I see Hillary Clinton is coming under attack for more remarks made on her Africa tour.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/12/hillary-clinton-2000-election-recount
I am not a great fan of La Clinton, but I agree 100% with her pointing out that electoral fraud happens in the US too. The UK as well – anybody who thinks we don’t have electoral fraud should try standing against Jack Straw in Blackburn.
Hillary Clinton is two faced out of which she speaks with a forked tongue. This is what she and her cronies have been up to in Honduras. I wouldn’t trust her an inch.
aaaaaaaaaaaaa~
At the center of that coup in the United States is the Clinton machine that in some kind of macabre power sharing agreement has taken US policy in this hemisphere hostage and off the track of what the President promised when running against Secretary Clinton for president in 2008.
Not only have we now got Clinton attorney Lanny Davis lobbying on behalf of the Honduran dictatorship before an administration whose central promise was that it would end the undue influence of lobbyists, but as journalist Bill Conroy documented this past weekend for Narco News, the US-funded Millenium Challenge Corp. ?” whose board of directors includes Secretary Clinton ?” poured $17 million into Honduras oligarch interests between April and July of this year.
While DC apparatchiks told us they had cut almost $20 million (about ten percent) of US aid to Honduras and put the rest on pause, Clinton’s Millenium Challenge Corp. (MCC) has been quietly replenishing those funds through the back door.
A Narco News review of deposits to the Honduran Central Bank reveals that since the June 28 coup d’etat ?” in a little over a month ?” MCC has subsidized the coup forces in Honduras with $6.5 million dollars.
Those payments arrived on these dates and in these amounts:
July 9: $0.9 million
July 16: $0.3 million
July 23: $3.7 million
July 30: $1.6 million
While it’s possible that the US President doesn’t know about this sabotage of his stated policy ?” a small Central American nation with a population smaller than that of New York City might not exactly be front and center of his attention ?” his Secretary of State is on the frickin’ board of directors of the entity that, we now know, has been quietly funding the coup even after it was consummated.
aaaaaaaaaaaaa~
US Secretary of State Clinton’s Micro-Management of the Corporation that Funds the Honduras Coup Regime
Records Demonstrate that the Secretary Has Hands-On Control of the Fund that Gave $6.5 Million to the Regime After the June 28 Coup
By Bill Conroy and Al Giordano
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/too-cute-half-honduras-mr-president
Think I have to agree with Mary on this one Craig. Clinton is also unduly influenced by New York’s powerful Zionist lobby which controls democrat circles in that city. I guess all power at this level is corrupt in this current dystopia.
“Hilary Clinton”…
http://tinyurl.com/qbt5tp
Thanks George. If we needed any confirmation, that says it.
Correction: Hilary Clingon sometimes speaks sense.
And sometimes she mis-speaks; as do all who live by propaganda. It’s sometimes more dishonest to speak only some of the truth as it is to speak lies, because the latter only needs to be discovered in part, but the former needs to be fully understood.
the Clintons have always done their own deals, from small town Arkansa, uttered Oliver North connections and more, to failing to put pressure on Netanyahu’s game playing which destroyed the oslo peace accord and wasted years of diplomatic effort.
I would not trust either as far as I could throw them. Unless harbouring a malicious thought, I would not touch ’em with a barge pole.
Sorry to deviate from the Clinton theme, but when Imran from Bradford posted aforewhile that Craig had made them, the fraudulent Muslim electorate in Bradford, very angry, I took his wording as a threat. Small fry compared to your above discussion, but these guys do tend to carry out their threats.
U2 did something quite impressive for Imprisoned Burmese Democracy Leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s tonight at Wembley Stadium and also some Powerful Images of Palestinians
So Bono isn’t a complete Tosser
Well Done
I thought Elbow were Brilliant
Tony
On one of the few times Hillary Clinton has ever told the truth, she gets savagely attacked for it.
The world is insane.
I occasionally read my wife’s Daily Mail and often disagree with Peter Oborne’s view of the world. However, if this review is anything to go by, his book may be well worth reading
Customer Review on Amazon
An Uprising Against Britain’s New Ruling Class, 28 Sep 2007
By Henry Berocca
Peter Oborne: The Triumph Of The Political Class (Simon & Schuster)
Peter Oborne is a columnist on the Right Wing Daily Mail, the organ of conservative Middle England. He has nevertheless written a revolutionary tract, which is essential reading for anyone who wants to overthrow Britain’s ruling class.
