Food for thought 3

Capitalists always take the prize for audacity. As Ontario's telecommunications manufacturing firm, Nortel, divvies up its assets, CEO Mike Zafirovski is requesting $12.3 million, while employees on long term disability are ignored and left to expect to exist on $10 000 per annum.

Oil tycoon, T. Boone Pickens told US Congress that US energy companies are entitled to some of Iraq's crude, because of the large numbers of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the large amount of taxpayers' money spent there.

At a conference in London, Goldman Sachs international advisor, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for exec's compensation and benefits for the first nine months of the year (up 46% from a year earlier), Griffiths told us not to worry, "We have to tolerate inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all." John Ayers