Maggie Thatcher dead of stroke....

[Kenneth Kapel]

At another, non political site, the Thatcher thread has a warning from the Administrators that any politcal comments will be deleted. hock:hock: She was a true conservative, a true defender of Mammon. A great many liberals, or so called liberals, also fit this description.

[Dawn Meredith]

Drives me nuts that I can't open these. I used to be able to. Now if I try to download this version of adobe I get a virus. Erick too.
No clue.

Dawn

[Magda Hassan]

• Lauren Turner
  
• From:AAP
  
• April 09, 2013 4:19AM
  
• 
  
• 
  
• Thatcher has blazed into national prominence almost literally from out of nowhere".The correspondence, coincidentally published hours before the former prime minister's death was announced, contained background information ahead of her planned meeting with US officials shortly after she became leader of the Conservative party.US diplomats believed Margaret Thatcher to be "crisp and a trifle patronising", according to a 1975 briefing released on whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.
  

US diplomats believed Margaret Thatcher to be "crisp and a trifle patronising", according to a 1975 briefing released on whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The correspondence, coincidentally published hours before the former prime minister's death was announced, contained background information ahead of her planned meeting with US officials shortly after she became leader of the Conservative party.

It described her as "Britain's newest political star" and noted that "Margaret Thatcher has blazed into national prominence almost literally from out of nowhere".The correspondence, coincidentally published hours before the former prime minister's death was announced, contained background information ahead of her planned meeting with US officials shortly after she became leader of the Conservative party.

The memo, headed Margaret Thatcher - Some first impressions, added: "When she first indicated that she intended to stand against Ted Heath for leadership of the Conservative party, few took her challenge seriously and fewer still believed it would succeed."
Predicting that she will be a "strong leader", the confidential briefing explained: "There is general agreement among friends and critics alike that she is an effective and forceful parliamentary performer.
"She has a quick, if not profound, mind, and works hard to master the most complicated brief. She fights her corner with skill and toughness, but can be flexible when pressed.
"In dealing with the media or with subordinates, she tends to be crisp and a trifle patronising. With colleagues, she is honest and straight-forward, if not excessively considerate of their vanities.
"Civil servants at the Ministry of Education found her autocratic. She has the courage of her convictions, and once she has reached a decision to act, is unlikely to be deflected by any but the most persuasive arguments. Self-confident and self-disciplined, she gives every promise of being a strong leader."
The memo, dated February 16, 1975, predicted she may not be popular with the working classes.
"Her immaculate grooming, her imperious manner, her conventional and somewhat forced charm, and above all her plummy voice stamp her as the quintessential suburban matron, and frightfully English to boot," it said..
"None of this goes down well with the working class of England (one-third of which used to vote Conservative), to say nothing of all classes in the Celtic fringes of this island."
It advises she should "humanise her public image and broaden the base of her party's appeal".
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breakin...6615364771

[Peter Lemkin]

Judge her by her 'calls' on others:

Mandella and the ANC - terrorists
R. Raygun - the best thing since sliced bread and political ally
Dictator Gen. A. Pinochet - a close friend and Saviour of Chile
...and one could go on and on
...she single handedly destroyed the unions and plight of working people in the UK.
...bye bye Maggie.

And the BBC is calling her the greatest PM and politician since Churchill. angryfire 'Greatest' in what way....?! Greatest disaster, perhaps.

[David Guyatt]

She'll never really die you know. The undead never do.

[Adele Edisen]

Margaret Thatcher's Criminal Legacy
By Finian Cunningham

The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association
with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e34556.htm [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001cECZrqNNq...u4vqSlRE=]

Margaret Thatcher's Criminal Legacy
By Finian Cunningham

April 09, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - Hours after the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the history books are being re-written and the beatification of the Iron Lady is well underway.

Current British premier David Cameron praised Lady Thatcher for having "saved Britain" and for making the has-been colonial power "great again".

Tributes poured forth from French and German leaders, Francoise Hollande and Angela Merkel, while US President Barack Obama said America had lost a "special friend".

Former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev also lamented the loss of "an historic world figure". Polish ex-president Lech Walesa hailed Margaret Thatcher for having brought down the Soviet Union and Communism.

