Dear Jeremy Clarkson,
Is the strain of earning too much money and living in the Cotswolds going to your head, Mr Clarkson? Or are you simply coming unglued? In your Sunday Times column devoted to promoting the motorcar, you recently told your adherents that one of your favourite cities is Copenhagen.
Aside from the fact that you enjoy looking at the bottoms of pretty Danish girls, you wrote, “...there are no bloody cars cluttering up the place.” I bet the car manufactures who provide you with gassed-up models for you to test and review nearly swallowed their cheque books.
Your obviously split personality caused you to reveal that, whereas you’re okay about bikes in Denmark, you are not okay about bikes in the UK, and especially not in London. You write, “I am constantly irritated by cyclists, as I am sure they are by me”.
WRONG, dopey! Cyclists aren’t irritated by any normal motorist. But they are afraid of some motorists, Mr Clarkson. Afraid that ‘irritated‘ motorists like you have a tendency to drive like pathological sows protecting piglets. (Now that you live in our bucolic hinterland, can I presume you are aware of the behaviour of fat pigs?) Yes, an irritated motorist, armed with his steed of steel, protected from harm by seat belts and airbags, is a cowardly and dangerous breed.
And thanks to people like you, these lunatics think they have right on their side, That because they pay road tax, they have the right to hard-shoulder other road users to one side, sometimes with fatal results.
You are a heavily-leaded petrolhead, Mr Clarkson. Probably one of the purist around. Why? Because you have curly hair - rather like a pig’s tail. Your hair follicles are bent. Follicles secrete oil onto our scalps. Because yours are bent, by the time your oil has negotiated the bends, it’s hotter than it should be. In fact because you get so steamed up, or one degree hotter than irritated, by cyclists in London, you, by a self-created oil refining process, end up with high-octane fuel swilling around your curly bonce.
This greasy phenomenon may be good for your hair but it’s doing your mentality no good whatsoever. This is why you drive around emitting high-pitched piggy-squeals telling cyclists, caravaners and other normal road users to ‘get out of the way’.
Get your follicles fixed, Mr Clarkson. Your irritation will disappear and you might become inclined to notice and appreciate the bottoms on pretty English girls.
Sunday 15 April 2012
Thursday 23 February 2012
Coming to country near you.
I have three things on my desk that are important to me: my Mac and a motivational toy given to me as a birthday present by some dear friends. It’s a large, battery operated button on the top of which is written EASY. On completing a task I press it. A gravelly voice says, ‘That was easy!’ I love it to death.
The third is a Post It note on which I have written ‘Gene Burnett, Jump you fuckers.’ This was a tip-off about a protest song that another friend thought I would appreciate. And how! It’s on YouTube and I advise everyone to listen, laugh and learn.
The people he’s urging to jump from tall buildings, bankers, and so on, never do. It’s the victims of their actions, those whose lives have been ruined by financial skulduggery who do the jumping. So if the following seems a tad obscure to you, I’ll assume that you may not be aware of the interconnectedness of the financial and business world, and how this interconnectedness has ruined and is set to ruin millions of lives.
In view of the fact that if all goes well with Facebook’s float onto the stock exchange, our favourite social networking company may get out of paying any corporation tax in America for a decade, and stay within the rules. This will have serious repercussions. Don’t ask me how they’ll get away it. I’m not a (dopey) regulator.
In addition, the New York Times reported that between 1999 and 2009, US multinationals hired 2.9 million workers in India, China and elsewhere around the world. During the same period they laid off 870,000 workers in America, for which American tax payers are still picking up the tab - lost tax revenue, welfare payments, rising crime and the massive costs of incarcerating millions. One positive aspect is that America can no longer afford to start any more wars.
All our multinationals now have unfettered access to global markets. They are able to pick and choose and move to countries offering cheaper labour. Meanwhile, following advice by merchant banks such as the legendary ‘Giant Vampire Squid’, (aka Goldman Sachs) a slippery creature that advised Greece how to gain access to the eurozone by a supposedly legal subterfuge, they set up tax avoidance regimes involving off-shore accounts. The cash they save enables fat cats and selected shareholders to live off the fat of several lands.
