"...The current Labour sleaze crisis is even more significant than most people have yet realised and if it isn't closed down pretty damned quick it's going to shine a light on a hidden world that only Conspiraloons have dreamt of. There's a good chance one of the Establishment's bagmen has been exposed for all the world see. The Iraq War? The War on Terror? The debt mountain and f*cked up banking system? We are closer to public exposure of some of the answers as to how all these things came about than we ever have been
Given all that, it's not surprising that the blogging 'Commentariat' (promoted by The Guardian and Julia Hobsbawm's (a name well worth googling) very Common Purpose feeling 'Editorial Intelligence'), as well as the Alex Jones' of this world, are somewhat at a loss for words. They're either too compromised or too f*cking stupid to comprehend what's going on. They simply don't have the ideological tools to make sense of the implications
Sad to say, it's the right wing libertarians that are running with this - along with all the distasteful baggage that goes with it..."
and to another Loon...
"(Is there) Something nasty in the woodpile? Certainly, and I'm still trying to figure out if Brown's unprecedented catalog of closely spaced woes really is just a case of coincidental timing, the result of some kind of tipping point having been naturally reached, or half a dozen shady blokes puffing on cigars in a room somewhere deciding that their interests are best served somehow by imploding the whole f*cking shambles..."
"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the Conspiraloon™"It's been a good week for us Loons so far but, sad to say, a good week for Loons invariably involves shocking or ghastly events that shake people out of their complacent slumber. So it's not exactly something to gloat over
nor is the fact that I fully expect plenty more good weeks for Loons in the not too distant future...
.
29 comments:
They're either too compromised or too f*cking stupid to comprehend what's going on. They simply don't have the ideological tools to make sense of the implications
All of the above.
Those that are too stupid have always been that way and are easy to distinguish from those that don't have the ideological tools, particularly with regard to the Editorialised Intelligence of the so-called 'new commentariat'.
This, I would suggest, is more by design than accident and thanks must go to Julia and her cronies united as they are in their common purpose breakfast briefings.
The genocidal mass murderer, Tony Bliar, decreed that we're all middle class now and so having a bunch of challenge nothing, keyboard-monkey bloggers drunk on their own inane verbosity about how comfy it is occupying the centre-ground seems like the only sensible, and incredibly easy to organise, move.
It's a wafer thin facade, but yay for middle-class, middle-ground mediocrity anyway. It was fun while it lasted.
The genocidal mass murderer, Tony Bliar, decreed that we're all middle class now
Well, I guess that makes us all a Strategic Threat then...
http://tinyurl.com/28ea5u
Clever how they've stacked the deck, eh?
Kinda pulls the rug out from under it when you seem 'em stacking the thing right before your very eyes.
BTW This article by that slippery f*cker Greg Pallast on Jon Mendelsohn is worth a spin
http://tinyurl.com/3xerts
"Those many years ago, at the dawn of the Blair regime, Mendelsohn handed me a confidential manifesto he’d penned for LLM clients only. It was a map of the soul of New Labour.
Here was a chilling combination of Mendelsohn, Mandelson and Nietzsche. “AN OLD WORLD IS DISAPPEARING AND A NEW ONE EMERGING,” he announced in upper case. In the “Passing World” were “ideology” and “conviction” - which would now be replaced by “Pragmatism” and “Consumption.” “Buying” would replace “Belief.”
And ultimately, in this Brave New Labour World, style was all: “WHAT YOU DO,” wrote Mendelsohn, was passé, replaced by, “HOW YOU DO IT.”"
I think I'm on of the thick ones. Aside from the confirmation of what we all knew about new labour being totally bent, what wider significance does this have?
Or is that the apparent fact that those 'upstairs' appear to want a change of personnel at No10?
From the same Pallast article:
If LLM appeared favored by Brown’s operation, Brown himself received favors from LLM. “Gordon Brown asked us to have our client KPMG [the consultancy] host a breakfast for him where it was pre-arranged that they would praise him for his prudent budgets.” Brown basked in this Potemkin praise-fest - a favor that would be returned with special access (for my own clients, if I paid the retainer).
That wouldn't happen to be the same KPMG as the KPMG famous for their tax shelter fraud now, would it?
Ho ho ho. Rome is burning and there's fiddlers to the left, fiddlers to the right and here we are stuck in the middle of 'em.
