‘Barclays has been accused of trying to bury news that it paid its top bankers an “extraordinarily greedy” £39.5m in bonuses by sneaking out the pay details when most of the City was distracted by the budget.

The bank, which promised it was “changing” after being fined £290m last year for its role in the Libor-rigging scandal, gave £17.6m worth of shares to Rich Ricci, the head of its investment banking division. Ricci, who owns 11 horses that raced at the Cheltenham Festival last week including one named Fatcatinthehat, immediately cashed in all of the shares.

The bonus will swell his pay packet so much that means the taxman will collect £9.3m from his next payslip. However, budget day tax changes including the government’s decision to scrap the 50p top rate will result in Ricci taking home an extra £27,149 from his basic salary of £700,000 from next month.

Ricci’s bonus is worth 656 times the average UK salary, but Wednesday’s payday was dwarfed by the £44m in pay and bonuses he collected in 2010.

Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins, who last month called for a new era of restrained bankers’ bonuses, was awarded 1.8m shares worth £5.3m. He cashed in more than half, realising enough money to pay tax on the bonus. A further seven top bankers shared the remaining £16.7m.

The bonuses, which were branded a “staggering reward for failure”, come a month after Barclays said Ricci and Jenkins would not be collecting an annual bonus this year because of the Libor scandal.’

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‘UK Chancellor George Osborne took today waved a red box full of broken promises at the country’s 99%.   Here are some key points of the budget and the litany of failures to date which have made the rich richer by making the poor poorer.

Cleaning up the Mess Left by Labour

There was a mess left by Labour; but it wasn’t too many nurses and teachers, decent pensions and pay for public sector workers or a welfare state that took care of those in need.  The mess left by Labour was a deregulated financial market, a bloated banking sector, an unprecedented erosion of our civil liberties, illegal foreign invasions, and costly privatisations of our public services to profit making private providers.

This was the mess that led us to a crisis of the banking sector, and an over indebted public purse which snapped with the Bankers Bailout.  The Coalition government has not put a single piece of legislation, regulation or measure in place to alleviate those concerns.  Quite the opposite, they have followed the trend at a gallop.  This is what makes this not simply a financial crisis, but a crisis of democracy.  We have no advocates.

The Impact of the Financial Crisis

In the bailout of 2008/9, the UK government had to guarantee funding to the banking sector, of 101% of GDP.  That is, the UK diverted over £2trn of tax payer money from public expenditure, to a handful of banks.

This is equivalent to almost 3 times its entire annual budget;  twenty years of NHS spending (£106.7bn a year); forty years of education spending (£48.2bn); or five hundred years of job seekers allowance (£4.9bn a year).

The world’s second richest man, Warren Buffet warned us in 2003 that the derivatives market was ‘devised by madmen’ and a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and we have only seen the first blast in this debt apocalypse.

The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode.’

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‘The July 7, 2005, London Bombings have been invoked as a justification for Theresa May’s Communications Data Bill, which is being critiqued by MPs over the next couple of weeks. If implemented Britain will be the most snooped on democracy in the world.

“The people who say they’re against this bill need to look victims of serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences in the eye and tell them why they’re not prepared to give the police the powers they need to protect the public,” retorted the Home Secretary.

May suggested the new legislation is needed to prevent another 7/7 style terrorist attack or the shootings of two female police officers in Manchester in September. She did not however explain how it would do so.

The controversial new laws will allow authorities access to every telephone, mobile and Internet communication made in the UK. The content of the communications will not be stored, rather logs will be kept of who the communication was between, its duration and when & where it took place. While the Bill’s advocates claim it will not widen the police’s traditional scope of surveillance, nor give them detailed personal information, civil liberties organizations are not convinced due to the nature of Internet communications.

The Open Rights Group states:
“The data generated through our use of services like Facebook, Google and Twitter tells people far more about us than [traditional] phone records – it reveals our our tastes, preferences and social ‘map’. Furthermore, the distinction between ‘content’ and ‘communications data’ does not, in practice, easily hold. So to claim this is simply an ‘update’ of existing powers is not accurate.”

The Home Office will require Internet Service Providers to store the web-pages customers visit for 12 months; Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites included. The use of Skype and online gaming will also be tracked in the name of national security.

Invoking the 7/7 bombings as a pretext for the snooping is a cheap but not surprising tactic. Considering the Government have not proven in a court of law who carried out the attacks and by what method, quite how the new system would have prevented the explosions like May claims is unclear.

If we assume the alleged bombers are guilty, at least two of them, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were on MI5′s radar months before the attacks. They were photographed, bugged, tailed, Khan was linked to a vehicle and both were noted as trustees of an Islamic book shop. They were also surrounded by a group of probable intelligence assets that may have been passing information to the security services. All of this was accomplished under current surveillance laws.

In that sense the fault was not with the legal remit of surveillance, but the state’s criminally negligent or deliberate inability to interpret and cross reference the data they obtained.

The Home Office have assured us that the new databases won’t be monitored, only accessed when a crime is suspected. If that’s the case, as shown with 7/7 the law already permits the use of wiretapping and surveillance, as it does with email monitoring too. Recent trials also show us that the police already monitor social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Although Nick Clegg apparently wants to veto the bill, he doesn’t have a particularly good track record when it comes to promises or standing up to the Conservatives.’