Of companies like the Great Vampire Squid; if, like Adolf Hitler, you wanted to arrange for your Central Bank to trade gold for cash with another Central Bank, let’s say the Swiss Central Bank, trade gold, say, gold that you’d extracted from the mouths of exterminated citizens and converted to bullion, you would choose that sort of company as your go-between. That sort of company would get the job done without restraint or reference to the moral issue. You’d have to give them at least 10% and they'd insist on one of their employees becoming Finance Minister, but it would be well worth it.
It’s not hard to imagine that sometime in the future, when all the bank and sovereign bailout money has been spent, one of our favourite countries is going to go bust. This means that the people who can’t get away with not paying their taxes will be squeezed half-to-death by job losses, inflation, increased indirect taxation and battered to bits by one or another austerity measure.
As we slide further into recession and unemployment rises inexorably, our multinational corporations react. They duck, dive and cut so successfully that they can't help making record profits. Yet tax revenues (are set to) decrease, à la Facebook, Vodafone, Google et al, and none of the profits will be used to reduce trade deficits or stave off recession. Ergo, our multinational corporations will not contribute one iota to the difficulties that we and our favourite countries are set to encounter.
The price for our apathy and our pathetic faith in Free Market Capitalism is going to have to be paid by us, and not by them, in full.
Personally, I’d like to not only see some of the fat cats jump from tall buildings, but as they flail away I’d press the toy button inside my soul and shout, ‘That was easy!’
The third is a Post It note on which I have written ‘Gene Burnett, Jump you fuckers.’ This was a tip-off about a protest song that another friend thought I would appreciate. And how! It’s on YouTube and I advise everyone to listen, laugh and learn.
The people he’s urging to jump from tall buildings, bankers, and so on, never do. It’s the victims of their actions, those whose lives have been ruined by financial skulduggery who do the jumping. So if the following seems a tad obscure to you, I’ll assume that you may not be aware of the interconnectedness of the financial and business world, and how this interconnectedness has ruined and is set to ruin millions of lives.
In view of the fact that if all goes well with Facebook’s float onto the stock exchange, our favourite social networking company may get out of paying any corporation tax in America for a decade, and stay within the rules. This will have serious repercussions. Don’t ask me how they’ll get away it. I’m not a (dopey) regulator.
In addition, the New York Times reported that between 1999 and 2009, US multinationals hired 2.9 million workers in India, China and elsewhere around the world. During the same period they laid off 870,000 workers in America, for which American tax payers are still picking up the tab - lost tax revenue, welfare payments, rising crime and the massive costs of incarcerating millions. One positive aspect is that America can no longer afford to start any more wars.
All our multinationals now have unfettered access to global markets. They are able to pick and choose and move to countries offering cheaper labour. Meanwhile, following advice by merchant banks such as the legendary ‘Giant Vampire Squid’, (aka Goldman Sachs) a slippery creature that advised Greece how to gain access to the eurozone by a supposedly legal subterfuge, they set up tax avoidance regimes involving off-shore accounts. The cash they save enables fat cats and selected shareholders to live off the fat of several lands.
Of companies like the Great Vampire Squid; if, like Adolf Hitler, you wanted to arrange for your Central Bank to trade gold for cash with another Central Bank, let’s say the Swiss Central Bank, trade gold, say, gold that you’d extracted from the mouths of exterminated citizens and converted to bullion, you would choose that sort of company as your go-between. That sort of company would get the job done without restraint or reference to the moral issue. You’d have to give them at least 10% and they'd insist on one of their employees becoming Finance Minister, but it would be well worth it.
It’s not hard to imagine that sometime in the future, when all the bank and sovereign bailout money has been spent, one of our favourite countries is going to go bust. This means that the people who can’t get away with not paying their taxes will be squeezed half-to-death by job losses, inflation, increased indirect taxation and battered to bits by one or another austerity measure.
As we slide further into recession and unemployment rises inexorably, our multinational corporations react. They duck, dive and cut so successfully that they can't help making record profits. Yet tax revenues (are set to) decrease, à la Facebook, Vodafone, Google et al, and none of the profits will be used to reduce trade deficits or stave off recession. Ergo, our multinational corporations will not contribute one iota to the difficulties that we and our favourite countries are set to encounter.
The price for our apathy and our pathetic faith in Free Market Capitalism is going to have to be paid by us, and not by them, in full.
Personally, I’d like to not only see some of the fat cats jump from tall buildings, but as they flail away I’d press the toy button inside my soul and shout, ‘That was easy!’
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