Squat now, while stocks last.
@anon
the wider significance is that our governing party is bought and paid for
and I'm not pretending for a second that the major opposition party isn't either
the conspiratorial element comes in when trying to get a handle on who is paying and what they are after
the stupid part comes from the fact that people are still adhering to party political loyalties and views of how the world works that are long dead
overlooking or making apologies for the leadership of the Labour party simply because they are not Tories just doesn't cut it any more
and no I have never worked as a taxi driver
Or is that the apparent fact that those 'upstairs' appear to want a change of personnel at No10?
I'm not being pedantic here but I'm not certain that's what's going on
Gordon was doing such as lovely job for those 'upstairs' it's hard to believe they just turned on him from out of the blue
That phone call David Abrahams made to Newsnight a couple of days ago, and the Newsnight piece that prompted it, seems to have been a unplanned 'wild card' event
... and if you are open to at least the possibility that there are such people as them 'upstairs' I wouldn't personally consider you to be stupid
Ahh yes, we knew the Labour party was for sale from the off didn't we with the Bernie Eccleston affair. Personally I think this element of buying politicians is probably a relatively small aspect of how our democracy is a sham. I don't think those that really hold the reigns of power would need to donate half a million to the Labour party to get what they want...
I don't think those that really hold the reigns of power would need to donate half a million to the Labour party to get what they want...
For sure. This side of things is only very small part of the game but if a scandal like this lifts a corner of the cover only a little way I'll take it
What's more interesting than a few grubby fivers being passed around is the manner in which popular 'consent' is managed and filtered.
In that respect the strong possibility that certain distractive news stories have been staged or promoted this week, the reticence of so many left-leaning (sic.) blogs to face up to the story, and the certain connections between New Labour and the Consent Industry are much more interesting
As is so often the case, the mechanism of the cover-up is more illuminating than the original crime
Absolutely. The existence of these media and news management companies appears to be one of the establishments best kept secrets. I mean everyones heard of spin, but the fact that a whole sector now exists to do the kind of thing normally the preserve of the CIA is a bit troubling to say the least.
Apparently William Casey, the director CIA in the 80s once said "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false". Who'd have thought that this old spook stuff would now be such a good earner?
Gordon BrNWO needs to stop wearing those pale blue ties for every guided photo opportunity, it sends out completely the wrong message to the revolutionary middle classes who have decided their Volvos aren't that great after all.
It's only just dawned on me that Mendelsohn's map of the soul of New Labour referred to by Pallast was composed in part of recycled Bananarama lyrics
That just makes it worse
"Sad to say, it's the right wing libertarians that are running with this…"
Now that the left and right have rushed to the totalitarian centre-ground it’s the right-wing libertarians who fill the void marked "the opposition". Why so sad Stef? I hope you haven't succumbed to the propaganda that right-leaning ex-public schoolboys are "the enemy"?
I hope you haven't succumbed to the propaganda that right-leaning ex-public schoolboys are "the enemy"?
No, I try to be more pluralist than that. Orwell was an Eton boy
My problem is that many of the people I see calling themselves right wing libertarians still fall for and regurgitate much of the crap that 'them upstairs' like to keep in circulation. Race hate being the first thing that comes to mind. There are others...
Bloody conspiraloons always trying to implicate Israel. Eh? It's the Daily Telegraph!
Abrahams drives a 'battered Volvo' btw.
@wolfie
... I forgot to mention that I only use expressions like 'right' and 'left' wing because the majority of people still insist on using, and defining their political beliefs in, those terms
these concepts are bullshit and used to divide the majority of people as they fight over the <10% percent of the world's wealth that's tossed their way, so that they don't get round to asking who's got the other 90+%
matters like wholesale oligarchical theft or mass enslavement or murder should be of concern of everyone, regardless of whether they believe in free markets or marx or not
Greg Pallast's site appears to be, er unwell
@bd
Mel P. has a problem with that particular Telegraph article...
http://tinyurl.com/32wf89
She seems to be miffed that some people are talking about one bollocks global conspiracy when they should all be focused on the real bollocks global conspiracy
hate-filled nutters like her give proper Conspiraloons a bad name
Dang she was fast. Naturally she cannot see the irony of the corollary that her article/accusations construct.
