Comments by "Faithless Hound" (@faithlesshound5621) on "VICE News"
channel.
-
10
-
6
-
5
-
3
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
Years before all these "fat cat" pension thieves like Philip Green and Robert Maxwell, the newspapers and TV screens were full of invective against "fat cat" pension funds, who were alleged to be richer than they needed to be. We were told repeatedly that, since the stock market was doing so well, businesses didn't need to contribute so much, or anything at all, to their employees' pensions. The so-called "pension holiday" that ensued was backed by Tory ministers of the stature of Michael Heseltine.
Sure enough, when the business climate took a downturn, the same captains of industry who said there was no need to contribute when the sun was shining said they couldn't afford to pay our extravagant pensions any more. We had the end of final salary schemes and the new slimmed down defined contribution schemes.
A whole new set of crooks got into the business of stealing retired and redundant workers' compensation and pensions. Ministers said they were relaxed about pensioners blowing their lump sum on a Lamborghini. As always, ordinary people end up in poverty and the crooks retire to tax havens.
Philip Green, for all his financial clout, claimed not to own anything. All his holdings and earnings were in the name of his wife, a full-time resident of Monaco, so he paid little or no tax. Presumably Lady Green was supporting the "journalists" and politicians who hyped up and enabled his wheeling and dealing and tax-free status.
Honourable mentions should go to the jet set crowd (Kate Moss, Anna Wintour, etc) who posed for pictures to distract us while he was picking our pockets.
1
-
1
-
These arrogant evangelicals had things their own way in England during the Commonwealth, and for somewhat longer in Scotland. They stopped all the accommodations that had grown up between the Roman Church and indigenous culture, cancelled every holiday (including Christmas and Easter) as pagan, banned the theatre, music and dancing and made going to church compulsory again.
After a couple of decades the English had had enough and the Puritans were sent packing. Religious warfare on the mainland of Europe had a similar effect on people's appetite for polemical preaching.
A lot of the most extreme Protestants, from Western Europe as well as England, sailed across to America to set up their own theocratic communities which reinstated much of the worst of what they had known before, but in favour of their own sect. These were the forerunners of the crazies of today. The fundamentalists also had a role in legitimising the Indian genocide on the basis of Biblical precedent.
Meanwhile the "broad church" movement developed in England and, as in other European countries, religious polemics are discouraged. Cunning politicians used the Catholic-Protestant divide to fuel conflict in Northern Ireland until the decay of religious belief defused it, despite the efforts of American donors. Religion was also exploited by the warring parties in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia to draw funding from abroad.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1