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Dec. 23, 2007 I was looking over the Guardian Observer newspaper the other day, and, after reading of the legal actions being taken against an employee of the Commonwealth and Foreign Office for leaking classified material , I came across an article dealing with the illegal contributions made by an industrialist to the labour government of Gordon Brown. The Guardian revealed 'that Labour officials had helped lawyers acting for the businessman Abrahams to draw up complex covenants allowing him to donate indirectly to the party. The arrangement was regarded as a loophole that allowed Abrahams to lawfully pay the money and remain unidentified'. What is particularly damming is the fact that 'Mendelsohn, the prime minister's chief fund raiser, became embroiled in the row after Abrahams released a letter requesting a meeting'. Initially there were accusations of funneling money from Israel which were then refuted.Abrahams position is that he went through the rigmarole in order to remain anonymous in order to prevent slurs regarding Jewish money and the Labour Party. What struck me was the amount; 650,000 UK pounds: just over one million $US. In the US (and even in Canada)this would not have made the news as any thing under 10 million is just so much water under the bridge. All of this is an example of the levels of morality pertaining in the new world and in the old. Wasn't the original point of immigrating to North America to escape the corruption of Europe? In the US senator Hillary can brush this kind of thing under the carpet by saying 'I am shocked'. In England it appears to be a weapon with which the Liberals and the Conservatives can use in order to tarnish the reputation of the present day Labour government. Oscar Wilde had it right while in America at a book signing or something. The news of Jesse James's assassinated was in all of the newspapers promoting him to issue one of his famous one liners: Americans always choose criminals as their hero's. Why do Americans so revere criminals. Is it that the early immigrants were largely from those given the option of either being hanged or deported to the colonies. It could be that the residue of all of those westerns instilled itself into American consciousness through some type of osmosis, but then again this couldn't have been so as in the heyday of the western the bad guys always lost. No need to go back so far when within recent memory the bad guy in the westerns has more often then not been portrayed as the good guy, fighting an evil system. Coming back to the political scandal in the UK and the two levels of morality. The US is a land of extremes. It is either hellishly hot or impossibly cold. Likewise the price of success and failure is diametrically opposed. To be successful in the US one is rich beyond the dreams of the the rest of the world. To be a failure gives one a standard of living pretty fair when compared to say Sri Lanaka -but abysmal when compared to those living a few blocks away.
With so much at stake is it a wonder that some
Americans are not adverse to risking the label of
criminal-and so fast to forgive those who deal under
the table.
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