It’s the obligatory accusations of innate British racism in the comments section which give me such a hard-on for Zionism. I'm seeing this sort of stuff a lot more on the web these days and I don’t think its very healthy.
It’s the obligatory accusations of innate British racism in the comments section which give me such a hard-on for Zionism. I'm seeing this sort of stuff a lot more on the web these days and I don’t think its very healthy.
Far from healthy but it does effectively serve the dual purpose of conflating criticism of the actions of a particular state with racism and engendering that sense of fear on which so much of the support for that country is based
As many Jewish writers have pointed out, Norman Finkelstein being the most reviled, there are powerful interests which are keen to promote the idea that all Jews are under siege
Mel's not stupid so she must be aware of the hypocrisy of the shit she writes
And some of her commentators come across as being quite unpleasant, racist people themselves. Lines about the tainted Anglo-German 'strain' and entire nations being infected with a mental virus are up there with anything Adolf and his boys came out with
Greg Pallast's site is still unwell...
Just in case it remains unwell....
Brown’s Fixer Explains How It’s Done: Jon Mendelsohn and the Secret Tape
Published November 29th, 2007 in Articles
Boasted £11 million donated by Tesco cut tax bill by £20 million
by Greg Palast
For the Guardian On Line
It was a stunning admission. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s crony explained to the U.S. businessman, in evil detail, exactly how the fix is done in Britain.
Unfortunately, for Jon Mendelsohn and his partners, the “businessman” was, in fact, an undercover reporter for The Observer of London.
Today, Brown’s foes are calling for Mendelsohn’s resignation as chief fundraiser of the Labour Party for his admitted knowledge of £630,000 ($1.2 million) in dodgy, possibly illegal, campaign contributions to Labour.
What’s odd here are the protestations of shock at the behavior of Mendelsohn, described in the Guardian as an “ethical” lobbyist. “Ethical” my arse.
It was exactly nine years ago that Mendelsohn and his lobby firm partners were caught trading cash for access. How this Mendelsohn character ended up heading Labour Party fundraising and how he obtained the sobriquet ‘ethical’ is the real shocker.
I know a few things about this Mendelsohn. The “businessman” with the hidden microphone was me. In June 1998, joined by my recorder and a real US businessman, Mark Swedlund, who designed my elaborate corporate front, I met Mr. Mendelsohn at his tony Soho London office. There Mendelsohn confirmed what was already on tape from his partners in the lobby firm he founded, LLM.
I explained my corporate needs: some environmental rules needed bending. I hinted I was with Enron. Mendelsohn’s partner Neil Lawson told my recorder that, if I paid LLM £5,000 to £20,000 per month, “We can go to anyone. We can go to Gordon Brown if we have to.” Brown was at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer. Could the lobbyist provide concrete examples of a fix?
Easily. Here is a short list of LLM claimed accomplishments:
- Inside information on then-Chancellor Gordon Brown’s budgets.
- Tax avoided by a supermarket chain following millions donated to a New Labour pet project.
- A pass on anti-trust action against client Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
- And for Gordon Brown, a favor that the Mendelsohn team expected to redeem.
Tesco Goes Tax-Free
LLM, which stands for the founders Lucas, Neil Lawson and Mendelsohn, were about to derail Brown’s plan for a tax on car parks (”parking lots” as we say in the States). This would cost Tesco, the supermarket chain, an LLM client, £20 million annually. LLM was holding secret meetings that week in June 1998 with Tony Blair’s Downing Street Policy Unit to get Tesco exempted from the proposed tax.
The tax threat went away after LLM advised Tesco to drop £11 million into funding for Blair’s odd Millennium Dome project.
[To my US readers: The Dome is a gargantuan tent costing $100 million - no kidding.]
“This government likes to do deals,” Lucas told me.
But this deal was complex, Mendelsohn said, not so simple as cash paid for a tax break. “Tony is very anxious to be seen as ‘green’,” Mendelsohn explained to me and my confederate. “Everything has to be couched in environmental language - even if it’s slightly Orwellian.” So LLM devised a set of cockamamie gimmicks for Tesco, like offering bus services to the elderly, which would paint the retailer green.
It worked. Tesco was spared the tax - though the company denies categorically that its cash dumped into the Dome bought any favors.
