Motor Racing And Gallery Motor

Former Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini recently admitted that NATO aggression against Serbia (March 24 — June 10, 1999) had nothing to do with the alleged humanitarian concerns — NATO bombed Serbia for three months because the United States and Britain wanted to have a military base on its territory.

Dini said Serbian officials would have signed the ultimatum issued by the West at the conference in Rambouillet, if it had excluded only one word.

- The problem was only one adjective. It would have been sufficient for Serbia if the document excluded the word "military" and left only the "international presence" in Kosovo, but the U.S. insisted on NATO getting an opportunity to enter the province - Dini explained.

You can read more on this story over at Svetlana’s brilliant new anti-war website De(Construct).net

Next time you read a commentator in the MSM talk about NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Kosovo, just email them the link.

It’s time to set the ‘official’ record straight.

POINT OF CLARIFICATION: The country which NATO illegally bombed in 1999 was of course called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and not Serbia, which did not exist as a sovereign state at that time. But I've kept 'Serbia' in the account above because it was the word used by the Lamberto Dini.

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With every passing day of economic woe, the scale of the heist just perpetrated against America's taxpayers by the country's largest banks becomes more apparent.

In the shadow of the presidential election, the nine biggest banks were given $125bn of taxpayer money with the understanding they would send this fresh capital coursing into the economy in the form of loans.

Unfortunately, the US government forgot to get the lending requirement in writing.

Instead, the banks are sitting on the money, earning interest and mulling mergers and acquisitions and replenishing bonus pools for their employees.

writes Philip Delves Broughton in today's First Post.

If you are an American taxpayer, (and I know that around 25% of this blog's readership is US-based), I'm afraid you've been the victims of what Delves Broughton rightly calls the biggest bank heist ever.

The biggest bank robbers don't wear stripey jerseys, black masks and carry bags marked 'Swag'; they wear suits and hobnob with the political elite.

Or, as Berthold Brecht so memorably put it: "What is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?"

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"Obama will not win the presidency: America will have been made to feel sufficiently good about itself simply by his nomination and the way it responds to him as a candidate not to feel the need to put him in the White House. America will decide that in such dangerous times, it must choose the wise older leader, the war hero, the statesman who talks about foreign policy and national security with real authority."
Janet Daley, Daily Telegraph, January 2008

"For what it is worth, I think it will be a close presidential race with the favourite, Obama, winning by a squeak."
Janet Daley, Daily Telegraph, November 2008.

Well, I hope you took my advice and headed down your local bookies to bet on an Obama landslide. If Daley, the world's worst pundit, said that Obama would win by a squeak, we knew for sure he'd win at a canter.

'The scale of Obama's victory exceeded Democratic expectations' reports The Guardian as the man Ms Daley assured us "will not win the Presidency" recorded the most emphatic win in a US Presidential election for two decades.

It's great to see the uber neocon McCain/Palin combo suffer such a heavy defeat. The American people have delivered a damning verdict on the past eight years- and disastrous neoconservative/neoliberal policies pursued by Bush and Cheney.

But while public opinion in America (and Britain too for that matter) has undoubtedly shifted to the left, neocon/neoliberal voices are (scandalously) still disproportionately represented in both countries mainstream media. Expect that to change over the next couple of years: people will simply stop reading columnists- and the newspapers they write for, if they consistently tell them things that they know not to be true (such as 'unregulated free market capitalism is good for everyone'; 'Barack Obama is a hard-line socialist' and 'soft' on terror, or that Russian and Iran pose 'a grave threat' to the west).

With their ridiculous attacks on Obama and bellicose pro-war rhetoric, uber neocon writers like Janet Daley, William Kristol and Melanie Phillips are totally out of step with the new spirit of the age. They've been proved wrong on virtually everything they've written about over the past ten years and their moment has well and truly passed.

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I know he's not a 'socialist', as Simon Heffer ludicrously claims. I know that his plans for extending health care are not as comprehensive as they should be. And I know that he's not the Messiah.

But nevertheless, it has to be Obama.

And the reason why? Well, as American divorcee Mary Treadwell (played so memorably by the late Vivien Leigh) says in the clip above from that wonderful, wonderful, film Ship of Fools, "in life if you can't get what you want, you'd better damn well settle for what you can get".

I'd like to see an unequivocally and unapologetically socialist, anti-war US President, someone who would give Americans the same universal state health care system that we enjoy here in Britain. A President who would pull US troops out of both Iraq and Afghanistan and announce that the US would henceforth only act in full accordance with international law.

But we can't get that at present so we need to settle for what we can get.

And that's Barack Obama. And what is Barack Obama's main attraction? Simply that he isn't John McCain. Make no mistake, a McCain presidency would be a nightmare.

Scott McConnell, the leading US paleo-conservative, explains why:

John McCain wants to bring them(the neocons) back, in triumph, on horseback.

Unlike Bush, McCain is a neocon true believer; Wilsonian bellicosity has visceral appeal for him. A McCain victory would mean, in short order, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Joshua Muravchik, a candid and well-connected neoconservative whom I’ve known for 25 years, affirmed this unequivocally at a Nixon Center debate last month. Iran is now the principal neoconservative obsession—as it is for Israel’s hawks, who ludicrously paint Tehran as Nazi Berlin. McCain jokes about bombing Iran, but the consequences would not be amusing. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs, has warned that an Israeli strike would put American forces in Iraq at grave risk. If America bombs, the consequences would be worse. As Secretary of Defense Gates warned a group of senators recently, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.”

