"they pretended they had won. So they invented the $5trillion figure"

Peter Oborne explains that Gordon Brown is guilty of telling more Brownies, this time alongside Barack Obama:

"Although Gordon Brown and President Obama had originally hoped to get world leaders to agree to such a 'fiscal stimulus', they actually failed to secure a single penny of extra government spending anywhere in the world.

Rather than admit defeat, however, they pretended they had won. So they invented the $5trillion figure. They arrived at the number by adding up the extra government borrowing expected to take place in

G20 economies between 2008 (when the recession began) and 2010 (when world leaders hope it will end). It is a completely arbitrary figure.

The next fabrication concerns the claim that G20 leaders agreed a 'programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy' - worth some $1.1trillion. It was this headline-grabbing figure which caught everyone's imagination - yet sadly, it too is mainly a bogus number because much of the money had already been pledged in recent months.

Almost half of that $1.1trillion - some $500billion - takes the form of extra money for the International Monetary Fund to bail out countries that run into trouble during the economic downturn.

Although Gordon Brown brazenly asserted that this was new money, this is simply not true. Japan, for example, gave $100billion to the IMF last November, while the EU offered the same sum earlier this year.

...

Next, Gordon Brown claimed that some $250billion has been raised to regenerate world trade with the help of extra finance. Once again, his claim is an invention.

Indeed, the small print of the G20 communique suggests only $3-4billion of new money has been committed, and the $250billion figure is only a vague pledge.

I fear that the more we look beneath the headlines of the London summit, the more its achievements look threadbare. I would estimate that no more than $250billion of the much vaunted $1.1trillion is genuinely new money.

The true story is that Gordon Brown seems to have corralled fellow leaders into perpetrating a gigantic collective fraud on world public opinion."

I am beginning to wonder if the UK and the USA are so dominated by a left-wing media that their government leaders can do what they want, when they want and lie as much as they like without any repercussions. Are we that far along the road to totalitarian government?