Friday, December 18, 2009

Brown's Borrowing Binge

Borrowing Brown's binge knows no bounds, hitting a record high of an eye watering £20 billion last month. How much more will the struggling Supreme Leader borrow before being booted out of office?

UK public borrowing hit an all-time high of £20.3 billion for a single month in November, according to official figures. Voters are left numb by mind-boggling numbers.

All dutifully reported but tucked away in The Times and Telegraph. Dog bites man just isn't news.

The record £20.3 billion is more than was borrowed for the whole of 2002. The IMF reckons that's equivalent to the entire 2009 output of economies such as Costa Rica and Uruguay.

The gloomy figures also showed net debt reaching a record £844.5 billion in November. For the first time, public sector borrowing taking the UK’s net debt to 60 per cent of total economic output.

The borrowing figure, which is £4.9 billion higher than the same month last year, is the highest since the Office for National Statistics (ONS) began compiling records in 1993.

But something doesn't add up. As part of his pre-election pre-budget report, Dreadful Darling said that net debt currently stood at £798 billion, or 55.6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

But the ONS data showed that at the end of November, debt stood at £844.5 billion, which is 60.2 per cent of economic output.

The Orange Party feels a headache coming on. Brown's borrowing binge drives home the true impact of a recession depression far deeper than was spun to play the politics of false hope and optimism.

Just how the government plans to halve the UK's monstrous deficit within a promised four years in its re-election dream world, is anyone's guess.

Ominously a third of this spending was accounted for by the bill for a decade of government failure. Social benefits such as Jobseeker's Allowance at £16.2 billion, is the highest for at least eight years.

Only last week the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned that the chancellor could have to find an extra £2,400 for every family to restore the public finances over the life of two parliaments.

Well thanks a lot New Labour. What a great legacy to leave future generations after a miserable twelve years in office.

The fag-end government is bankrupting the nations with a mixture of incompetence and smoke and mirrors accounting after Borrowing Brown cooked the books.

Feral economics have taken hold. A rudderless ship of state is sinking fast, left to the mercy of a political leadership that knows the game is up.

Unprecedented debt, the pound down the pan, pensions plummeting. Banks sailing off into the sunset with a wad of funny money. Gold sold off at rock-bottom prices and a dole queue longer than Borrowing Brown's arm.

And there's still at least three months to go before the general election.

How much more will Brown borrow and saddle the country with debt, just to dig himself out of the economic mess of his own making and screw things up for the incoming government?

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Copenhagen Tragedy And Farce

World 'climate change' leaders living in a fantasy world are working hard to lay the blame on a man-made global warming myth, instead of tackling the real tragedy and cleaning up killer pollution and man-made greed. A failed Copenhagen summit is set to end in farce and tragedy.

Scaremongering tactics that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by a build up of man-made CO2 is a cool cop out. Throw into the mix billions spent on averting a 'global disaster' to line the pockets of the 'green' entrepreneurs. A recipe for opportunism and greed is a disaster waiting to happen.

Ripping out the heart of the rain forests and its people to produce cheap beef and palm oil for the West is the real tragedy. Forcing poor souls to choke on pollution from factories to satisfy the West's lust for cheap goods and live in the squalor of the detritus of pollution is the real scandal.

But hey, why tackle pollution and the destruction of rainforests when a ready made cute trick of man-made global warming is far more comforting - and cheaper.

World leaders and wannabes descended on the Copenhagen jamboree like a plague. For a few days the new Tinsel Town has been home to everybody who is anybody and the obligatory photo-op. All worshipping at the shrine of the oil dollar, celebrity and Al Gore.



Always with an eye on the chance, Obama, with popularity plummeting, has jumped on the celebrity global warming bandwagon with more false hopes and busted dreams. All a bit rich coming from the guy who picked up a Nobel peace prize with the warped logic declaring that 'war is the new peace'.

Here Borrowing Brown has latched on to the climate fad to try to pick up a few fag-end votes, begging and borrowing £1.6 billion of taxpayers cash to hand over and add to the mountain of debt, without so much as a by-your-leave.

So-called 'climate change scientists' and self-appointed cheerleaders of the AGW con staged a feeble fightback after leaked e-mails showing up the sham of the man-made global warming myth sent shivers down the spines of the greenwash zealots.

