US Waves Goodbye To Triple-A Credit Rating

Reuters UK brings us the inevitable news of credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgrading of United States debt from its prized triple-A position to AA-plus, citing concerns with the government’s budget deficit and rising debt burden.

As I recounted yesterday, the recent U.S. deal on raising the debt ceiling and supposedly reducing the deficit and debt was a calculated fraud. Instead, the U.S. will increase its borrowing and spending, albeit at a slightly slower rate than projected.

Commenting on the announcement, Republican Senator, Jim DeMint of South Carolina observed very much the same, saying:

The deal Congress just passed over conservative objections has already had its obvious effect, the loss of America’s credibility around the world. The deal was not a serious attempt to solve our spending and debt problem, it was a political solution meant to kick the can down the road. The only real solution to our spending and debt crisis was Cut, Cap & Balance that the president rejected out of hand.

The announcement by Standard & Poor’s was largely expected with the agency having placed the U.S. credit rating under review on the 14th of July. It is therefore unlikely to have much on an immediate impact on the markets. However, the long term implications for the United States and the world economy could be far reaching.

The Chinese, who are currently the biggest single creditor to the United States, were immediately critical of U.S. debt reduction steps (or lack thereof), and called for the creation of a new, stable global reserve currency. The country’s official news agency, Xinhua, said:

The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone.

China has also strongly urged the United States to cut military and social welfare expenditure, warning that further credit downgrades would very likely undermine world economic recovery and trigger a new round of financial turmoil.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s great Europhile, Mark Mardell has been asking whether the separated system of Government in the United States is to blame for the financial crisis, and wondering if ‘the system itself may not be fit for purpose’.

Much like his former colleagues in the EU, Mark is rather adverse to actual opposition. In their world, the ‘dysfunctional’ government he claims the U.S. system produced has led to the prevention (mainly, in his eyes, by the Republicans and the Tea party) of a serious and unified agreement on the future of the dollar and the United States economy. If everyone would only just agree (or be given no choice in the matter) then the country could easily sort out its economic troubles in a flash – just like the EU. Oh no, wait..!

Still, we in Britain do not have the same system of Government as the United States, so I’m sure we have nothing to worry about. Our economy is so safe in fact that our MPs are able to spend time on much more important business…

Behind The Scenes

We have by now all seen grainy, shaky footage of the violence that has erupted in Tibet within the past week. Yet, as with so many events observed by us at distance, there is far more to this than first meets the eye.

During his recent column in The Sunday Telegraph, Christopher Booker highlighted how our Government (the EU Commission) has become involved in actively colluding with the Chinese authorities to deny aid relief in Tibet. Booker tells us:

On the country’s northern edge, six months of snow and record low temperatures have created a catastrophe in the Chinese province of Chingai. According to China’s official news agency, 500,000 animals have died and three million people face starvation. When a similar if much smaller crisis 10 years ago hit Ladakh, in northern Kashmir, thousands of lives were saved by the expert intervention of a British charity, ApTibet, working with the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Relief Committee.

It should be noted at this point that we have seen extraordinarily low temperatures across the globe this winter ranging from blizzards in Texas to snow carpeting Jerusalem, Damascus and Amman – all of which Christopher Booker has actually reported on in previous weeks. However, as Booker observed at the time, this has gone ‘virtually unreported in Britain’. This of course strongly and vividly contrasts with reporting from the BBC and many other British news agencies which persist in predicting global warming disaster and catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.

Once again regarding Tibet, one would have thought that right now the charity work carried out by ApTibet would be vital and much appreciated by the international community. Not so in the European Union. Booker continues by informing us that:

Two years ago, after China and Europe became ‘strategic partners’ under an agreement signed by Tony Blair, the EU’s acting president, in December 2005, the Commission suspended ApTibet’s operations because of its link to the Dalai Lama. Since then, it has done all it can to close the charity down…

The whole Booker column is well worth reading, as he describes the way in which the European Union has attempted to bankrupt ApTibet by suspending outstanding contracts with the agency and calling for immediate repayment of funds that it had readily given before the 2005 Blair agreement with China. Booker ends by commenting that:

Doubtless in Beijing, the EU’s ‘strategic partners’ are happy. Meanwhile, its troops are again shooting at Tibetans in the streets of Lhasa, while to the north, three million people are starving, without any hope of assistance from the outside world.

Of little surprise is the fact that you just don’t hear about this on the BBC or indeed from any other British news outlet. Research and analysis would be required to reach these conclusions – something that modern media is none too fond of; that, and it doesn’t fit the ‘official’ narrative of events.

More Unwanted EU Meddling

Not content to constantly interfere and meddle in just our lives in this part of the world; the EU has recently taken to interfering in the politics and remit of other international nations.

In August, the EU Commission sent a message to the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, strongly urging him to abolish the death penalty in his state and cease all future executions of those on death row.

The Commission’s note stated that, ‘There is no evidence to suggest that the use of the death penalty serves as a deterrent against violent crime and the irreversibility of the punishment means that miscarriages of justice, which are inevitable in all legal systems, cannot be redressed.’

Apart from there being plenty of evidence to suggest that the death sentence acts as a very good deterrent of violent crime and murder, what exactly has the legal process and laws of a self-governing state such as Texas got to do with the European Union? Not much is the answer.

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