Freedom Cheaper than Iraq War 764

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A particularly mendacious lie by Danny Alexander puts the institutional start-up costs of Scottish Independence at £1.5 billion.  That is a cool half billion pounds cheaper than Scotland’s share of the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars, even on the Westminster government’s blatant under-estimate of the war costs.

So Scotland can afford criminal invasions killing hundreds of thousands to ‘bring freedom’, but cannot afford the smaller cost of its own freedom!!!

The £1.5 billion estimate is mendacious in two ways.  Firstly, it is a simple recycling of a Canadian lie at the time of the Quebec independence referendum, apportioning with no argument 1% of GDP to startup costs.

Secondly, as nearly all the money will be spent in Scotland it is not a loss at all, but actually an increase to GDP, as any but the most nutty neo-con would be forced to acknowledge.  And it would be the precursor of government money spent annually in Scotland rather than England for ever thereafter.

Thankfully Alexander won’t have a job much longer – and if he thinks a penny of Scottish public spending is going in future to support his huge arse and deceitful mouth, he is very wrong.

 

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764 thoughts on “Freedom Cheaper than Iraq War”

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  • Mary

    Is Habbabkuk psychotic? The aggressive, hostile and abusive posts come in batches. They are not typed on to the blog directly but assembled elsewhere and then arrive like machine gun fire all together. A very strange mind is at work.

    Ref High Down, state run as if that makes a difference to what I was pointing out (the high incidence of mental illness amongst the prisoners), probably holds about 3.5% ex military personnel in its population. Rory Stewart was commissioned by Grayling to look into that on the basis of his having been an army officer! Nothing will change.

    http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/11/concern-number-soldiers-jail-review-rehabilitation

    http://www.theguardian.com/politics/rory-stewart

  • Dave Lawton

    Habba ,I will butt in here as you are totally out of touch with the real world.

    “You’re not getting back to that old idea of yours that the ousting of the corrupt, authoritarian, thuggish Yanukovich was all a Jewish conspiracy, are you?”

    It was Victor Pinch who bankrolled the putsch in Kiev also with a little help from his friends like
    Blair and the Clinton’s by oiling the wheels of their foundations. Remember some Zionists will collaborate with Neo-Nazi`s when it suits their schemes. I know this from personal experience.

  • Dreoilin

    Thanks for posting that item about Christine Lagarde, Ben. I’m somehow not too surprised that she ended up in court just like her predecessor. It’ll be interesting to see what the outcome is.

    Here’s a tweet that was re-posted by 1122 people (should cheer some of you up!)

    “It wasn’t too long ago when I used to check BBC news to see if things I saw on Twitter were accurate. At some point, this was reversed.”

    https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/469856513771970560

  • Mary

    Incredible. The Egyptians are shooting at children now.

    Gaza fisherman shot by Egyptian boats
    28/05/2014 23:03

    http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=700691

    GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — A Palestinian fisherman was shot by Egyptian boats in the sea near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

    Spokesman for the Gaza ministry of health Ashraf al-Qidra told Ma’an that a fisherman was shot in the face by Egyptian boats off the coast of Rafah.

    Al-Qidra said that the victim was 16 years old but did not identify him by name.

    He was taken to the European Gaza Hospital with moderate to serious injuries, al-Qidra added.

    Although Israeli soldiers enforcing a 7-year-old blockade on the Gaza Strip frequently fire at Palestinian fishermen who stray too far from the coast, Egyptian forces — who also enforce the siege, at Israel’s request — do so much more rarely.

  • Peacewisher

    The trouble is, good people, that H. uses similar language to those in power, except that he puts it in a more emotional way.

    I’ve just listened to the UN Security Council. I can tell you that several speeches made H.’s view look positively moderate. They’ve all completely swallowed the western-media’s lies.

    I’ve just read about Guernica, and how it was barely reported, and Nazi involvement was barely recognised… except by the likes of Churchill, who could see it for what it was and called it (immortal words) “An experiment in Terror”. He was (of course) ignored.

    I wasn’t around in 1937, but the incorrect perception of events in the Spanish Civil War probably emboldened Hitler and his allies and helped cause the madness that followed.

  • John Goss

    Yep, I’m getting that message Mary. They could be editing it. Or there could be a break in the link. Copy some text from the article and paste it into a search engine. Then it should bring up a workable link.

  • John Goss

    Peacewisher, what you say is true, news often only becomes news when some historian uncovers the truth. The rest is the news of those in power. The link by Dreoilin at 28 May, 2014 – 10:21 pm about sums it up but my own suspicion is that we are becoming aware and go searching for the news elsewhere if we suspect the same shenanigans as went on on MSM at the run up to the Iraq War. If that event had not happened I might be happily listening to the BBC and believing 95% of the shit.

