Fred The Shred

The pack now turns on Sir Fred Goodwin. It is not hard to see why: he was the CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland during the time it made the business moves that have now unravelled, leading to tens of billions in losses and effective nationalisation.

Now it turns out that Goodwin will not be returning his £693,000 a year pension, despite the revelations regarding the appalling shape he left the bank in.

And I don't blame him.

I don't like him. I despise the casino capitalism he embodied. I even had the misfortune to glimpse the man one day when I was out at the sinister post-fascist headquarters RBS has out at Gogarburn. He was striding along some Roman consul while lesser beings were expected to - literally - move to the side of the path to allow the great man through.

But the fact is that a Government Minister signed off on Goodwin's deal. They knew. So why should he give it back?

When Goodwin was winning at the mortgage-backed securities roulette wheel, Brown, Salmond, the Tories, all of them were queueing up, desperate to be associated with him. Worse than that, they were like those footy slappers who hang around in clubs hoping for some big name star to ream them every which way in a casually abusive fashion then discard them, all so they can tell their mates they were with Big Fred from the RBS Rangers last night.

This whole campaign to pin the blame for EVERYTHING on Goodwin and demand he give back his pension is nothing more than an attempt to disguise the fact that the entire British political establishment is utterly complicit in this financial disaster.

In the greater scheme of things, while I could certainly deal with £693,000 a year for doing sweet fanny adams, I'm a bit more concerned with about the hundreds of billions that seem to be produced every few weeks to chuck at yet another failing bank.

The bottom line is this all happened on Gordon Brown's watch, first as Chancellor, now as Prime Minister.

No matter how much Labour spin, no matter how much they shriek and point the finger at everyone else, that is the simple fact and the voting public knows it.

Sharks - lift your game

After this blog snared the world exclusive about the stingray jihad against Australia, I thought it was time that I addressed the frankly disgusting and unAustralian behaviour of our sharks.

The sharks have been attacking us with some regularity of late.

And it's just not on.

Why can't the sharks be more like the crocodiles, which have the pleasing tendency to only attack tourists? I fully support this behaviour from the great green dinosaurs.

If Pommy backpackers think they can come over here and take our lowly-paid call centre jobs and steal our sunburn, then they've got to accept that any moment a 15 foot long scaly escapee from the Jurassic era might seize them in its bone-crushing jaws, before taking them on a terrifying death roll and then leaving their broken corpse underneath a submerged log in order to putrefy for a few weeks before consuming them in huge barbaric gulps.

That's why I reckon that salt water crocodiles should be introduced to places like Bondi Beach and St Kilda where tourists congregate.

That's one Peter Garrett should be getting onto pronto.

Anyway, we have laws protecting the biggest and meanest of the sharks like the Great Whites. And whenever one of them attacks somebody, we always say things like "Yeah, nah, look, Darren wouldn't want the shark killed, he knew he was in it's environment."

So lift your bloody game and stop attacking us sharks. I appreciate you have to eat. It's pretty much all you do, apart from occasionally menacing underwater cameras and stuff.

But we bring enough tourists to our beaches.

If the crocodiles can content themselves with foreign fare, then you can too, finny denizens of the deep.

Ya basta! And yes I know its not Greek

I have suitably recovered from my birthday which was celebrated in fine style.

At some hungover point I read this fantastic article in The Observer about the recent Greek riots.

It's the kind of stuff that makes you want to put on a balaclava and head out onto the streets to punch on with the coppers.

Comments ...

I have now enabled people to make anonymous comments if they wish.

Go on.

Coming together ...

One thing that shat me about the bushfires at home was the shrill insistence that Australians were fantastic because we 'came together at this time'. FFS - what do you expect us to do?

The difference of course is that this was an unexpected semi-natural disaster.

Things are very different in the economic disaster we are all suffering at various levels.

I defy you to read this piece and not be sickened by the voraciousness of both the American corporate world and many consumers. And don't go kidding yourself that consumers in Australia or Britain would be any different.

Silence, nagging voice ...

So it turns out Jade Goody is really genuinely dying from fancer.

What's fancer you ask? Fanny cancer.

Don't worry, if it was a similar sort of bloke, I'd say nadcer, or cancer-balls, or something.

