The Rusty Wire Service

In this, her Diamond Jubilee year presiding over ‘The Firm’, Mrs Windsor is faced with the prospect of her beloved Scotland  actively   starting to question its role in a future United Kingdom. The 700 th anniversary of the Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn beckons in 2014 and the leader of the Scottish National Party Alex Salmond rightly recognises this as a fitting time to conduct a referendum on his country’s future. The UK’s flaccid excuse for a Prime Minister David Cameron responded by telling Salmond that it is for Westminster to determine whether or not a referendum is held on the issue and that furthermore, it is for Westminster to decide what form of wording any such referendum would take. Naturally, this butters no parsnips with Salmond who cheerfully points out that that the majority reached by the SNP at the last election is all the mandate he needs to go to the Scottish people. Arguments about the economics of Scottish independence are not conclus...

Apparently, we live in a society beset by a plague of scroungers. We’ve all heard about them (or at least read about them in the Daily Hate, excuse me, Mail). We’re regularly told that they’re the real reason the Irish and British economies are on their knees.  Oh yes, everywhere you turn, there they are; out sky-diving and doing heavy-lifting when they’re supposed to be off on the sick. Disappointingly, the scroungers who are scamming billions by playing casino games with people’s pensions are not the ones our media is holding up to scrutiny; it’s so much easier after all to point the finger further down the foodchain (apart that is from soft, bald, pink paragon of banking opprobrium Stephen Hester of RBS).  Now, if we could only find a way of generating money for our friends in the private sector while at the same time making an example of these workshy fraudsters (or cutting the safety net out from under an already marginalised section of society; depending on...

John (Jackie) Duddy (17) . Shot in the chest in the car park of Rossville flats Patrick Joseph Doherty (31) . Shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety in the forecourt of Rossville flats. Bernard McGuigan (41) . Shot in the back of the head when he went to help Patrick Doherty. He had been waving a white handkerchief at the soldiers to indicate his peaceful intentions. Hugh Pious Gilmour (17) . Shot through his right elbow, the bullet then entering his chest as he ran from the paratroopers on Rossville Street. Kevin McElhinney (17) . Shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety at the front entrance of the Rossville Flats. Two witnesses stated McElhinney was unarmed. Michael Gerald Kelly (17) . Shot in the stomach while standing near the rubble barricade in front of Rossville Flats. John Pius Young (17) . Shot in the head while standing at the rubble barricade. Two witnesses stated Young was unarmed. William Noel Nash (19) . Shot in th...

Today is the actual birthday of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Had he lived, the good doctor would have been 83 years old. Tomorrow (16 January), it will be officially celebrated as a US holiday. It’s not for me to speculate on what he would make of the world under POTUS Obama but I’d like to think he’d have continued to be the eloquent and fearless spokesman of the dispossessed that he had been for much of his life. Here is Dr King in his own words, on August 28, 1963 in Washington DC. There have been many songs written about Dr Martin Luther King Jr, most notably by Stevie Wonder ('Happy Birthday') and U2’s 'Pride (in the name of love)', both fine pieces of music in their own right but ' Strings of Life'  is the tune that came out top in the Rusty Wire Poll of MLK tunes:  Happy Birthday Dr King.

The most worrying corollary of the Great Depression of the 20 th century with current events is the dramatic deterioration in global relations occasioned by extreme nationalism. This chauvinism flowed directly from the parlous state of the world economy in the 1930s and of course led to the outbreak of the Second World War. The ‘Great Depression of the 21 st century’ is only a couple of years old but already, the warning signs are manifest.  Here in the UK, a weak Prime Minister, bowing to pressure from his own party’s right-wing Eurosceptic rump, has set the country on a collision course with the EU. To anyone with half an eye on domestic affairs in Britain, the tortured antics of Westminster’s finest over Europe should come as no surprise. The Conservative Party has in the past almost destroyed itself over the European question and will doubtless do so again. Britain in a Global World: Options for a New Beginning discusses the relationship between the UK and ...

cat·e·chism /ˈkatəˌkizəm/ : Noun: 1. A summary of the principles of Christian religion in the form of questions and answers, used for the instruction of Christians. 2. A series of fixed questions, answers, or precepts used for instruction in other situations. As a matter of observational truism, in which direction should all proceedings ideally be going? Forward How does one characterise an attitudinal change in a paradigm’s position? It shifts When testing the metaphorically vehicular veracity of a proposition, which component must be kicked? The tyres                                                                                                                      ...

‘Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result…’ The great physicist Albert Einstein is credited with the above quotation which is perhaps as apposite a starting point as any for the lemming –like conduct of the markets since first we started chronicling their behaviour. From Dutch tulips to South Sea Bubbles to buying on the margins in the 1920s , the history of the markets is an all too predictable narrative of dramatic crashes, punctuated by periods of fear, greed and denial. But if we’re looking for market-appropriate aphorisms, perhaps we should also be looking to the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who warned us that if ‘we forget the past then we lose both eyes’. In their recent publication Economists' Hubris - The Case Of Risk Management , Shahin Shojai, global head of strategic research at Capco and George Feiger, CEO of Contango Caoital Advisors, highlight that ‘madness’ and ‘blindness’ through their analys...