Tag Archives: Scotland

Think of this Scotland before you vote.

15 Monday Sep 2014

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What did the big bail out cost the poor tax payer.

Ireland total cost of the bailout to more than €70bn,

AIB will require an additional €13.3bn.

– Bank of Ireland will require €5.2bn.

– ESB will require €1.5bn.

– Irish Life & Permanent (IL&P) will require €4bn.

UK government bailed the banks out to the tune of £123.93bn, and at its peak had liabilities for the banking crisis of £1.2 trillion.

Greece, 166 billion euros in bailout loans,

The USA taxpayers give them an astonishing $83bn subsidy every year.

Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion

The Fed paid $659.4 million in “fees” to these very same institutions during the period in question. This is not part of the bailout.

OK. So now we have the full picture, right? no wrong!

Officials at the European Commission confirmed plans for a new “financial instrument” based on an existing £42billion. At present, the fund – known as the Balance of Payment Facility – exists to provide emergency loans to non-eurozone EU nations. More than £9billion has already been lent to Latvia, ­Hungary and Romania. Now officials want to extend the scheme to include financial institutions such as banks. The fact is that many banks throughout Europe today have a zombie existence where they continue to exist, attempt to draw in savings, that they cannot get, by offering deposit rates, significantly below the rate of inflation, and live in an existence where they have money to pay staff but yet cannot afford to make loans to support businesses. The banks continue to trade, annually they must increase fees and yet they continue to record annual losses. Their losses are usually met by state guaranteed loans and those states seek daily to extricate themselves from their obligations to these banks.

The bailout enslaved us to the big banks more than ever before creating a “moral hazard”

Next time you hear someone say an independent Scotland could not have afforded the banking bail out, remember how the US Federal Reserve bailed out Barclay’s to the tune of £552.32bn.  It is a fact that the contribution of an independent Scotland’s taxpayers to any bank bail-out that may or may not have been required in an independent Scotland would have been the same as it has been with Scotland part of the UK.

Ask them if they think Scotland would have made the same bank regulation mistakes as the city of London led Westminster government?

In the case of Barclay’s, it fell to the US to support the bank because they were one of the single largest purchasers of US Government debt, so the problem was the US Government’s, not the UK taxpayer’s alone. The US intervened so that its debt market didn’t collapse and to prevent broader consequences for America’s economy and society.

The UK Government bail out of RBS and HBOS amounted to £65bn. That’s a lot of money, but the US Federal Reserve made emergency loans available to RBS of £285bn and to HBOS of £115bn.

The US bailed out these UK banks too, in the same way as Scottish taxpayers contributed to liquidity support for international banks based in London (including American ones).

The whole shindig was a redistribution of money from the poor to the rich.

Just Look at what a mere 25 billion could do.

Serious: Not Serious. 

Buy enough malaria nets to protect the entire malaria-affected population of the world (half a billion people) for 80 years (based on Nothing But Nets figures of $10 a net)

Completely fund the World Food Program for five years.

Repair twice over the damage done to Haiti in the recent earthquake.

Fund enough clean water and infrastructure projects to meet the millennium Development Goals.

Buy up and extinguish the national debt of Bangladesh.

Fund the UNESCO “Information for All” Project for 1200 years.

Provide food aid to Niger for 1000 years.

Asphalt every trunk and regional road (110,000km) of substandard road in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here is what they could have done with in Ireland.

Research & develop 5000 new drugs….one of em’s bound to be useful.

Construct 6 Large Hadron Colliders one all 7 green party TD

Build 5 James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to Hubble), and revolutionist astronomy.

Pay the interest on everyone’s mortgage for 4 years (€147bn of mortgages at 4% is €5.88bn a year)

Abolish income tax for two years (based on 2009 gov income tax receipts of €11.8bn)

Offer everyone on the live register €100,000 to emigrate (we could afford a 50% take-up by the 466,000 on the dole)

Fly the adult population of Ireland to Las Vegas, give everyone 10k to gamble with.

Abolish VAT for two and a half years (based on 2009 receipts of €10.8bn)

Remove excise duty from fuel, tobacco and alcohol until 2015 (based on excise receipts of €4.7bn a year)

Pay the grocery bills of everybody in the country for 2.5 years.

Give every person in the country €5,555.56

Buy half a million eco-friendly Nissan Leaf cars and have enough for a 5GW nuclear power station with the cash left over.

Provide a new laptop every year to every second level student for 147 years.

Buy a 32GB iPhone, a 64GB iPad, a 13″ 2.13GHz MacBook Air and a 27-inch iMac for every man, woman and child living in Ireland.

Buy a pint of Guinness for everyone in the world to celebrate Arthur’s Day (and it would count as exports)

Scrap all fares on all forms of public transport, intercity and commuter trains and buses for 33 years.

Send 225,000 people to do the Harvard MBA.

Buy the world’s 20 most valuable soccer clubs, worth €9.6bn, wipe their debt (€2.3bn) and move them to Ireland, building each a 75,000-seater stadium (€600m each, based off cost of Aviva stadium)

Host two Olympics games, based on the London 2012 cost of €11.2bn.

