Bankers’ glove puppet Osborne humiliated – but we pay

Posh boy bankers’ whore Osborne has just spent a pile of our money – nobody knows how much, but probably a few million – trying to overturn an EU law limiting bankers’ bonuses. Yup, of all the EU laws the Tories could have challenged, they chose one that offended their bosses in banking. So let me just remind you of the scale of the heist pulled off by our bankers.

The first stage of the financial crisis was US bank Lehman Brothers’ collapse. The boss of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, picked up around $200m running and ruining the bank. Then on leaving, quickly transferred his $13m Florida mansion into his wife’s name for just $100 so that Lehman’s furious shareholders couldn’t get hold of it by suing him.

Next up (or rather down) was US bank Merrill Lynch. Its boss, Stan O’Neal, reportedly got paid $161m for destroying it. Then the new boss, John Thain, a former Goldman Sachs banker said to have earned about $300m from Goldman Sachs’s flotation, authorised $4bn in bonuses while Merrill was receiving $10bn of US taxpayers’ money and just before he sold the smoking ruins of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America.

In fact, in the Armaggeddon year of 2007-08, the top five US banks paid record bonuses of $38bn, up from $36bn the previous year.

As far as I know, not a single banker has been prosecuted in the US and not a single banker has had the proceeds of their crimes confiscated. The term ‘bank robbery’ used to refer to ordinary criminals robbing banks. Now it means banking criminals robbing ordinary people.

Here in the UK, we’ll probably ‘only’ pay around £100bn – almost the total budget of the NHS (£110bn) – bailing out our banks and we’re still only beginning to find out the massive scale of fraud, manipulation, tax evasion and mis-selling which has lost us ordinary suckers probably over another £100bn.

The worst example of (IMHO) blatant fraud was when Sir Tom McKillop and Fred Goodwin’s RBS raised billions from their stupid shareholders so they could satisfy their delusions of grandeur by buying Dutch bank ABN Amro. Here’s what Fred wrote for shareholders just a few months before the collapse of RBS – the biggest bankruptcy in British history: “last year also saw us benefit from our focus on credit quality and risk management”. This ludicrous claim was backed up by farcical Sir Tom: “we have witnessed the benefits of the Group’s longstanding focus on credit quality”. Then a few months later, our rulers threw £45bn of our money into the stinking bankrupt cesspit of greed and incompetence that multimillionaires McKillop and Goodwin had created.

So, what does our Government do? Prosecute a few bankers? Nope. Confiscate their assets? Nope. Instead Osborne and Cameron throw large amounts of our money at expensive lawyers to try to allow their banker friends to continue to fleece us.

Truly in human history never has so much been stolen so brazenly from so many by such a bunch of greedy, hypocritical, lying, corrupt, gloating, self-satisfied scum.