Such fulsome praise may be expected coming from so many war criminals. But it is instructive of how history is written by the victors and criminals in high office. Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel should all be arraigned and prosecuted for war crimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Mali, among other places. Kissinger has long evaded justice for over four decades for his role in the US genocide in Southeast Asia during the so-called Vietnam War in which over three million people were obliterated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The British state is to give Thatcher, who died this week aged 87, a full military-honours funeral. The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times.

So, here is a people's history of Thatcher's legacy.

She will be remembered for colluding with the most reactionary elements of Rupert Murdoch's squalid media empire to launch a war over the Malvinas Islands in 1982, a war that caused hundreds of lives and involved the gratuitous sinking of an Argentine warship, the Belgrano,
by a British submarine.

By declaring war, rather than conducting political negotiations with Argentina over Britain's ongoing colonial possession of the Malvinas, Thatcher salvaged her waning public support in Britain, and the bloodletting helped catapult her into a second term of office in Downing Street. Her political "greatness" that so many Western leaders now eulogize was therefore paid in part by the lives of Argentine and British soldiers, and by bequeathing an ongoing source of conflict in the South Atlantic.

It wasn't just foreigners that Thatcher declared war on. Armed with her snake-oil economic policies of privatisation, deregulation, unleashing finance capitalism, pump-priming the rich with tax awards subsidised by the ordinary working population, Thatcher declared war on the British people themselves. She famously proclaimed that "there was no such thing as society" and went on to oversee an explosion in the gap between rich and poor and the demolition of social conditions in Britain. That legacy has been amplified by both successive Conservative and Labour governments and is central to today's social meltdown in Britain - more than two decades after Thatcher resigned. Laughably, David Cameron, a protégé of Thatcher, claims that she "saved" Britain. The truth is Thatcher accelerated the sinking of British capitalism and society at large. What she ordered for the Belgrano has in a very real way come to be realised for British society at large.

During her second term of office in the mid-1980s, the Iron Lady declared war on the "enemy within". She was referring to Britain's strongly unionised coal-mining industry. Imagine declaring war on your own population. That is a measure of her pathological intolerance towards others who did not happen to share her obnoxious ideological views - ideological views that have since become exposed as intellectually and morally bankrupt.

For over a year around 1984, her Orwellian mindset and policies starved mining communities in the North of England into submission. Her use of paramilitary police violence also broke the resolve and legitimate rights of these communities. Miners' leader Arthur Scargill would later be vindicated in the eyes of ordinary people, if not in the eyes of the mainstream media. Britain's coalmines were systematically shut down, thousands of workers would be made unemployed, and entire communities were thrown on the social scrap heap. All this violence and misery was the price for Thatcher's ideological war against working people and their political rights.

The class war that Thatcher unleashed in Britain is still raging. The rich have become richer, the poor decidedly more numerous and poorer. The decimation of workers' rights and the unfettered power given to finance capital were hallmarks of Thatcher's legacy and are to this day hallmarks of Britain's current social decay. But that destructive legacy goes well beyond Britain. The rightwing nihilistic capitalism that Thatcher gave vent to was and became a zeitgeist for North America, Europe and globally. The economic malaise that is currently plaguing the world can be traced directly to such ideologues as Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan.

A final word on Thatcher's real legacy, as opposed to the fakery from fellow war criminals, is her role in Ireland's conflict. Her epitaph of "Iron Lady" is often said with admiration or even sneaking regard for her supposed virtues of determination and strength. In truth, her "iron" character was simply malevolent, as can be seen from her policies towards the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. In 1981, 10 Irish republican prisoners, led by a young Belfast man by the name of Bobby Sands, died from hunger strikes. The men died after more than 50 days of refusing prison food because they were demanding to be treated as political prisoners, not as criminals. Thatcher refused to yield to their demands, denouncing them as criminals and callously claiming that they "took their own lives". No matter that Bobby Sands had been elected by tens of thousands of Irish voters to the British House of Parliament during his hunger strike. He was merely a criminal who deserved to die, according to the cold, unfeeling Thatcher.

As a result of Thatcher's intransigence to negotiate Irish rights, the violence in the North of Ireland would escalate over the next decade, claiming thousands of lives. As with Las Malvinas dispute with Argentina, Thatcher deliberately took the military option and, with that, countless lives, rather than engage in reasoned, mutual dialogue. Her arrogance and obduracy blinded her to any other possibility.