In The Triumph Of The Political Class, he shows how that class has been transformed, largely by stealth, within the space of a generation.
Britain used to be governed by the Establishment, a network of people who knew each other (often through family) and largely shared the same social background, education and values. These values were pre-eminently Victorian: their best qualities were public service and incorruptibility, their worst were amateurism and snobbery. Their values were very strongly enforced – the monarch who rejected them, Edward VIII, was dethroned at the Establishment’s behest. For about a hundred years this Establishment and its values dominated the governance of Britain through its grip on its major institutions, the home and overseas civil service, the armed forces, the judiciary and the City of London (before deregulation). They were buttressed by the monarchy, the state churches, and most of the media, especially the BBC. Although they dominated the political system, they regarded politics as a duty, rather than a career: indeed for most of the twentieth century it was almost impossible to make a living out of politics alone. People went into politics to represent their class or their locality, and they kept strong personal links with the interests in civil society which they represented.
This Establishment was remarkably adaptive. It survived two World Wars (when it successfully enlisted new talent to make good its shortcomings), the rise of organized labour, the emancipation of women and other gigantic upheavals. But it did not survive the arrival of a new elite who elbowed it ruthlessly aside and destroyed its powerbases. This is Oborne’s Political Class – and a deeply unlovely bunch they are.
They live in a sealed world – like astronauts on an alien planet, moving along airlocked passages between a series of domes: party machines: “think-tanks”; Parliament; government; EU bureaucracy; lobbying; consultancies; media, all within the giant dome of politics. They form a self-admiring, self-promoting coterie and although they can plot viciously against each other they protect each other equally fiercely from any attack or criticism from the outside world. In their hands the political parties have melted their political differences and simply become vehicles for personal ambitions. Ironically, the political parties have never been so well organized and managed at precisely the moment when they no longer represent the interests and values of wider society and when they are all being deserted en masse by their former members.
Like all inhabitants of a sealed world, the Political Class behave very oddly. As a gentleman himself, Oborne spends a fair amount of time analysing their speech – a weird and depressing mix of managerial gobbledygook and fake populism – and their dress. More pertinently, he exposes their standards of conduct. On the whole, the old Establishment behaved better than the people they governed. The Political Class behaves much worse – although it does not stop them preaching endlessly at other people about “responsibility” and good citizenship.
With a wealth of examples, Oborne shows that our new rulers are parasites, who enrich themselves constantly at the taxpayers’ expense. They routinely abuse power, lie and suppress and manipulate the truth. They never admit error or failure, they always shuffle responsibility onto someone else. In daily life, unlike the old Establishment, they are graceless and self-obsessed. In sum, they have no standards whatever except their own advancement. Yet they are indignant when anyone exposes their behaviour and turn savagely on those who call them to account (Oborne tells chilling tales of the treatment of Elizabeth Filkin, libelled and dismissed as Parliamentary Commissioner of Standards, and of John Yates, the policemen who investigated cash-for-peerages).
Oborne unearths a wonderful remark from former Blair adviser Geoff Mulgan (a prime specimen of the Political Class, who has glided from “think tank” to Number 10 and back with no contact with the outside world): “we expect leaders to abide by far more demanding rules than the rest of us. So, for example, we expect them to suspend personal considerations when exercising impersonal power; not to give special favours; not to treat people well just because they like them. We don’t let them use their power to enrich themselves or gain sexual favours.” Wrong, Geoff – those are precisely the standards which everyone is expected to live by – drudges, doctors, directors – and it is our rulers who repeatedly flout them.
On one point, however, Oborne has misread the new Political Class. He suggests that unlike the old Establishment they have no religious values. In fact, many of the new Political Class, especially in New Labour, are ostentatiously religious (the latest being Gordon Brown, parading his preacher father to his Party Conference). Moreover, all the Political Class have found it expedient to form an alliance with religious leaders and self-selected representatives of “faith communities”. In consequence, a third of Britain’s state schools are now under religious control – although fewer than 20 per cent of Britons make any kind of religious observance.
Oborne likens the new Political Class to the grasping, corrupt coterie of politicians who governed Georgian England, dissected by the great historian Sir Louis Namier. But he is unfair to Namier’s politicians. For all their failings, they had some great successes in government. They presided over an agricultural revolution and an industrial revolution, they defeated Napoleon and they secured Britain’s role as a global power. (At least they did not get in the way).