That’s not all. Top McCain advisers like Robert Kagan seek to reignite a Cold War with Russia: Kagan recently told a Washington audience he wouldn’t want to live in a world in which Russia had a preponderance of influence over Georgia. Elliott Abrams, son-in-law of Norman “World War IV” Podhoretz, is reportedly in line to head McCain’s National Security Council. As a Bush appointee, he’s worked at stymieing the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Expect a McCain administration to back the Netanyahu policy of turning the West Bank into isolated bantustans instead of a Palestinian state.

For these reasons, I’m voting for Obama. While he doesn’t inspire me, he does impress. His two-year campaign has been disciplined and intelligent…..If elected, he will inherit an office burdened with massive financial and foreign-policy problems. Unlike John McCain, he won’t try to bomb his way out of the mess.

Well, we don't know for sure that Obama won't 'try to bomb his way out of the mess'.
But he's certainly less likely to do so than John 'Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran' McCain and for that reason alone he has to get the nod.

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Not content with writing the most repulsive anti-Obama smear piece back in the summer, when she penned the lines:

"His problem is not so much that he is an African-American in the modern political sense of being a black American. It is that he is an African-American in the literal sense of being half African and only half American."

the Daily Telegraph's uber neocon columnist has now submitted an article so silly it even makes 'Mad' Mel Phillips' offerings on Obama look relatively sane (and that is saying a hell of a lot).

Daley has spent the entire year throwing all the usual neocon insults at Obama- ie he's soft on 'terror', he's a luxury the 'free world' cannot afford etc etc; now she's turning her attention to the damage Comrade Barack would do the US economy with his terrible plans to 'spread the wealth'.

"There is another facet of Obama taxation with even more serious consequences for the US. In order to pay for his tax cut for 95 per cent of the population (half of whom do not pay income tax and whose "cut" would be in the form of a cash rebate), President Obama and his Democratic Congress would raise the US rate of corporation tax - already the second highest in the world - from 15 to 20 per cent. They also plan to punish through taxation companies that employ people overseas rather than "creating American jobs".

Wow, how revolutionary! How Marxist! Raising corporation tax to 20%! Using the taxation system to encouraging firms to employ people in America and not in Indonesian sweat shops! What a catastrophe that would be for ordinary American people!

As to what will happen in tomorrow's election, Daley predicts:

For what it is worth, I think it will be a close presidential race with the favourite, Obama, winning by a squeak

It's rather different to what she was predicting earlier this year:

Obama will not win the presidency: America will have been made to feel sufficiently good about itself simply by his nomination and the way it responds to him as a candidate not to feel the need to put him in the White House.
The popular, if not the electoral college, vote will be close but America will decide that in such dangerous times, it must choose the wise older leader, the war hero, the statesman who talks about foreign policy and national security with real authority.

Then again, predictions are not really Ms Daley's strong point.

This is after all the same journalist who labelled the moral case against the Iraq war to be "at best naive, at worst idiotic" and who believed (please, no sniggering at the back), the existence of WMDs to have been established by Blair's dossier.

Now, having told us emphatically that 'Obama will not win the Presidency', Daley thinks he'll win 'by a squeak'.

You know what that means, folks.

Get down your local bookies and put a bet on an Obama landslide.

NEWS FLASH: Janet Daley's Daily Telegraph colleague Simon Heffer has made a last-gasp attempt to grab the 'Silliest Anti-Obama article of the Year Award' with this ridiculous offering.
Heffer writes:

He has been branded a socialist by Sarah Palin and, because it was Sarah Palin doing the branding, the term was ridiculed by media here who are almost clinically biased against the Republicans. However, when one examines Mr Obama's rhetoric about "spreading the wealth", and looks at spending promises made in the past 21 months, socialism is a fair term. He plans, or at least has promised, expensive projects - such as healthcare reforms.

As questionnaire says in the comments to this post, it really doesn't take much to be labelled a 'Marxist' these days. Or a 'socialist' either, as far as Daley & Heffer are concerned.

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The late, great Dr Erich Fromm (above) lambasted the way that in ultra-materialistic capitalist societies we talk of how much human brings are 'worth' in monetary terms.

I wonder what Fromm would have made of this truly disgusting report in the Daily Telegraph on the new world motor racing champion Lewis Hamilton.

Lewis Hamilton will be bigger than David Beckham, says Max Clifford

Lewis Hamilton will very soon be bigger than David Beckham, public relations experts predicted as the racing driver sealed the 2008 Formula One World Championship in Brazil.

He is currently thought to be worth around £15 million, according to Auto Trader's Motoring Rich List - less than half that of fellow British F1 driver Jenson Button.

Mr Clifford said: "He is going to be bigger than David Beckham, because he is only 23 and motor racing is even more lucrative than football.

"If you were to chose a sport from a purely financial point of view, motor racing would have to be number one."

He continued: "Lewis Hamilton is young, he is obviously talented and he is a good looking fellow, so you have a perfect recipe for sponsorship."

Becoming world champion would transform him into a household name in Britain and around the world, he said.

"We don't have many world champions, so the media here will become even more crazy about him that they already are," he said.

"That will just add to his worth."


Many congratulations to Lewis Hamilton on winning the World Championship. But wouldn't it be nice, if instead of talking about how many millions of pounds he is now 'worth', we simply lauded his achievement?

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After this latest fiasco is there anyone (apart from the loonies at the Adam Smith Institute), still willing to argue that the increased involvement of the private sector in the business of government has led to greater efficiency?

As I wrote in the First Post back in August, after the latest loss of confidential data by a private contractor:

It is logical to assume that the more outside agencies that handle government data, the greater the likelihood of it getting lost. But logic, it seems, goes out of the window where Britain's political elite and their blind attachment to neo-liberal dogma is concerned.

If like me, you feel that 'enough is enough' and that it's time to call a halt to Britain's disastrous twenty-nine year obsession with privatisation, then there's a newly formed pressure group just for you.

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