As the violence gyrated in Ireland, Thatcher would also embrace the criminal policy of colluding with pro-British death squads. Armed,funded and directed by British intelligence, these death squads would in subsequent years kill hundreds of innocent people - with the knowledge and tacit approval of Lady Thatcher. It was a policy of British state terrorism in action, sanctioned by Thatcher. One of those victims was Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane, who was murdered in February 1989. He was shot 12 times in the head in front of his wife and children by a British death squad, after the killers smashed their way into the Finucane home on a Sunday afternoon.

Thus whether in her dealings with Las Malvinas row with Argentina, the British working people or Irish republicans, Margaret Thatcher was an intolerant militarist who always resorted to demagoguery, violence and starvation to get her political way. She was a criminal fascist who is
now proclaimed to be a national hero.

Reports this week say that Thatcher died with Alzheimer's, the brain-degenerating disease in which the patient loses their faculty for memory. Western leaders, it seems, would also like to erase public memory of Thatcher's criminal legacy.

Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio.

Adele

[Magda Hassan]

Margaret Thatcher tax shock: £12m mansion where she saw out her days registered in TAX HAVEN

• Nov 30, 2013 00:00
  
• By Nick Sommerlad
  
• 42 Comments
  

An expert said: "It's strange that the most British of prime ministers enjoyed the benefits of a property registered in the British Virgin Islands"

This lady's not for taxing: Questions raised over Thatcher fortune
Flag-waving former PM Margaret Thatcher may have avoided millions in inheritance tax by keeping a chunk of her fortune offshore.
A copy of Tory Baroness Thatcher's will shows she left a £4.7million estate to be shared among family members.
But the £12million Central London mansion where the Iron Lady spent the last years of her life is owned by an anonymous trust registered in the British Virgin Islands a *notorious tax haven.
Through this arrangement she could have avoided up to £5million in inheritance tax the 40% that would have been due if it was owned by a UK individual.
In the will, made in 1997, Thatcher intended to leave £1million to husband Sir Denis, but he died in 2003 10 years before her. Instead, her estate is split between her family, with a third each going to her twins Mark and Carol, and the remaining third shared by her grandchildren when they reach 25.
Expert Richard Murphy, of Tax Research, said: "It has always been strange that Margaret Thatcher, that most British of prime ministers, enjoyed the benefits of a property registered in the British Virgin Islands.
"It is possible that Denis Thatcher set up the trust or other offshore arrangements in order to save tax."
Ex-Tory leader Thatcher died in April aged 87 following a stroke and had her *ceremonial funeral funded by the taxpayer.
Papers linked to her will state "the gross value of the estate in the United Kingdom amounts to £4,768,795". But it does not appear to include the Belgravia mansion, valued at £12.4million by Zoopla.
The house was bought in 1991 by Bakeland Property Limited, an anonymous offshore trust in Jersey, on a 64-year lease. It was sub-leased to a firm of the same name based in the British Virgin Islands.
It is not known who the beneficiaries of Bakeland are. If Thatcher had owned shares in it when she died, inheritance tax would have been due on their value.
Lawyer Andrew Kidd, of Clintons, said: "The shares in the BVI company would be included in Baroness Thatcher's estate, and subject to UK inheritance tax, in so far as they were in her ownership."
Thatcher's financial advisors refused in 2002 to explain why she did not appear to own her own house, and stated: "No one's going to tell you about that."

[David Guyatt]

Nothing new to see here folk, move along.

All pols say one thing, but always, without exception, fill their pockets in the shadows.

The real question here, is where did she get that money, having gone straight from a Prime Minister's salary (not abundant, to say the least) to retirement in 1990, followed by a spell in the Lords which was was truncated following a series of small strokes in 2002 ---- and having no money to speak of before she became PM?

As her chauffeur said incredulously, when he saw the the Meryl Strrep movie about her hobbling around her supposed home, portrayed as a fairly spartan flat, she was a "multi-millionaire".

Answers to this curious conundrum on a postcard addressed to:

The Al-Yamamah Arms Deal Kick-Back Fund for Poor Pols and Other Needy Grifters,
The BAE-Saudi-Prince Bandar bin Sultan Edifice of Righteousness Centre
No Name Private Bank
Zurich
Switzerland.

And while you're at it, you might also include a paragraph of your thoughts why the Thatcher loving Tony Blair, when still Prime Minister stepped in to halt an investigation in to the corruption surrounding this BAE-Saudi arms deal?