I must say I'm a bit confused by own reaction to all this. From the very first time I saw her on Big Brother, I found Goody to be the personification of the gobby tabloid ignorance that crystallises the very worst in English culture.

But now as she's literally being eaten away inside at a young age, I'm reconsidering.

To her credit, Goody has never pretended to be anything other than she is: a very 21st Century working class white girl. And she's made more cash than any other Big Brother contestant despite not even winning the show.

She's also as much as a product of us than anything else - she put herself up on the shelf and the British public bought her schtick, however unconscious much of it may be, by the bucketload.

Getting a bit Pseuds Corner, she reminds me of the prole women in 1984. In her completely unself-aware insularity, she manages to reveal the machinations of Inner Party types like Mandelson and their bumbling Outer Party minions like Derek Draper for the hideously contrived bullshit it is.

I can't say I'll actively miss Goody when she shuffles off into the great Diary Room in the sky in a few months time but then - hey! - thousands of people die an hour and I don't grieve for them either.

But I certainly don't dislike her anymore and I have to admit to a grudging respect. You got dealt a shit hand in life Jade - with the crackhead Mum and all - and you played it pretty well.

May your journey be swift and the WKD Blue flowing wherever you end up.

Shoichi Nakagawa ...

Can't say I blame Japan's Finance minister for wanting to get on the sauce.

His country is spiralling into depression only a few short years after emerging from the Lost decade of deflation and general misery.

In fact, having now had the misfortune to be close to a few politicians, I'm firmly of the belief that it is the shiny eyed mega-keener types, usually those who have never had a real job outside student then party politics, who very rarely drink, that are the one's we should be afraid of.

Hitler was teetotal after all.

With the world turning to shit, what we need is one of those big piss ons where you all sit around putting the world to rights and often come up with some decent ideas.

Just remember to get someone to take notes or tape it so we can gingerly begin implementing it in the morning.

Schadenfraude is good ...

As you have hopefully worked out, this blog is about The Age of Obama. It's developing slowly this age and it tends to have problems with not having paid its taxes back in the day.

However, I did have a good old cynical chuckle this morning reading about the travails of the filthy little gangster port that is Dubai.

If ever a place came to symbolise everything that was bad about The Age of George Bush, it was Dubai: a vile temple to casino capitalism built both literally and figuratively on the unstable sands of debt and Middle East power politics.

I hope the entire place goes bankrupt and gets sold off to the Kiwis or something.

Heaven knows those poor little buggers need a helping hand now everyone's forgotten about Lord Of The Rings.

I wish ...

I wish I could be a climate change sceptic. It sounds like the thing I'd be right into and pretty bloody good at too. It ticks all the boxes for the kind of stuff I normally despise: quasi religious fervour of adherents, involvement of drippy gullible types, figurehead like The Amazingly Lifelike Al Gore.

God, I wish I could bring myself to think that climate change is a big scam. But it isn't.

There are of course lots of scammers out there making big bucks off it. In this regard, its much like The Millenium Bug, or Y2K, albeit that climate change is 'realerer' than that. Some of the hyperbole around climate change is patently designed to seperate fools from their money.

Global Adaptation Solutions salesman: Did you know when sea levels rise by 1000 feet next year because of CLIMATE CHANGE, your whole business will be wiped out and your 16 year old daughter forced to become a hooker in order to feed the family?

Gullible businessman: Oh noes!1!!. Whatever can I do to avoid this awful outcome? Tell me, O seer, O Great Sage.

GAS salesman: The only way to escape this is to sign up all your staff to our bespoke Surviving The Coming Climate Catastrophe: How Your Business Can Prosper In The Apocalypse training sessions. Only £795.95 per staff member per session. Each module contains 17 sessions. It is recommended that all staff complete at least 5 modules. Or otherwise middle management types on business trips will be bending your lovely daughter over a Holiday Inn breakfast table at £70 a turn.

Laugh as you may, but effectively this is what many in the climate change industry are doing.

The problem is climate change is real. It is happening. But not in the ways that are easily digestible into soundbites or sales pitches. Global temperatures are rising, but not uniformly. Some parts of the world, in North America and Europe, may actually be getting colder, while the south eastern corner of Australia is apparentley now locked in perpetual drought.

