The British are a more citizen friendly enviroment at least as far as their overall welfare is concerned. They have established radical ideas such as health care as a right and not just a privilege for the wealthy. One of the cultural memes of this nation is the tale of Robin Hood one that stole from the rich to feed the poor. There is limited information about the origin of this tale but there are some historical collieries that place two possible individuals as the source.
More after the jump:
This possibly indicates that the legend as we have it already derives from two separate sources, probably two separate 'Robin Hoods'. The Scottish historian John Major, writing in 1521, maintained that Robin Hood was active in 1193-4, at the time of John's attempted coup against Richard, and it is possible to construct an argument which supports this.
On 25th July 1225, the royal justices held an assize at York. When the penalties were recorded in the Michaelmas roll of the Exchequer, they included 32s. 6d. for the chattels of one Robert Hod, fugitive. The account was carried forward into the following year, when he had acquired the nickname of 'Hobbehod', and indicates that he had been a tenant of the archbishopric of York.
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In Britain there is a popular movement to begin taxing transactions in an attempt to not only stabilize the market through decreasing the impetus to trade with abandon but to increase funding for needed social programs, The Robin Hood Tax
sounds complicated, but actually it isn’t. A tiny tax on bankers has the power to raise hundreds of billions every year – giving a vital boost to the NHS, our schools, and the fight against child poverty – as well as tackling poverty and climate change around the world.
There was a poll done and lo and behold it had some interesting anomalies. From naked capitalism:
Well-known British film director/producer/screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, for instance) and actor Bill Nightly started a campaign for a Tobin tax on banks, which they rebranded as a “Robin Hood tax”. In addition to securing the support from a variety of organizations, they launched a video and an internet poll to show that the public would favor the idea.
At 3:41 PM, “no” votes spiked suddenly, rising from 1400 to 6000 in less than twenty minutes, which. The site’s technical staff tightened security, investigated, and determined that nearly all the votes in the surge period came from two computers….and as the Times Online explains:
one privately-owned and hard to trace, the other, it is claimed, registered to a computer at Goldman Sachs…
Internet experts said that the act was sabotage, as the culprit would have to create a special computer program in order to register so many votes in such a short space of time. They also said it was possible, though unlikely, that the campaign had fallen victim to an elaborate hoax, as it is possible to mask the true IP address and make it seem as though a hacker came from elsewhere.
Now who would think Goldman Sachs would do anything underhanded like that? They always put the people first. And they never employ shady employees, right?
These pillars of the community would be willing to spread the wealth of course.
And any impropriety will surely be honestly investigated.
More than 1,700 came from a Goldman-registered server, with the rest from what appeared to be a personal address. It was unclear whether the stunt involved an individual or a number of people. Goldman said: “We have just received this information, and we are investigating the matter fully.”