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My, my, the rich are under attack everywhere, and I thank God the Panama Papers didn’t include the name of the poor little Greek boy. Legality being my middle name, I took legal advice and stayed away from offshore trusts and shell companies as soon as my daddy died. No Mossack Fonseca, they advised, everything’s gotta be on the up-and-up. Mind you, it beats being on a Panama list with all the hacks poring over my not-so-hard-earned moola.

What bothers me is how the word rich has now become a pejorative term, and people use it as an insult, like “that rich fat bastard over there,” as an ex-friend recently described a very nice businessman who was minding his own business. Sure, there are plenty of rich men and women around who behave horribly, and their children can be even worse, but they are in the minority, among the Hiltons and Kardashians and Aby Rosens of this world. Go out in the great Midwest, Southwest, and Northwest, not to mention the Northeast of America, and you will find thousands of rich, patriotic, God-fearing citizens who would run a mile to get away from a mention in a gossip column. Ditto in Europe, in la France profonde or in the shires of the English countryside. Like scum, the rich one reads about in the columns surface in places like New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and London.

Where wealth is concerned, we’re now back in the early ’70s, before Maggie Thatcher came into the picture and handbagged the envious class warriors to oblivion. Corbyn and his motley crew—this Tom Watson character should be tarred and feathered for attacking people who cannot defend themselves, always under the protection of parliamentary immunity—hate anybody who’s got a hint of wealth, forgetting the fact that no matter how hard we try, we can’t all sink to Watson’s and Corbyn’s level. That some can rig the system to hide their wealth is unjust, but so is the fact that journalists at The Guardian can spout about unfairness and the rich while the trust that feeds them hides its wealth down in the sunny Caribbean. Let’s face it, taxation is a form of state theft, so the smart ones will always find ways to ensure the state steals the minimum from them. But linking Dave Cameron with tax cheats is Orwellian, the truth being a lie and vice versa. This is how desperate the class warriors are; the next thing they might do is audit Jeremy Clarke’s tax returns for associating with yours truly and having spent a night in Tim Hoare’s house.
               
Needless to say, the unelected and incompetent crooks who run the EU are wading into the fight against international tax dodging. But not to worry; if they handle it as competently as they did the migrant crisis, Amazon and Google will probably get a rebate for the taxes they’ve avoided until now. The double standards reek of hypocrisy. Here you have Facebook hosting sprawling online bazaars offering antiaircraft weapons and even guided missiles, and the hacks are going on about Uncle Vlad Putin, whose name didn’t even appear on the Panama list. The FBI was frantically trying to gain access to the iPhone of those murderers in the San Bernardino massacre, and Apple head Tim Cook refused to play ball in case those the killers had been talking to had their names revealed. It might look bad for the company name. It makes you wish that someone would shoot Cook up the ass, but such just things never happen, do they?