Your view: Readers have their say

Sonny Bill Williams with the Plunket logo replacing the BNZ bank logo.

All Blacks and 'stolen money'

Who should sponsor sport?

With our modern diet of alphabet soup, we are expected to recognise abbreviations such as HSBC, PwC, KFC, ATM, without having to consult Wikipedia.

In NZ (you must know what that stands for) some Kiwis are even known by their initials.

One sportsman can even command the headlines with just SBW - recognised even by people like myself who do not know the difference between rugby union and rugby league.

But Sonny Bill Williams made news recently - not just for objecting to the name of a bank being emblazoned on his jersey but also against that of one the world's biggest insurance companies, AIG (the American Insurance Group), sponsors of the All Blacks.

Sonny became a Moslem a few years ago, hence his objection to "riba" (interest being charged on loans). Not that this view belongs exclusively to Islam - many Christians and Jews abhor usury.

By far the bulk of the world's money supply is private bank credit created out of nothing yet rented out at compounding interest. Even MSGs (Monetary Sovereign Governments) like our own are expected to borrow on the capital markets to finance the public sector - our own government allocating $16 million per day for debt-funding.

The 10th anniversary of Wall Street's hedge fund collapse is an appropriate time to question the legitimacy of NZ Rugby Union's contract with AIG, given the background to that corporation's survival of the great global financial meltdown.

To share extracts from British writer Will Hutton's 2010 book Them and Us: Why we need a fairer society:

By mid-2007 "it became clearer that the likes of Citigroup, Bank of America, RBS [Royal Bank of Scotland] and the insurance company AIG could not be allowed to collapse. These massive, complex financial institutions had become too big to fail ...

"In 2008, Merrill Lynch lost $27 billion and survived courtesy of a $6.8 billion injection of US government money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) even while being taken over by the Bank of America (which itself received $5.2 billion).

"Yet the thundering hoards retained a bonus pool of $3.6 billion paying out more than $1 million to each of 700 employees that year.

"Even more amazingly, the 377 employees in AIG's financial products unit who had gambled on credit default swaps to bankrupt the United States largest insurance company received $220 million in bonuses - $500,000 per employee.

"AIG survived only because of an $80 billion injection of capital by the US taxpayer via the TARP.

"Perhaps even more remarkable, this culture has survived the crash and the bailouts ... Goldman [Sachs] needed to turn itself into a bank to gain access to he Federal Reserve's discount window and secure vital liquidity [receiving] $5 billion of otherwise valueless credit default swaps owed to it by AIG because the latter was bailed out ... and sold $21 billion of bonds to raise funds guaranteed by the US government."

The question must be asked: Are our honoured and adulated All Blacks being funded with stolen money i.e. stolen from the US taxpayer?

HEATHER MARION SMITH, Gisborne

No justice

Done and dusted. Did we witness expediency and theatricals at our courthouse on Monday and Tuesday of this week?

Our hopes that our legal system would ensure that those who enact our laws must also abide by them were shattered.

Those who ride on our backs as we pay their wages and lifelong perks - some say the highest paid beneficiaries in the land.

When Chester Borrows drove his car into us I remarked to Sgt Hei Hei: "A crime was just committed here." His reply: "You stood in front of him."

I pointed out: standing on footpath - legal; driving into folk - illegal, suggesting if Borrows was covered in tattoos, wore a gang patch and was brown, they would have chased, breath-tested and charged him.

Did the police really have their hearts in this prosecution?

Why the lenient charge and not adding leaving the scene of an accident?

What caused police witnesses lack of observation skills and memory lapses around much of this accident?

Chester, we have never indulged in illegal activities, damaged your property or destroyed your signs.

So when you and your followers celebrated in the Rutland, you did so in error. This was not a victory, but another nail in the coffin of our judicial system.

- Edited

DENISE LOCKETT, Whanganui

Logic challenged

David Gash writes an interesting letter ("Evolution's flaws", May 2) in his part-rebuttal to one by Mandy Donne-Lee.

Here are my opinions which I claim are based on evidence.

I believe in God, though He may be pondering on my future ...

David, your inference that an eye couldn't evolve a bit at a time is logically seen as a possible false claim.

Any animal sensor which evolved to discriminate only between light and shadow to begin with, would be of immense evolutionary advantage among a hitherto blind set of life forms. Changing light levels alone is an absolute warning something is moving that can't be felt yet.

That first "proto-eyed" creature has the advantage of preparedness - decide to eat it or run from it. Those genes would thrive through generations.

Besides, the eye that Christians claim arrived "suddenly perfect", designed by God, is a somewhat faulty design. I hesitate to insult my maker by telling Him my brain can see faults in His handiwork. But I will tell readers, if asked here.

Another claim, that several genes must change at once for a species to evolve into another, and therefore it, supposedly, can't happen, is questionable. The known quality of pleiotropy allows one gene change to have several simultaneous effects. In practice, this allows greater evolutionary changes in a shorter geological time.

With great respect to David Gash, I term yet another claim specious: The one about how artificial gene changes in insects have resulted in inferior species that can't survive in nature.

It's a true claim per se. However, it was deliberately planned by innovative use of God-given human brains - release semi-sterile insects into the world and in a few generations there are vastly reduced disease-carrying insect populations because of their "nobbled" gene pool. Smart of us, eh?

I suspect I might have a spot of bother getting past the Pearly Gates. Logically, I don't see why, though ...

STAN HOOD, Whanganui