By contrast, although the new Political Class boasts constantly about its professionalism and surrounds itself with armies of expensive consultants and experts it has proved spectacularly incompetent in matters great and small. Apart from Iraq they have given us the ERM debacle, railway privatization, endless botched reorganizations of the NHS, a string of IT disasters (and ID cards in waiting), farm payments, the prison crisis, inadequate armed forces equipment, housing and medical care, incoherent and failed policies on drink, drugs and gambling, the Millennium Dome, school meals… Almost nothing these people touch works properly. They could not even replace the Lord Chancellorship.
How did so many corrupt, charmless and incompetent people get away with it? Oborne gives a large part of the answer. They suborned, subordinated and supplanted all the institutions which might otherwise have resisted them – often with the assistance of willing collaborators within. In particular, the home civil service and the diplomatic service were humiliated repeatedly – their advice rejected and their normal command structures replaced by political appointees, expensive outside consultants and (most sinisterly) by intelligence services which were captured by the Political Class. To give only one of copious examples of this process of humiliation, Alastair Campbell’s understrapper, a nonentity by the name of Danny Pruce, had more influence on the infamous September dossier on Iraq than the whole of the Foreign Office.
Oborne is equally penetrating about the Political Class’s attacks on the Monarchy (no match for Blair’s calculated emotive response to the death of Princess Diana), the judiciary (still intact but repeatedly threatened by political appeals to populist feelings) and above all, the media. The Political Class, notably Tony Blair, would have us believe that their behaviour was a necessary response to a vicious, voracious media. Garbage. The Political Class have recruited large sections of the media to print or broadcast its propaganda as fact. That is what spin doctoring means and it requires willing collaborators in the media. Some of the media have done even worse, and propagated deliberate lies or character assassination at the behest of the Political Class. More and more of the media, and its members, are becoming indistinguishable from the Political Class. They routinely trade jobs and careers – politicians become expensively paid columnists, journalists join the government machine and give orders to civil servants. The Political Class gets angry with journalists only when they break ranks and refuse to play the game. In spite of their shrill complaints, both the Thatcher and the Blair governments had a remarkably easy ride from the media. Nearly all of their biggest decisions were endorsed and promoted by the media and their propaganda was rarely, if ever, dissected or challenged.
The Political Class has thrived because of the collapse of the institutions which might have resisted it. But that is not the whole story, and there is a vital factor which Oborne fails to discuss: political apathy. All the parties fret publicly about public apathy and disengagement from the political process – but the Political Class actually depend on it. They do not want people to become engaged in politics. It is no coincidence that their remedies for low voter turnout are postal voting and text or online voting – all of them ways of voting which are more passive and unthinking than the traditional ballot box (and all of them, incidentally, a major threat to the secret ballot and the integrity of the election process),
The Political Class needs an apathetic, acquiescent electorate in the same way that Basil Fawlty depended on the supine, downtrodden guests at Fawlty Towers.
If people cared about British politics would they put up for a minute with the standard of service they get from their present political rulers?
Yes, that’s pretty well spot-on, and I would add that most of the new political class are shamelessly greedy moneygrubbers in a way which their Establishment predecessors never were.
Here is a link to Amnesty International’s response to the foreign affairs committee criticism of our governments torture and rendition involvement. Amnesty is calling for a full and independent enquiry and their is a link for you to contact your MP (at minimum effort to yourself may I add!) to call for “a full independent, effective, impartial enquiry into UK involvement in rendition, secret detention and enforced disappearance, including the case of Binyam Mohammed”. Please spare the five minutes it will take to contact your MP. Thanks – http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18369
That review, if I simply substitute Congress for Parliament and eliminate the European elements, describes precisely the situation in the US as well. One might almost think …
Now i see what Tony_opmoc means about your moderation of comments Craig. It seems to be random. Still – good post and i agree with it as usual.
Absolutely off topic but I saw this and remembered Craig’s piece on a heavy who called collecting a debt for which a landlord was responsible.
This is a problem which is getting worse the more unemployment rises and people are chucked off benefits by NuLabour using Purnell’s legislation. Who is Secretary for Work and Pensions now btw?
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-cruel-and-out-of-control-the-new-face-of-debt-collecting-1771885.html
Yvette Cooper is the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
Johann Hari’s article is another example of the uselessness of regulators. The Left really need to rethink their attachment to these sorts of bodies. It is submitted a better solution is to increase access to legal aid for civil matters (something the Attlee government did over 60 years ago). And to ensure enough lawyers participate in the scheme transfer the burden of form filling to the claimant.