But the credibility of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) had been blown out of the icy waters. The Climategate scandal at the now discredited Climate Research Unit (CRU) dealt a death blow to the con artists. Climate modelling chicanery and dodgy data to concoct the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) reports have been exposed as a sham.

Carefully contrived political initiatives had been disguised as objective science. Deceitful manipulation of data or downright destruction of inconvenient truths has finally left the zealots out on a limb.

The stakes are high for the eco-fascists who stand to make a mint out of the con and other people's misery. Billions in funding and research grants pour into the pockets of the vested interests in defending the AGW model.

Politicians are propagating the myth to shore up waning popularity. Carbon traders have latched on to the latest fad to make a fast buck. All traded off other people's misery.

Many magazines and newspapers which latched onto the cool global warming myth in a bid to lure readers have finally seen through the con.

The myth was such a nice tidy story. The end-game is a squalid power play over 'carbon mitigation' funding at Copenhagen.

The Orange Party takes its hat off to BBC regional TV weatherman, Paul Hudson and his innocuous posting on the BBC website back in October. Then Hudson had the cheek to ask: what happened to global warming? "For the last eleven years," said Hudson, "we have not observed any increase in global temperatures".

The leaked emails were a result of Hudson's BBC posting. Climategate followed to shock the world. What remains is a squalid footnote in history as the greatest scandal in modern science was exposed as a sham.

The Orange Party has long believed the man-made global warming myth is an elaborate money-spinning hoax. The 'world's leading climate scientists' are more dedicated to promoting an alarmist political agenda than scientific research.

Pollution and greed is killing the planet and its people. Anything else is pure poppycock.

Top picture: Private Eye cover

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Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Will Darling's PBR Dupe Voters?

The general election phoney war is about to hot up with Dreadful Darling's dumbed-down pre-budget report. It's all hands to the pumps of the sinking ship with a blatant package of politicking and posturing. But lurking beneath lies the dreadful state of the public finances. Beleaguered Brown's hopes of hanging on to power rests with the PBR. Will voters be convinced?

The public could be forgiven for thinking it's just business as usual. Nothing of the sort. Tomorrow's pre-budget is all about the election not public finances. Until the struggling Supreme Leader names the day, everything has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

What is needed is a clear, bold message on how to tackle the country's obscene deficit and lay bare the full horror of the country's dire economic mess. Instead a one-off tax on bank bonuses has been mooted along with ubiquitous 'efficiency' savings, which will bring in peanuts for the overall debt burden.

The pre-election budget will be more about shoring up New Labour's collapsing vote. Destined to go down as Darling's last joke on the public, the over optimistic government and past treasury forecasts are set to be exposed.

The key to cutting debt is cutting public spending. But there will be no public spending review until after the election. What the government would actually do is under wraps. Any 'cuts' are set to be hidden in election hot air.

Moody’s 'AAA sovereign monitor', published today, shows the UK hanging onto its triple-A credit rating by the skin of its teeth. The UK entered the crisis in a vulnerable position and is now facing an “inexorable deterioration of debt affordability,” warned Moody.

The UK’s fundamentals are dismal and don’t support the ratings,” said Citigroup's Mark Schofield. “Only if some pretty draconian fiscal measures are in place will the UK keep hold of its AAA rating.”

But Darling has already signalled he will put off much needed measures to slash the biggest budget deficit since the War. Shockingly, the government doesn't have a convincing plan for getting out of its own fiscal mess.

Cameron is right. “If you have a government that doesn’t have the courage to tackle the deficit, that’s the risk of the double dip,” he said. "The country has been the first in and the last out of recession of the major economies because of the policy errors of the last decade or so."

Dreadful Darling is fighting a lonesome, losing battle sorting out the fiscal mess inherited from Brown. Caught between the spinning devils and the deep blue sea of an incompetent treasury, Brown and his sidekick Balls call the economic shots. In the bunker, Mandy and Campbell control the spin.

The PBR package will have been been well-crafted with populist voter appeal and a dash of Brown sauce, aimed at drawing a well worn line between 'fair' New Labour and Cameron's Conservatives only interested in helping 'Tory toffs'.

The Struggling Supreme Leader is playing for short-term gain, paying lip service to cuts, going heavy on measures to strengthen the spinner's narrow dividing line.