Message for Murdoch
The year of my paper’s original investigation (dubbed, “Lobbygate”), anti-trust authorities were looking into Rupert Murdoch’s companies’ alleged predatory pricing practices. LLM carried the word from Downing Street, according to Lucas, that, if Murdoch’s tabloids toned down criticism of new antitrust legislation, the law’s final language would reflect the government’s appreciation. On the other hand, harsh coverage in Murdoch’s papers could provoke problems for the media group in Parliament’s union-recognition bill.
The message to muzzle journalists was not, said Lucas, “an easy one in their culture” - journalists being a trying lot. However, the outcome pleased LLM clientele.
A Peek at the Budget
It also happened that on one of the days I recorded Mendelsohn’s partners, they boasted of informing an LLM client about details of Gordon Brown’s budget plans before the Chancellor’s announcement went public.
A lobbyist competing for my “business,” when asked to match the offer of inside information and deal-making held out by LLM and another New Labour firm said, “It’s appalling. It’s disturbing,” and added that he would refuse to match LLM’s services at any price.
If LLM appeared favored by Brown’s operation, Brown himself received favors from LLM. “Gordon Brown asked us to have our client KPMG [the consultancy] host a breakfast for him where it was pre-arranged that they would praise him for his prudent budgets.” Brown basked in this Potemkin praise-fest - a favor that would be returned with special access (for my own clients, if I paid the retainer).
Whether Mendelsohn, Lawson and Lucas actually pulled off all they claimed, I can’t say. Though just kids in their twenties, LLM had garnered millions in revenue, a lot of loot if for mere advice. No one seriously investigated; no one asked uncomfortable questions of Mr. Brown, Mr. Blair or the man at the center of several of these supposed “deals,” Mr. Peter Mandelson, now an EU Commissioner.
However, that Mendelsohn made these tawdry claims (or grinned at me while his partner made them), and that they were published on page one of every newspaper in the realm - part of an LLM tape broadcast on BBC’s Newsnight - one would think that the perspicacious Mr. Brown would have avoided Mendelsohn like the plague.
But the PM embraced Mr. Let’s-Make-A-Deal. The reason was made clear to me by Mendelsohn himself, a man as brainy as he is cynical and wealthy. Those many years ago, at the dawn of the Blair regime, Mendelsohn handed me a confidential manifesto he’d penned for LLM clients only. It was a map of the soul of New Labour.
Here was a chilling combination of Mendelsohn, Mandelson and Nietzsche. “AN OLD WORLD IS DISAPPEARING AND A NEW ONE EMERGING,” he announced in upper case. In the “Passing World” were “ideology” and “conviction” - which would now be replaced by “Pragmatism” and “Consumption.” “Buying” would replace “Belief.”
And ultimately, in this Brave New Labour World, style was all: “WHAT YOU DO,” wrote Mendelsohn, was passé, replaced by, “HOW YOU DO IT.”
So why demand Mendelsohn’s head now? Gordon Brown is a prudent man whom, I suspect, reads a newspaper or two - and knew exactly whom he had positioned to fill his party’s coin sacks. Mendelsohn is just a gun for hire, a forgettable factotum. I wouldn’t place the blame on the hired gun, but on the man whose finger is on the trigger.
The series “Lobbygate: Cash for Access” was originally published by The Observer (UK) in July 1998 by Greg Palast and Antony Barnett. For a complete history of the scandal, read, “Blair and the Sale of Britain” in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Constable & Robinson 2004). Excerpt here.
BBC Radio's political correspondent John Pienaar on the recent spate on crises hitting the UK government...
The worst run of bad luck must end at some point. Mustn't it?
And arguably, dumb, dreadful luck is the only thing that explains such a run of political catastrophes in such a small space of time.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7121305.stm
You keep believing that John...
He's right. What a run of terrible, terrible, terrible bad luck, not even slightly caused by criminal intent, conspiracy to defraud, launder money, or any one of a number of other criminal activities.
Just terrible, terrible, terrible luck. Poor things, it's the stuff of bleeding hearts.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of all people displaying large(ish) cojones...
http://tinyurl.com/3yy8lj
Part of the intro to that article is very telling indeed and goes some way to explaining quite why journos (the amoral bunch of cunts that they are) -- even those who aren't on the Editorial Intelligence payroll -- repeatedly fail to challenge established orthodoxies:
"For an easy life, some things, you learn, are best left unsaid. Nervous, am I? You bet."
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