In the meantime, an individual being harassed should look at Ferguson v British Gas [2009] EWCA Civ 46.
http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2009/46.html
SJB, I dont get it – do you mean the intrinsic uselessness of regulators, or the uselessness of the pathetic excuse for regulators that we have at the moment?
I have to disagree with the comment that Britain is no longer ruled by the establishment, but by a new political class.
As my own story demonstrates so clearly, the political class is scared to tread on the establishment’s toes, even when the establishment is acting criminally. MI5/6 keep the political class in line for the establishment, smearing (and threatening to ruin the career) of any politician who steps out of line.
It has to be said that our politicians are probably quite easy to smear. Both the establishment and politicians like to pretend that Britain is a democracy and that the politicians are in control, though they are not.
Clear proof of the involvement of MI5/6 in the UK, and CSIS in Canada with torture is outlined on the web site:
http://zerzetzen.wikispaces.com
The torture follows the zerzetsen technique developed by the Stasi to persecute dissidents. You will note that the matter has been heavily reported to 2 governments and is being covered-up. Why is it being covered-up? The reason is that there is so much evidence of torture by MI5/6 that any honest investigation would incriminate them, and the sources in the high establishment whom the intelligence services are acting for – as if MI5/6 in the UK and CSIS were the establishment’s private crime gang.
Clear documentary evidence of the cover-up conspiracy is on the wiki. Examine the evidence for yourself. You may wonder why the complaint is not being investigated, or myself prosecuted for the accusations I have made. The answer is that the establishment does not want the truth to come out, and that elected governments in 2 countries do what the establishment tells them to do. Roderick Russell
Intrinsic uselessness, Mike. As I see it, there are two key problems: (1) a vested interest not to investigate thoroughly in case malpractice is discovered, which would reflect badly on their preventative role; and (2) lack of constant competition.
This isnt on topic at all, but i couldnt find Steve’s email address to send him it so i’m posting it here.
I was looking at photos of the Norwich North count on the Guardian website. Unfortunately none of Craig. However there is one where you can see Steve – 2nd from the left in the photo on the link below
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/gallery/2009/jul/24/norwich-north-byelection-byelections?picture=350764892
Brian Wilson’s dislike for the SNP may be down to the fact that he saw too much of the SNP in Lewis and Harris, some of whom in the past were extremely unpleasant and hypocritical people – like Donald Stewart MP who ran an “anti-permissive campaign” against my grandfather Malcolm MacMillan MP. Stewart and some of his supporters spread false rumours about him having been in “the fleshpots of London” and also made up stories about his trips abroad – which actually included walking alongside Greek dissidents against the fascist Colonel’s regime in Greece.
The SNP i’ve met in Lanarkshire seem to be a totally different and far better sort of people, including many people who were formerly in the Labour party before Blair and Brown took it over.
I won’t ever criticise Brian Wilson however much i disagree with his political views these days because he was a good friend of my family in the past. I don’t know why his views have changed so much but i suspect his run ins with some of the less pleasant members of the SNP in the Western Isles may have started to make him focus too much on opposing the SNP and not enough on where Blair and Brown were leading Labour.
Since we are off topic anyway and the answer to who rules the country is that, in this country, plus ca change… please may I move from electoral fraud to banking fraud.
If the money the bankers stole from the real economy, now being replaced by QE, was used to purchase assets abroad, e.g. vast cheap tracts of Iraq, Somalia, Bulgaria etc, then it’s easy to see who’s being conned. Our bankers are buying up foreign assets with virtual cash for free. No problem for our own national interests.
We don’t mind conning foreigners, do we?
The money we have borrowed from Qatar to get out of this hole will be repaid by selling countries like Qatar, at vastly inflated prices, the land which our people bought for free. Win,win.
Every idiot sitting on a parish council in England knows how to spin money in this way through the planning rules.
Regulation and profiteering = political class and establishment. They are one and the same thing, which we’ve been fooled into thinking are separate.
Grey suits and tweeds hang side by side in the wardrobes of the wealthy of this world. Even Craig has some rather worn tropical flannels he puts on from time to time. Sorry, Craig.
regulation = politics = profiteering = establishment. cunts all of them. i believe that is an approved word on this website, please correct me if i’m wrong.