  • Peacewisher

    @John: I don’t think the BBC was quite that bad back in 2003, John. The Hutton Report made it a Downing St, and therefore potentially a Washington, mouthpiece. I think it got a little better when Brown was PM, but Cameron, with his entourage that included Murdoch newspapers inc., soon took it back to the times of “Best of Blair”.

    Maybe H. is right. Maybe he agrees with us, but it just having a bit of fun presenting the “establishment” line. None of us know the truth… historians are still arguing about the numbers killed at Guernica and in the Ho.. (oops, mustn’t talk about that one!)

  • Herbie

    As ever, habby, it’s you who needs help reading.

    The Polish govt is involved:

    “The Poles have been participating actively in the formation of death squads in Ukraine since September 2013, when Foreign Minister R. Sikorski invited 86 members of the Right Sector to train at the police training center in Legionowo, 23 km from Warsaw. The fighters, who came on the pretext of a university exchange program, were mostly men of around 40; they received a month-long training course in organizing mass protests, erecting barricades, seizing government buildings, street fighting tactics, shooting techniques, including from sniper rifles, etc. The Polish weekly Nie published a photo from Legionowo showing Ukrainian fascists dressed in Nazi uniforms alongside their Polish instructors in civilian clothing.”

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/polish-death-squads-fighting-in-ukraine-cia-covert-operation/5384210

    Be on the lookout for a chemical weapon false flag, as in Syria.

  • Ben-LA PACQUTE LO ES TODO

    “To those doubters, the president’s address offered scant comfort. Reiterating and further tightening a doctrine he laid out in a speech to the United Nations last fall, Mr. Obama said the United States should act unilaterally only in defense of a narrow set of “core interests,” such as the free flow of trade.”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-obama-in-his-west-point-speech-binds-americas-hands-on-foreign-affairs/2014/05/28/f3db48fe-e66d-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.html

    Free flow of trade like CNG in Ukraine or BRICS threats to Petrodollars?

  • Tony M

    Some few Poles almost certainly did operate with the Germans and Banderites in Ukraine in the war after the war to end all wars, as well as Gestapo there were Polish SS/SD and Einsatzgruppen (German Action Group) formations, some voluntarily formed -brutal, but it has been said they exaggerated self-servingly their own effectiveness -these operated in the rear of the Nazi German army after the frontline had moved far forward but before any pseudo-civil administration could hope to function in the captured areas, their job was to deal with partisan activities targetting and security of vulnerable German Eastern front rearguard communications and personnel, partisan atrocities made some such places as dangerous as the real front-line itself, but included damping down internecine slaughter amongst different partisan groups themselves, stopping such violent disorder as suited them, and if possible amongst prisoners and overt partisans to identify and summarily execute Communist Commissars attached to the Red Army, allegedly responsible for field indoctrination of the Russian forces and of civilian populations, the Commissars place in the Red Army hierarchy was high ranking with commensurate powers, the Commissars had a fanaticism and function in Stalin’s armies similar to the SS in Hitler’s, with the Russian forces in between facing the Germans in front and a bullet in the back from the Commissars in their rear should their fighting fervour be insufficient to overcome any residual sense of self-preservation (they can counter that with long-acting drugs these days).

    Populations, borders etc. have been moved around so much wholesale since then that it’s difficult to see this as a new strain of indigenous Polish-Prussian-Ukranian-Galician ugly militarism, as you’re unlikely to be dealing with descendants of the same people, unless its something in their water there; with so many other backers including the UK and US governments, the big thoroughly bad NATO suicide pact, parasitic oligarchs and elites the world over, the PNAC fuckwits, the Grand Delinquent, Prisoner in Cell Block H Blair and so on, that there is plenty of blame to spread thickly around and scrutinise for historical parallels. Inevitably then it could be suggested that the UK must have reverted to inherent fascism, and its not just due to the phony UKIP blip or Foetus Hague squeezing out of his specimen jar to promise a peace to end all peace, if we’d all just follow him wherever –I doubt the UK has regressed in any such a way, the fascists here have never been even briefly OUT of power, but they’re a few rungs down the ladder from their former top position and take orders now rather than giving them.