Campbell's simplistic class warfare jibes, bashing 'Tory toffs', is a masterclass in exploiting public anxiety about the Tories only out to serve vested interests.

With Tories painted as on the side of a privileged few, Brown is trying to appeal to New Labour's core vote and tap into public anger at the fat cats.

The 'Eton' jibe plays well with New Labour's core voters but not to a savvy electorate. After all, Harman, Darling and Balls were all privately educated at toffee-nosed schools. Blair's own privileged public school education was kept under wraps.

What will stick in the throats of voters is any party which is seen to be on the side of vested interest, be they the political elite, the fats cats, the cronies, City bankers or country landowners. Darling's PBR is part of that plan.

The Tories have already begun the fightback with a debt ticker beamed onto the side of Battersea power station to switch the PBR focus back to that horrendous debt. Something the Orange Party was suggesting way back in February.

New Labour's general election focus will be on Tory voters who deserted the party in droves to follow Blair's hyped up hope and promise of a promised land.

But the politics of false hope lies in tatters. The discredited government is trying to salvage something from a decade of disaster and failure. Oborne has already delivered a damning indictment on a "rudderless economy and a once great Treasury that's now not fit for purpose."

"Darling", he said, "should be forced to own up to the Treasury's consistent failure to grip the nature and scale of the economic recession. This failure is on such a scale that it amounts to negligence."

Brown has been even more misleading. As the only G20 nation in recession, the PM and former chancellor has built up a disreputable reputation for not telling it straight. Anything ministers say will not be believed.

With Malcolm Tucker aka Alastair Campbell now back in the Downing Street fold, a line from The Thick of It springs to mind:

A dying government? Cabinet minister Nicola Murray was in no doubt: "Dying? You bet. Its hair is falling out. It's coughing up blood. And the kids are trying to change the will."



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Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Mission Impossible In The New Vietnam

More troops are to be sent to their deaths on a fool's errand in the Afghan killing fields. Obama is set for a Mission Impossible surge with poodle Brown behind him, pinning hopes on everything coming up roses in time for crucial elections.

Both Washington and London are spinning an 'end game' to dupe a war-weary public on both sides of the Atlantic in a blatant election ploy.

After months of dithering, a rerun of the disastrous Bush/Blair Iraq debacle is on the cards with an increasingly sceptical public left to pick up the pieces.

Der Spiegel put it well: Obama's rallying call to the nation felt like "a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric, leaving both dreamers and realists feeling distraught."

Here Brown doesn't blink without first running it past Washington. Singing from the same hymn sheet, the outline of a 'timetable' has been carefully set up to keep the folks sweet.

Obama's popularity is plummeting. Mid term elections are looming. A president who built up hopes closing Gitmo, only to dash them, plans to end the war by getting in deeper.

Public approval for Obama's war has taken a nose dive with noticeable opposition from within his own Democratic party.

It's Vietnam all over again. The Taliban are the new Reds. Johnson and Nixon have been replaced by Bush and Obama who like Nixon promised to 'end the war' by getting in deeper.

Ahead of Obama's 30,000 troop surge, his poodle Brown got in early with 500 more UK troops and a few lamentable excuses, throwing in everything including the kitchen sink.

In a desperate search for a reason, Brown too is embroiled in a bitter battle to win over hearts and minds and capture the hopeless argument in the run up to the general election.

Apparently the armed forces now have the equipment needed to send in more troops. That begs the questions: why were ill-equipped troops sent to their deaths in the past? Shouldn't the right kit and proper support be in place before a country decides to wage war in a far off land?

Bogeyman Bin Laden popped up again as public enemy number one, with Brown urging a new push to hunt him down. Er, wasn't that what they were supposed to be doing ever since 9/11?

Now Brown has repeated his old con that sending in more troops will help keep the streets here safe. Poppycock. The London underground bombers were British not Afghan and trained in Pakistan not Afghanistan.

To top it all, there's a wonderful pre-election photo-op in January with an Afghan London summit.

As Obama and Brown embark on a fool's errand with mission impossible, some fools may be fooled by the spin. The Orange Party isn't. A US pull out, timed to coincide with election campaigns, is a despicable way to use the lives of brave troops for petty party political ends.