If temperatures in Melbourne rise by 4 degrees above average and those in Chicago drop by 1, then that is still a rise of three degrees from the average. (I think, maths never being my strong suit, but you get the idea.)

People in some parts of the world will not be too adversely affected by climate change probably for many decades to come. Some are feeling it already. As always, the poor will feel it most and first. Even in rich Melbourne, the suburbs that burned were those on the fringe of the city where people on low incomes have been forced because of indecent property price surges.

It is an old truism but we are very much like the frogs in the pot of water, with the temperature rising and us not feeling it untril it is too late.

Thanks America

The US and Australia have a very close relationship when bushfires strike. Every northern summer when California burns, we send firefighters and equipment over there and they do the same when we are hit hard. It's a good thing and must be supported.

But one influence we can do without is the fundamentalist brand of evangelical Protestant Christianity developed in the US and now exported here.

One of the most extreme examples in the US of this tendency is Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. Phelps has a quite unhealthy obsession with what gay types get up in their day-to-day lives and has become convinced that because the US 'tolerates and encourages' the 'sin' of homosexuality, all bad things that happen there are divine retribution.

He even pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan with charming signs like those above.

Now the Australian wing of this movement - mega churches, babbling in tongues, DONATE NOW! - is getting in on the act.

One of the biggest churches, the badly-named Catch The Fire Ministry, issued a statement claming that access to abortion in Victoria is the reason for the fires.

“In my dream I saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably. With this I woke up from my dream with the interpretation as the following words came to me in a flash from the Spirit of God.

That His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb.”

“We at CTFM have spent the last few days in prayer and weeping, watching the news and learning that more than 170 people have perished and more than 750 houses have gone up in flames with much property and personal belongings of people all wiped out within hours,” he said.

Firebugs

Thinking about the fires at home, especially the fact that so many were deliberately lit - and some apparentley re-lit after being put out - is immensely distressing and frustrating.

So I have taken some solace in this picture of a firefighter giving some water to a koala.

The future is now ...

It is qute a bizarre experience siting in a chilly living room in Edinburgh watching places you know and have been burning amid an unprecedented heatwave.

Last week four consective days above 43 degrees left the area surrounding my home city of Melbourne scorched tinder dry, giant fields of kindling and basted grass just waiting for a spark. Today it was 46 degrees, with gusting winds: like living in a fan forced oven.

When the fires started, and sadly it is likely that some were deliberately lit, the result was an instantaneous cauldron of flam moving at speeds of 60kmh.

While the loss of life - police are estimating at the moment that 40 people are dead - is awful, we do have to face the fact that such fires are part and parcel of Australian life. And we are making the situation worse.

Just like if you swim in t waters off the coast of Victoria, you need to be aware that there are 6m Great Whites in those same seas, thus, if you are going to live in the bush in south eastern Australia, you need to be prepared for fires.

And if the Victorian Government is content to let 1500 people a week move to Melbourne and for the city's suburbs to expand ever further outward, then it has to accept the fact that more people and houses will be placed in the fire danger zone.

Melbourne is expanding too fast and the lack of infrastructure, from transport to the ability to provide enough water, is becoming more and more apparent.

Still a great city though.

The race to the bottom

Protectionism is the new black.

British jobs for British workers says Brown. America first said Obama, before having to withdraw the statement under pressure - laughably hypocritical pressure - from the EU.

British Labour, led by Gordon Brown, is deeply complicit in all this. The anti-foreigner strikes here make plain their cause: you said British jobs for British workers Mr Brown the placards read, let's see them.

But thankfully, some rump elements of British - more accurately English - Labour, refuse still to sign upto the neo-liberal divide and rule agenda.

Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas realises the danger of Brown's imbecilic soundbites - his constituency already has a strong BNP presence. But as a real Labour MP, he knows these strikes are not about racism per se, but are actually a reaction to the economic ultra-liberalism that has allowed unfettered movements of workers and crucially, capital.

It's worth a read

The real danger on the far right comes not from the security services penetrated and controlled BNP, but from a movement and vitally - charismatic - leader we don't know about yet. This depression will be long and hard. There is plenty of time for such a creature to evolve yet. The question is how ugly and savage it will be.

Doesn't scare me

On the Beeb last night the story about the Iranians launching their first communications satellite led with the line that the move led to "grave concern in the West".