Give each one of the 10,000 most senior bankers a round of golf on old head Kinsale, the most expensive course in Europe, every day for 20 years, and hope that they come up with some ideas!Buy over one-third of Denmark, 10% of France or three Luxembourg, based on 2008 land costs.

Buy over one-third of Denmark, 10% of France or three Luxembourg, based on 2008 land costs.

Purchase carbon credits to allow us to burn 3000 sq miles of hardwood forest.

Send 833 people into space (or perhaps just 1666 one way trips…)

Build 1,000 km of high-speed rail, serving all major coastal cities on the island (based on recent costs in Spain)

Build 75 brand new 50-teacher schools and run them for 75 years.

Build 35 new Children’s Hospitals (based on €700m cost of new Children’s Hospital in Dublin)

Pay for cervical cancer vaccines for every girl going into 1st year for the next 8333 years.

Pay for an extra 5,000 hospital consultants for 62.5 years, based on Finnish wage.

Introduce free pre-schooling for 32 years, based on an average cost of €700 a month for two years of 10 months, for all 110,000 children in the country.

Give medical cards to everyone, for 25 years based on €500m cost in 2009 to cover 1.5m people.

Make education properly free – the current cost from primary school to degree graduation is €70,000 per child. €25bn would bring nearly 400,000 students through their entire education.

Or Ireland could buy one broken bank…oh, hang on…..

I could go on and on.

If I were Scottish there is no answer but YES.YES. YES.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ Nationhood is a Changing.

13 Saturday Sep 2014

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Here we are once again writing about a subject that in this part of the world will be put to the test next week – When Scotland goes to the poll – In or out.

What exactly are the Scots being asked to determining.?  Are they being asked as who its citizens are whether modern or traditional, European or non-European.

Or are they having an independent Scotland’s moment, giving concrete form to the tricky question of ‘who are the Scots’?

Or !  If creativity is not grounded in the soul, then reality is reduced only to the quantifiable parameters of markets and money; and with that, politics gets reduced only to the question of whether Scotland will be better or worse off with or without England until the oil runs out.

Now let me say that no writer writes in a vacuum but in this case that is exactly what I am doing because I believe that a nation is a soul of forgotten voices, a spiritual principle.

But in reality nationhood is often defined in terms of commonness of culture, language, history, ethnicity, religion and spirit.

The terms nation, nationhood, nationality seem to have become distant at a time when globalization, multiculturalism, intercultural or cross-cultural communication define the way we live with respect to ourselves, the others and the environment on the whole. This becomes usually more emphatic in times of hardships for a country, especially during foreign invasion.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori once summoned together people of different age and background to defend one’s country and culture.

So lets ask the question.

In the world as we know it to-day what do you think constitutes a nation or nationhood.? ( If your brave enough lets hear your views)

The world today is demarcated by borders according to the positioning of sovereign states of nations. Despite this, this sense of commonness as defined above is hard to maintain in present day society, when social, economic, demographic, technological and other developments take place in an eye shut.

Thus, in the present society a new feeling of commonness appears to define nation, nationality and nationhood. It is the attempt to balance “civic citizenship” against “cultural citizenship”

Nations are not naturally occurring phenomenon and nationalism pursues a behavioral entity of the nation.

Nations are basically fabrications and constructions perceived in the minds of ‘man’. the nation is an ‘imagined political community.

Another words the nation is now an exchange of cultures, and the erasure of borders and boundaries have given way to a globalized world in which all cultures negotiate.

Cohesive elements are provided by language, religion, shared historical experiences, physical congruity and others.

Nations can exist with or without a distinct political identity, that a ‘nation’ is the product and is born out of the birth of ‘Capitalism’,especially ‘print capitalism’ that enables the dissemination, development and spread of the imagination and subjective awareness in raising the feelings of ‘togetherness’,‘belongingness’ and the inclusive ‘we’, in the bond of world consumerism.

This type of cultures have slowly eroded our Western and Eastern culture in an attempt to fused our culture, to give birth to hybrids and mutants.

We need to start by asking the much deeper question of what we think that life is all about. What is a human being? Are we just egos walking about on legs of meat, here today, gone tomorrow?

While many of the broader discussions of globalization and regionalisation convey an air of inevitability, most neither advocate nor address the vexed issues raised by the free flow of people.

What, then, does the Nation or Nationhood mean to ordinary people?

Nationalism’ is a sentiment of loyalty towards the nation, which is shared by people, inherited blinkers of race and religion, what we call ‘loyalty to truth and beauty, justice and freedom or is the project to make the political unit, the state (or polity) congruent with the cultural unit, the nation.

A good example is the Current state of affairs  in Syria, Iraq with a violent secessionist movements in the form of ISIS trying to create a Muslim State.

Instead of living in harmony as most imagined nations around the world, this Lot of barbaric wankers want to create a nation with its roots in fear, suspicion and hatred of the other.

While in Europe, North America, Soviet Union and the UK there is a growing backlash against immigration and multiculturalism.  Nationalism and its xenophobic correlates continue to flourish to no avail  because flows of transnational migration will unseated the nation-state as the dominant form of political organization in the world today due to Inequality and Poverty, and Greed.

To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people, a Nation.  Long live free Scotland.

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