Draft Communications Data Bill

‘Efforts to portray every nearly single benefit claimant as “on the fiddle” stepped up a gear at the weekend with the DWP briefing the media with tabloid-ready “bizarre benefit fraud excuses”, including:

• “We don’t live together – he just comes each morning to fill his flask.”
• “I was carrying the ladders for therapy.”
• “I never noticed my wife going to work.”
• “He lives in a caravan in the drive.”
• “It was my twin.”
• “I didn’t know wife was at work – I’m in the shed.”

After George Osborne was accused by churches of exaggerating the scale of benefit fraud in October 2010, this latest move has led to renewed charges from charities that the government is “using unusual fraud cases to support changes which could have a serious and negative impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of disabled people.”

Perhaps Iain Duncan Smith and his DWP spinners would benefit from some context. The £1.1 billion cost of fraud (a modest 0.7% of the total benefits spend) averages out to £59 across 18.5 million claimants.* In contrast, MPs were ordered to pay back £1.2 million in the wake of Thomas Legg’s inquiry into expenses, an average of £1,858 for the 646 members of the Commons.

Looking for offenders to castigate in press releases, the DWP ministerial team need not look beyond their own ranks: Chris Grayling claimed thousands to renovate a flat in central London – bought with a mortgage funded at taxpayers’ expense – even though his constituency home is less than 17 miles from the House of Commons; Steve Webb claimed for £8,400 in stamp duty after he sold his Westminster flat and bought another just 100 yards down the road.

Can the “quiet man” please turn down the volume on these smears?’

(Source: )

”Only the little people pay taxes,” the late American corporate tax evader Leona Helmsley famously declared. That’s certainly the spirit of David Cameron and George Osborne’s Britain. Five years into the crisis, the British economy has just edged out of its third downturn, but construction is still reeling from government cuts and most people’s living standards are falling.

Those at the sharp end are being hit hardest: from cuts to disability and housing benefits, tax credits and the educational maintenance allowance and now increases in council tax while NHS waiting lists are lengthening, food banks are mushrooming across the country and charities report sharp increases in the number of children going hungry. All this to pay for the collapse in corporate investment and tax revenues triggered by the greatest crash since the 30s.

At the other end of the spectrum though, things are going swimmingly. The richest 1,000 people in Britain have seen their wealth increase by £155bn since the crisis began – more than enough to pay off the whole government deficit of £119bn at a stroke. Anyone earning over £1m a year can look forward to a £42,000 tax cut in the spring, while firms have been rewarded with a 2% cut in corporation tax to 24%.

Not that many of them pay anything like that, even now. The scale of tax avoidance by high-street brand multinationals has now become clear, in no small part thanks to campaigning groups such as UK Uncut. Asda, Google, Apple, eBay, Ikea, Starbucks, Vodafone: all pay minimal tax on massive UK revenues, mostly by diverting profits earned in Britain to their parent companies, or lower tax jurisdictions via royalty and service payments or transfer pricing.’

‘A British citizen whose family believe he is being tortured by American secret agents has suddenly had all his rights as a UK national removed by the Home Secretary.

Mahdi Hashi – who MI5 once tried to recruit as a spy – has been deprived of his British passport, denied access to consular assistance and may never return to Britain. He is thought to be being held in an African prison.

Mohamed and Kaltun Hashi, the parents of the 23-year-old care worker from Camden, North London, became concerned for his safety after being tipped off that in the summer he had been taken to a prison in the African state of Djibouti while visiting neighbouring Somalia.

‘Prisoner: Mahdi Hashi is believed to be held at a US camp in Djibouti after he had his rights as a UK national removed by the Home Secretary Theresa May’

The information was passed on by another prisoner who said Mr Hashi claimed he had been ‘mistreated’ and was being interrogated by men working for America.

The Mail on Sunday has established that while Mr Hashi was out of Britain, Home Secretary Theresa May used a little-known power – which does not require a court order – to deprive him of all his rights as a British national.’

(Source: Daily Mail)

‘NICK HOPKINS’ Guardian article gives further proof of our leap into an opaque drone age.

It is not that all drones are bad drones; rather, decisions are being made that will ripple through the generations.

Just as the secret Manhattan Project ushered in the nuclear age, so the military and their corporate colleagues are pressing forward with policies with very little public disclosure or debate.

Consider David Cameron’s claim that British drones have killed 124 insurgents in Afghanistan; Hopkins reports that “defence officials said they had no idea where the prime minister got the figure and denied it was from the MoD”. Does this mean that our kill-numbers are being conjured up by politicians?

There are many more questions that beg for an answer. One is the degree to which drones are to be used simply as a weapon of terror. In British Air and Space Power Doctrine, the MoD informs us that “air power is not employed solely for kinetic purposes. The psychological impact of air power from the presence of a UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] … has often proved to be extremely effective in exerting influence, especially when linked to information operations.”

In plain English, the circling drones are used to terrify the citizens below into providing intelligence. Did not the Geneva conventions forbid such a war against civilians? Did we forget so soon how the material frightened out of people in the “war on terror” proved so suspect?

The most harrowing histories I heard in my recent trip to the Pakistan border regions involved the fear factor – 800,000 concededly innocent men, women and children in the region terrified by the sounds of drones overhead, 24 hours a day. To what extent is this to be an intentional policy? Is it regulated? Or even debated?’