  • Tony M

    calan ampbell (29 May, 2014 – 5:58 am)

    It seems to be be behind some sort of Paywall, and a Murdochite one at that, I’m not sure if it’s more energetic Muslim demonising or if it’s simply a distractingly controversial story to create lots of noise and heat but very little light, whilst ignoring herds of elephants pouring in through the door, few will want to give any click custom to one of Rupert’s ailing playthings. If they felt it was really important don’t you think they’d want to give it wider circulation than just restricted to the inner-clique of Mr. Murdoch’s Official Fan Club crew. What is your view Mr AC (or can I call you Fred), personally I’m firmly against stoning to death, though think stoners to death ought to be incarcerated till death or cure. It doesn’t seem in any way though like our battle to tell religious fundamentalists in Pakistan what we think ladies should or shouldn’t wear or should or shouldn’t do, we’d achieve a whole lot more in tackling extremism by reining in the Saudis who’ve exported Islamic fundamentalism around the globe with our grinning idiot leaderships’ fawning approval, certainly set up such extremists next door to Pakistan in Afghanistan with the original mujahadeen and their altogether peculiar ideas concerning womens’ rights and I dare say in Pakistan itself the Saudi influence has struck home and penetrated deeply, and willy-nilly droning of them can’t have helped convince them to reform much either. I would say for tolerant islamic heritage peoples, seeing their co-religionists slain in their millions in a series of measures such as murderous blockades and aggressive wars predicated on tissues of lies would also rather tend to harden attitudes, drive them to seek answers from the charlatans and embolden their own extremists buoyed by the trend-bucking reversal in religion’s decay. I would say the secular socialist islamic countries we’ve utterly destroyed, Iraq, Syria, Libya etc. did not have these problems either of dominant religious extremists or repression of women, and the regimes we’ve imposed or tried imposing look altogether worse in this and every respect. When the wests putrid press gets itself into a lather over women’s rights abroad and allows articles like this to appear, I can almost picture the R2P interventionists briefly opening one eye, sniffing the wind, realising its Pakistan and resuming their slumber or playing dead. Palestinian women and for that matter children and men it might have escaped your notice are afforded the least rights, and face daily outrages dangers and death, but I don’t see either Mr Murdoch’s one-ply toilet wipe titles or you daring to highlight that apropos of nothing, or recognise the glaring inconsistency in never doing so.

    “All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. […]”

    They’re their nutters mate, over there they stone people, over here ours get elected to Westminster.

    It’s not necessary to even have a view, without our interference this’ll get sorted, with outsiders sticking their neb in, as proven already it does and can only get incomparably worse.

    Condemn it sure, but the sickening hypocrisy and complete lack of any sense of proportion in the behaviour of the collective mass media, which has waged hot bloody war on Islam since decades past is rather hard to stomach. The credibility gap too vast to bridge.

  • Mary

    I copied the Independent piece on Bilderberg out last night. I think it is the same as I remember it when first reading it. Still getting the same message on the link????

    Is it the Bilderberg conference – or conspiracy?
    The world’s most powerful people begin their annual meeting on Thursday. So what have they got to hide?
    Tom Harper Author Biography
    Investigations Reporter

    Wednesday 28 May 2014

    Conspiracy theorists may chuckle when they learn a debate entitled “Does Privacy Exist?” is to feature at this year’s Bilderberg conference, the notoriously secretive gathering of the world’s most powerful bankers, politicians and business people.

    There may be a further shaking of heads when they discover one of the participants at the heavily fortified, five-star Marriott Hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark, will be Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security Agency (NSA), which was embarrassed by the mass-surveillance revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. In fairness to the Bilderberg, the organisers of this year’s conference – which starts on Thursday – have made efforts to be more transparent by publishing a list of all the prime ministers, chief executives and military chiefs in attendance, as well as the topics up for discussion.

    Chancellor George Osborne and his Labour counterpart, Ed Balls, are among the hand-picked group of British politicians who will visit Copenhagen to hob-nob with the global elite behind closed doors.

    Other guests from the political sphere include the former “Third Man” of New Labour, Lord Mandelson, the current International Development Secretary, Justine Greening, and the veteran American foreign policy expert, Henry Kissinger.

    Billionaire captains of industry who landed invitations include the heads of Shell, BP, Airbus, HSBC, Saab, AXA, Google, and Linkedin. They will sit alongside key global powerbrokers such as Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, and senior officials from the European Central Bank.

    The chairmen from Goldman Sachs and Lazards will perhaps reflect on how their investment banks “advised” Whitehall over the controversial flotation of Royal Mail, which left the UK taxpayer £1bn out of pocket.

    Keeping a discreet eye over the exchanges will be the intelligence chiefs such as Mr Alexander from the United States and Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, who was pictured on Facebook in his swimming trunks in 2009.

    Items on the agenda include “The future of democracy and the middle-class trap”, “The new architecture of the Middle East” and the major geopolitical crisis of the moment: “Ukraine”. The secretive nature of the Bilderberg Conference has triggered suspicions that the event is used to shape global policy at the expense of democratic oversight. The idea of the euro was said to have been spawned at one meeting in the Nineties.

    Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West, asked a series of parliamentary questions about Bilderberg last year when the conference was held at a five-star hotel near Watford. He told The Independent: “I don’t regard the Bilderberg as a great threat but we would all like to know what is going on with these things. Secrecy inspires concern.”

    Despite its new efforts at transparency, the conference is still acutely sensitive about radical infiltration. On Tuesday night, three journalists – self-styled “InfoWarriors” – were arrested by Danish police after they tried to ambush the organisers outside the Marriott.

    Unfortunately for Hannah Borno, a British freelance journalist staying in the hotel, she was spotted exchanging words with the “InfoWarriors” earlier in the day, which caused her stay to be prematurely cut short. She said: “As my husband and I prepared to go to bed we were confronted by a hotel member of staff and a member of security. They said we had been seen talking to some people earlier who had been asked to leave, and for the safety of the staff they had been advised to ask us to leave.”

    ends

    I assume the photo is of the hotel. http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article9449462.ece/alternates/w620/pg-6-bilderberg-v2.jpg

  • Ba'al Zevul (I think)

    one of the items on the Bilderberger agenda was “The Challenge of Africa” but as far as I could see there was nobody from Africa invited. These people are a lot more dangerous than Paul Flynn thinks they are.

    Would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at that one. Any secretive (and by heck they’re secretive) group of politicians and globalists is going to attract conspiracy theorists, but in the case of Bilderberg, there’s a lot it’s not explaining about its activities, and a covert agenda is strongly indicated. Proof is missing, thanks in part to the group’s magical ability to silence even those reporters it invites to its meetings. “The Challenge of Africa” may have been considered in the context of the scramble for Africa’s resources – and if so, no actual Africans would have been required to attend.

    Lacking proof, here’s some history by way of background –

    http://www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2013-06-11.html

    David Rockefeller expressed his gratitude to the “free press” of the democratic nations for their silence when he addressed a secretive reunion of Bilderberg in Sand, Germany in June 1991. The following is a translation from the French journal “Minute” of June 19th 1991. “We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our re-union and have respected their promises of discretion for almost four decades….

    …It would not have been possible to develop our world project if we bad been subjected to the full fire of publicity all these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and disposed to move towards a world government which will not know war but only peace and prosperity for all mankind….

    …The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and of world bankers is surely preferable to the self-determination which has been practised for centuries past.”

    *blood running cold*…ok, it probably isn’t a continuation of the Nazis’ dream of owning Europe. And these remarks were very much ‘allegedly’; they’re disputed. But Bilderberg attracts some very powerful people, and quite a few of our democratically elected leaders – some of whom (Blair) try to conceal their attendance. It’s not a conspiracy to rule the world, or even half of it. It’s a forum for people who already rule a good bit of the world to work out ways of ruling more of it, without any inconvenient reference to the potentially ruled. This piece gives a better flavour:

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/10/bilderberg-2011-charlie-skelton

  • Mary

    Phrases I noted were ‘The new architecture of the Middle East’ (are they not evil considering what realities lie behind that description?) and ‘the major geopolitical crisis of the moment: “Ukraine’.

    A ‘crisis’ implies a remote cause, a happening. This one has been worked on over years – no doubt at Builder’s Burg in part. Endless war, endless blood, endless tears in the eyes of Mummies and their children. Shukran Mr Mandelsohn aka The Third Man and nephew of Herbert Morrison. The Talmud lives in him.

    Just to remind ourselves of the tentacles, the Scottish ‘rite’ etc.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_President_of_the_Council

    Slime was President of the Privy Council. I did not know that Clegg is now. Note Reid. Note Ashton. See that Clegg has special responsibility for constitutional and political reform. Ironic or what?

    The attendees are here although I have not looked at the lists. Feel sick enough already.
    http://www.globalresearch.ca/bilderberg-2014-list-of-participants-mingling-of-military-intel-politicians-finance-oil-media-academia-and-neocon-think-tanks/5384179

  • Ba'al Zevul (I think)

    Europe’s fucked. But there’s one man alone who can save it.

    http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/tony-blair-calls-for-a-grand-bargain-to-rescue-europe/

    So designing this new union will be very difficult. Let me make a few quick reflections. A Europe wide election for the Presidency of the Commission or Council is the most direct way to involve the public. An election for a big post held by one person* – this people can understand. The problem with the European Parliament is that though clearly democratically elected, my experience is people don’t feel close to their MEP’s. This could change but only if the European Parliament and National parliaments interact far more closely.

    The 21st Century case for Europe is based not on war or peace but on power or irrelevance.

    *Me, you bloody morons. Who else?

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