If this is the case then, in some senses, it is no different to the vast political and banking elite who increasingly see themselves as stateless and detached from wider society.
Think of the guy at Lehman who had his own personal lift, or our own Minister Howlin who has his own personal toilet.
The traders and hedge funders who minimise their tax or are paid through complex schemes involving trusts, offshore companies or the like. The developers who looked farther afield once they were done plundering Ireland while stashing as many of their assets as they could hidden in offshore trusts because they knew the game was up.
The MEPs who earn €400k a year when expenses and allowances are included, who can clock in in Brussels
John O'Donoghue with his expenses, the Fianna Failers who got the government jet to pick them up or drop them at the airport nearest to their constituency, Fidelma Healy-Eames.Michael Lowry and Denis O’Brien. James Reilly. Mick Wallace. Charlie Haughey. David Drumm. Michael Fingleton. Phil Hogan. The list goes on and on.
The professionals and the civil servants in government departments and the advisers and the accountants and the auditors who see it fit to plunder a bankrupt and failing state for overbloated six figure salaries and seven-figure gold-plated lottery win pensions.
The increasingly irrelevant and powerless UN that burns through untold millions every day spent on bureaucracy and expenses.
Hundreds of millions of people across the globe are suffering the consequences of the recklessness of, let's be honest, how many people? A few hundred maybe - right at the very top?
And we are powerless to do very much about it. It can’t go on like this. Yet it goes on.
In my opinion, the human condition dictates that, in one sense, if you make enough journeys by plane or travel more and more by private jet, you stop seeing the world as a world of nation states. All countries begin to merge into one entity and the world becomes smaller.
Not to make excuses for them, but it's just an observation that may be relevant in some way.
But for the vast majority of people, their daily lives are not like that and so I'd argue that they don't see the world that way.
The nation state is becoming more of an idea than a reality. It is becoming a mirage within a vacuum.
The danger that Europe will implode on itself increases by the day while the EU's democratic legitimacy and that of many of its states decreases at the same rate or even faster.
As for Quinn, as others have said, credit to him for providing employment for 7,000 people although I'd be very surprised if he got there without cutting the odd corner.
But his greed to get his hands on Anglo in the belief that he would make even more money from owning it was his undoing and the rest is history.
posted by John Reynolds at 4:23 a.m.
0 comments