The sheer pace of Obama's military deployment mimics Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq. But the war-mongering pair can send as many troops as they can, it won't make a jot of difference. This is is an exercise in futility and failure.

People feel duped by a hopeless unwinnable half-hearted war now at stalemate. Opinion polls in the UK resonate with those in the US.

But Brown's government has bound itself to Obama's war, fought with all the fervour of Bush neo-cons, right down to the surge. An accelerated timetable with a built-in endgame smacks of electioneering.

As with Iraq, MPs have been duped, this time with a promised hand over to Afghan control. Oblivious to tribal allegiances of corrupt Afghan security forces, more troops will be sent to their deaths. A high price to pay to prop up corrupt and discredited Karzai.

But stepped-up 'training' for Afghan forces will allow Brown and Obama to claim everything is hunky-dory, just in time for those elections back home.

NATO and other allies will have to contribute additional troops to a war that is deeply unpopular in Europe. Setting out a rough timeframe is a sure sign of mounting concerns on Capitol Hill. But how Obama intends to pay for his escalation is left in the air with the extra cost put at around $30 billion.

Supporting a corrupt Afghan government by adding more troops is a fool's errand. As in the UK, the US public is waking up to the fact that the Afghan Taliban is not a direct threat to the US or UK. The threat comes from Islamic fundamentalists trained in Pakistan. The public has no stomach for Brown and Obama's war.

Like Bush and Blair before them, the new warmongers are doomed to failure in a hopeless, unwinnable war. Once again the public is being taken for a ride with the olive branch of an 'end game'.

Stubbornly refusing to learn the lessons of Vietnam, the Blair/Bush legacy of Iraq and now Afghanistan will come back to haunt them. And like in Vietnam and Iraq, it is troops and civilians who will suffer and bear the brunt of a bloody taste for war.

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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Don't Mention The (illegal) War

The farce of a long-awaited 'inquiry' into warmongering Blair's illegal Iraq War has finally opened to a fanfare of fudge and a big dollop of whitewash. For months the public will have to suffer the charade of a parade with none of the powers of a full blown legal inquiry.

As one senior judge told the Guardian: "Analysing the war's legality was beyond the panel's competence. It does not include a single judge or lawyer."

The 'inquiry' is fronted by Brown's placemen working to a tight Downing Street remit. Brown was a member of Blair's war cabinet. How can this be independent of the very government which took the country to war on the back of a pack of lies? Another cover-up is on the cards.

No witnesses can be ordered to attend. No-one can be subpoenaed. No evidence will be given under oath. The 'inquiry' cannot reach a 'verdict', apportion blame or judge criminality.

Chilcot's opening statement today made that quite clear: The inquiry was "not definitive in the sense of a court verdict".

The public does want definitive answers. Why did Blair take this country to war illegally? Who else was in on the shameful act? But that legality isn't on the agenda. Unlike a full public inquiry, Chilcot has no legal standing to lay criminal blame or get to the bottom of the complex issue of the legality of the war.

Witnesses can lie through their teeth with no forensic legal mind to challenge them and no recourse to law. No final report will see the light of day until late 2010.

Chilcot, a former Whitehall mandarin and 'safe pair of hands', has been at pains to insist the 'inquiry' will not produce a 'whitewash'. Methinks the man doth protest too much.

The Orange Party remembers reeling in disbelief over the Standard's ludicrous '45 minutes' shock headline. Listening in a daze to Gilligan on Radio 4, spilling the beans on the 'sexed up' Iraq weapons dossier. Watching Blair's henchman Campbell storm into Channel 4 news live to rip the BBC and bully anyone who got in his way.

Watching the shameful spectacle of a witch hunt over government scientist David Kelly. Watching a reporter asking Blair if he had "blood on his hands" after Kelly's strange, still unexplained death.

Watching hundreds of thousands of protesters outside a duped parliament. The relentless spin of going to war to hunt down invisible WMDs rather than regime change, which would never stand up in an international court of law. Hearing Claire Short let slip Blair's "taste for war".

And ripping up life-long membership of a so-called 'Labour' Party in disgust. If New Labour can lie about war what else did it lie about?

There has already been one whitewash - the Hutton 'inquiry' into the death of Kelly. There has already been a discredited secret Butler inquiry into pre-war intelligence failures which protected Teflon Tony. Chilcot has been set up to join them with a shameful cover-up.