I am as Western as they come and I'm not concerned. Not one little bit. I'm not even concerned about the Iranians getting a nuke. The best way to stop the Iranian nuclear program would be to demand that the Israelis open up their own nuclear stockpile to international inspection. But that'll never happen for obvious reasons - hello Obama chief of staff and IDF volunteer Rahm Emanuel among others.

So instead we have to put up with this drivel about Iran being a nuclear threat when Israel's fundamental defence strategy relies on The Samson Option - put simply, if they think they are in deep trouble, they'll blow up with the world with them, thus, we better save them.

Even if the Iranians do get a nuclear bomb and the means to deliver it, I'm still not concerned. The doctrine of MAD means that they'll never use it. They might be Muslim but they aren't crazy.

I am concerned about the treatment of women in Iran, it's capital punishment policy and many other issues.

But then, I'm concerned about what goes inside plenty of nuclear armed Western democracies too.

Most of all though, I'm just sick and tired of this relentless, baseless scaremongering about Iran. We're not idiots.

They wouldn't - would they?

Well, well, well. From the file marked Tres Convenient we learn today that the official election register from last year's Glenrothes by-election has been 'lost'.

We only know this because the Scottish Nationalists, who were as surprised as everyone at the 7000 vote margin of the by-election, demanded access to said register after their activists on the ground the night of the vote expressed concern at the amount of late registrations for postal votes in the election.

Some analysts suggest that Labour received 400 per cent more postal votes - which are notoriously easy to fake - in the by-election than they did for the same seat in the General Election held only two years earlier. That's a lot of people on holiday at once.

And, as the Nats know, Labour has form on vote rigging using postals. It's been demonstrated in a court of law.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Glenrothes to Labour. They'd just lost another safe Labour seat - Glasgow East - to the Nats, had lost Crewe and Nantwich to the Tories in England and Brown was on the ropes. The word in the corridors suggested that if Glenrothes went, the bloke who held the neighbouring seat, one G.Brown, was going with it.

Am I saying Labour rigged the by-election? No. Am I saying it that it is a distinct possibility? Yes. Yes, I am. An inquiry, now launched, must be thorough and swift.

There's two main reasons why I'm suspcious. Brown broke with convention and campaigned in the seat numerous times and even sent the missus out to knock on doors. He simply couldn't afford to lose.

More tellingly, the Nationalist apparatchiks on the day were briefing that the election would be nail bitingly close: a margin of about 500 votes either way was their call. And they'd been on the money with such predictions in Glasgow East and the Scottish Parliament elections before that. It's hard to believe they'd be so spectacularly wrong in this case.

But still, politics is funny game.

I mean, who would have thought Her Majesty's Government would rip a PHD students thesis off the Internet and misrepresent it in order to dupe MPs into voting for the illegal invasion of Iraq?

Still, what does that prove? Everything and nothing in equal measure.

Behold the monobrow!

Was watching the Liverpool v Chelsea game on Sunday and couldn't but notice Chelsea's right back Jose Bosingwa and his mighty monobrow.

Look at it. It is quite amazing, like he has shaved a riverboat gambler's moustache and stuck it just above the ridge of his brow.

If you look closely at his designer stubble, you can see the sideburns reach right up his face. If he wanted to, he could affect a look where his monobrow and sideburns become one. That would be pretty cool. Like a reverse Craig David.

This is how it starts ...

Eric Blair would have liked the headlines in the papers at the moment:

The Observer talks about the creation of a People's Bank.

The ever cheerful Daily Mail demands British jobs for British workers.

There is a simple political term for what is happening in this cold rainswept island off the northwest coast of Europe. It is called National Socialism.

The state is expanding to the point where it has become the economy. Financial services, which used to be 'the engine of our prosperity' - yeah, I can't write that with a straight face either - are now centrally planned in the most Soviet sense of the word.

Civil liberties are being eroded daily. Soldiers die in a far off war every week for reasons no-one can really articulate other than we need to be fighting 'them'. Support our boys on the Malabar front. And now the Government is goading us to blame them foreigners with their garlicky breath and weirdo Polish names made up entirely of consonants for all our difficulties.

And this is only February. What's it going to be like in six months time, when people realise the economy is in genuine depression and not going to recover any time soon?