and prosecution through 2021 as well as paid more than $1 million individually.

This sort of idiocy permeates all sections of government. The waste is colossal. So colossal that the tax paying public very seldom, if ever, gets to hear about it. And if and when they do it is invariably too late to do anything about it. The money is gone. Wasted!

That’s part of the reason the United States imposes the world’s highest corporate tax rates and why it is one of the few countries in the world to impose a “worldwide tax” on domestic firms and on its citizens.

America likes to try to impose ‘democracy’ on other nations in the world, especially the ones that don’t understand it and don’t want it.

But with ‘democracy’ should come ‘accountability’.

Clearly is does not.

Therefore the system we really have is an ‘idiocracy’, not a ‘democracy’.

Let’s start and call it what it is. It’s a much more appropriate name for what is going on!

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“I Think,” Said The Sweet Potato, “Therefore I Yam.”

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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Well today I yam the poster of more puns.
Keep your groans handy, you might need ‘em.
Enjoy or endure.
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You can say what you like

about freedom of speech.

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I would love to dance at a metric party,

but I have two left 0.305 meters.

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Waiters are good at multiplication

because they know their tables.

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I accidentally grabbed a

live electric cable yesterday.

It really Hertz.

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Capital punishment.

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I used to work at a car garage

that had a jet wash.

It was pointless,

there was nowhere for them to land.

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I got a 24 hour clock from

a garage sale for only 10/c.

They’ll be so mad,

it’s lasted far longer.

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I’m in court accused of the murders of

Dracula and Monte Cristo.

I’m pleading guilty to both Counts.

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There’s a Muslim in the street carrying a gun.

Police say he’s Ahmed and dangerous.

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My ex girlfriend text to say that

she’d made a voodoo doll of me.

I think she’s pulling my leg.

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I used to have a job in the police force,

in which I’d break into secure

computer files to uncover criminal activity.

That was until I was met by one system

that proved I wasn’t up to the job.

I just couldn’t hack it.

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Driving home, I noticed I had a

police car right up my ass.

Must have a word with my nephew

about leaving his toys lying around.

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I’d been worrying about my

geography exam for a long time.

When I sat down to take it,

the first question read;

“What is the correct term for any wind that

blows between 4 and 30 miles per hour?”

I don’t know what I was worried about.

It was a breeze.

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I was so nervous when I met my

future father-in-law that i blurted out,

“Sir, May I have your daughters

hole in handy matrimony?”

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What do you call a bunch of

kleptomaniacs with musical instruments?

A Steal Band.
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They Say Pride Goes Before A Fall

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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So, if pride goes before a fall, what goes before a CRASH?

Well, in terms of the pathetic Obamacare web site, the usual form of words from the Obama Administration is

“…the site was fully-functioning for a “vast majority” of users.”

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CRASH!

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It happened again last week, early Friday afternoon in fact, as millions of Americans tried to get insurance coverage before the deadline.

I don’t know where they got the information that the site was functioning for the “vast majority of users”.

Well, I do actually. It was a lie. Another one.

In fact the healthcare.gov is not fully-functioning for anyone. On the positive side I suppose you could say that everyone has an equal chance of not being able to use the web site, but that is small comfort to those trying to do so.

And this is just the latest CRASH of many. Last November there was another major one. They “fixed” it, except of course they didn’t, they just got it working for a while, until it toppled over again.

Left in the hands of idiot bureaucrats who clearly have no idea what they are doing, no system can work efficiently. They choose bad designers, who use bad code, produce a bad product, and then are amazed and surprised when it doesn’t work.

There are tens of thousands of commercial web sites, like Google, Amazon, Ebay, Microsoft, even Wikipedia, that take much higher traffic every day without crashing – and they’ve been doing it for years.

Yet the bureaucratic bunglers can’t get their web site working for more than a few weeks at a time.

About all they got right was the timing of the CRASH.

No, wait, they even got that wrong, because the whole debacle happened less than two hours before President Obama had a scheduled press conference, helping to push his approval rating more and more in the negative direction.

But fear not, as millions of his citizens now find themselves stressed and worrying because they have no insurance – due to no fault of their own –  their leader will have a solution.

I don’t know what it is, but the odds are in favor of another vacation, possibly in Hawaii – but definitely fully insured!

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A Taxing Problem And A Simple Solution.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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The Sunday Sermon

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Taxation is a perfect example of how the politicians and the bureaucrats have made things go haywire.

Such a monstrous collection of tax regulations has been accumulated over the years that even qualified accountants cannot properly decipher them.

There are allowances for this…. but not that…. except you can have it for that too…. but only if you do this first……

There are ‘eliminated items’ which may not be the same as ‘excluded items’, which is different from ‘excluded income’, not to be confused with ‘exempt income’, all of which you can have as deductions as long as everything has been ‘apportioned’ and/or ‘allocated’ according to the precise rules………  and on and on and on and on it goes.  

Just to give you an idea of the scale of the problem and to prove that I am not exaggerating in the slightest, the current US Tax Code is now well over 70,000 pages long. That’s about 185 times longer than it was in 1913, when the code was 400 pages and still far too long and complicated at that!

If you are an Apple or a Google or an Exxon and have a multi-billion dollar war chest you can buy the best professional experts and end up paying little or no tax at all. On the other hand if you are Joe Average you’ve got no chance!

Is there a better way?

I think so. For sure there isn’t a worse way!

It’s not a new idea, but as the system gets more and more complicated, it makes more and more sense to change it.

So why don’t we have a certain tax free allowance of $30,000 or $50,000 or whatever for annual exempt income, and pay 10 cents on every dollar we earn above that (or 10p a pound or 10 cents per euro) and leave it at that?

If that was the rule, and the only rule, everyone could do their tax returns easily, everything would be transparent, there wouldn’t be any complicated loopholes and no one would feel aggrieved because we are all being treated equally. And I think the governments would actually net a lot more revenue at a much reduced collection cost.

Too easy? Can’t be done like that?

That’s what the bureaucrats say, but as usual they are lying. They just don’t want their little empires reduced.

Of course it can be done the simple way. If fact although we don’t notice it, we see it done every day like that with sales tax. You buy something for a dollar and you pay your percentage of sales tax. (VAT they call it in Europe).

Easy. Simple. Everyone knows what they have to pay and why they have to pay it.

It will never happen of course. Not while the bureaucrats remain in charge and the politicians are bought and paid for.

Not until the revolution – if there ever is another one.

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