In the meantime an expensive farce is set to unfold as a pre-election sop to voters. The public still won't know why troops were sent to their deaths in Iraq or exactly what advice the government was given over the war's legality.

Barrister Blair will have his day, facing piles of trials with smiles. After all the fudge and faux outrage, a war weary public will be none the wiser.

Top picture: Peter Brookes, The Times. Mid pictures: Daily Mirror, Evening Standard. Bottom Picture: Private Eye.

NOTE: Two blogs giving a blow by blow account of the Chilcot Inquiry are worth following. Channel 4's Iraqinquiryblogger and the Iraq Inquiry Digest, edited by Chis Ames.

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Climategate II-A Feeble Fightback

So-called 'climate change scientists' and self-appointed cheerleaders of the AGW con are staging a feeble fightback with a bit of dodgy science of their own, after leaked e-mails showing up the sham of the man-made global warming myth sent shivers down the spines of the greenwash zealots.

Slammed as 'the greatest scandal in modern science', now "three UK groups studying climate change have issued an unprecedented statement about the dangers of failing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases", reports the BBC with glee.

Usual suspects, The Royal Society, Met Office, and Natural Environment Research Council say the science (sic) underpinning climate change is "more alarming than ever".

And to back up the Climategate sham, they say the 2007 UK floods were "consistent with emerging patterns".

Nothing to do with a woeful lack of investment in storm drains. Nothing to do with building houses on flood plains. Nothing to do with concreting over huge tracts of land. Nah. Blame it on man-made global warming. So much easier.

A damning string of emails hacked from one of the world's top climate research centres at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) confirmed that the entire shoddy science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a scam.

About 1,000 e-mails and more than 3,000 private documents relating to climate change showed up attempts to prevent the release of scientific data, destroy material and rig scientific data to make out humans are causing global warming.

Some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Sceptics claim this is 'the final nail in the coffin' of man-made global warming theory. Even evergreen George Monbiot, now feels he's wasted years of his life "promoting a bogus discipline".

The publication of hacked e-mails has prompted one key US Republican senator to call for an investigation into the research. James Inhofe told the Washington Times, he would probe whether the IPCC "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."


Here former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, has called for an inquiry into the global warming scandal.

The Orange Party has long believed the man-made global warming myth is an elaborate money-spinning hoax. The 'world's leading climate scientists' are more dedicated to promoting an alarmist political agenda than scientific research.

At the centre of the Climategate scam is the international body that claims to be the world authority on climate change – the UN-sponsored IPCC.

Any shred of credibility left in the IPCC and its lackeys in the CRU, Met Office and BBC has been torn to shreds.

Opinion polls show the public doesn't buy into the hype of man-made climate change. Advertising watchdogs are investigating a scary £6m government 'climate change' ad over claims it's 'misleading and too "scary" for children'.

The government's climate change figures have been branded 'misleading' by the government's own UK Statistics Authority.

A BBC ‘climate reporter’ and regional TV weatherman, Paul Hudson, ruffled a few feathers with the audacity to ask: What happened to global warming? Pointing to the fact that "the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998."

These so-called "scientists" deliberately set out to trick and mislead. They skewed the data to fit in with a half-baked political agenda. Throwing out facts which did not support an ideological stance.

Science is only what AGW zealots deem is science. Truth only that which which fits into a narrow minded view of the complexities of nature's long rich cycles. The public has been deliberately taken for a ride on the anthropogenic global warming scam when the brutal reality is staring them in the face but more difficult to stomach. Pollution and greed are the culprits.

Pollution and greed which has seen forests wiped out and natives booted out to fuel the West's insatiable demand for cheap beef and palm oil.

Pollution and greed which has led to Far East factories belching out poison to satisfy the craving for cheap goods. Pollution and greed which forces poor souls to eek out a living on the stench of Third World rubbish tips.

Pollution and greed which has led to factories and public utilities given a slap on the wrist for polluting rivers, fields and water courses.

These are the real culprits. Not the hapless soul who is forced to read by a dim 'energy saving' light bulb.

The real scandal is the way dodgy science is being used to prop up politicians, carbon traders and taxpayer funded 'research centres', riding on the back of the scam to make a quick buck.

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