Thursday, September 25, 2008

US Snubs Brown To Deal With Their Economy

Brown's big talk of meeting "financial and government leaders", has fallen on deaf ears, as US politicians and finance chiefs snub him, to concentrate on the real task of digging themselves out of the hole of a looming economic meltdown. 

Instead, Brown is attending a UN summit on the issue of the "Millennium Development Goals" and attending a celebrity fund-raising dinner, as aides try to fix up a hurried meeting for tomorrow.

US treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, has already turned down a request to meet the prime minister. President Bush is due to address the nation on a $700 billion rescue plan and presidential hopefuls, McCain and Obama are to meet with Bush to hammer out a cross-party emergency bail-out package.

Brown, as chancellor and now prime minister, is directly responsible for the current economic mess in the UK, when he blindly followed the US lead, to allow greedy banks to make fat profits with little regulation. 

Meanwhile, as Brown struts around the UN stage, posing for celebrity snaps with his wife, people here are left wondering how the government is going to tackle the imminent threat of rampant inflation, looming unemployment and the nightmare of burgeoning debt.

The BBC's Nick Robinson observes: "The best Gordon Brown can hope for on this trip is a dialogue which produces an appetite for reform in the future."

Instead of empty gestures and more mosquito nets for Africa, Brown should stick to the issues which directly affect people back home and leave his pet project of a global dialogue for another day.

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