@golem xiv..on the new normal…agree with most of it…although I think your view there on the reason of the bankrupcy being only the too big government progs. falls short…a small look towards the defence budget tells me that there you ll find most of the problems….besides there are some market related technicalities that have to go too…whats your view on that digital speed trading thing going 134 times per second? …greetings

How little oppression changes its methods.

Quote from a review: "What The Firm of Nucingen reveals is the activities of powerful banker-speculators who manipulate the stock market, capitalising (literally) on a time of rapid industrialisation and changes in society after the revolution.

Nucingen is able to convince investors to sell their stock cheaply because he uses Rastignac's respectable reputation to help induce panic selling. In this way he manages to improve his own unremarkable fortunes by acquiring shares in a German mining company called Worschin and other businesses."

"What we see […] is Balzac railing against government intervention to ban petty gambling while allowing the finance sector to gamble with the lives and money of others."

It's available on the Internet as well as in hard copy.

Have posted before? Forgive me if you have and I've forgotten. And if you haven't , then Welcome.

Rather an aposite quote from de Maupassant. As for the length of the struggle – yes it is long indeed. But I feel we are now closer to the moment whgen a sufficient number of people are willing to question the official 'truths' and withdraw their passive support for the system they underpin, than we have been since my Grandfather's day. Maybe longer.

I feel hopeful as I haven't before.

Glad you've said hello. Hope you'll comment again.

Madame Forestier had halted.

"You say you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?"

"Yes. You hadn't noticed it? They were very much alike."

And she smiled in proud and innocent happiness.

Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her two hands.

"Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs! . . . "

***********************************************************

Guy de Maupassant's "Necklace" does have a contemporary ring to it. Workers slaving away all their lives thinking they've saved enough for retirement only to have the value of the currency they saved in cut in half when they start drawing their pensions. Not only the currency they saved in but the assets they put their currency into falling in price to levels they were at more than a decade ago e.g. the Dow was hitting the 11,000 mark in 2000. Look at it now. House prices plummeting to more correctly reflect their value. Pensions invested in CDOs blown out of the water. Fake pasty diamonds? As for the value of the currency they get their pensions in, just use the price of gold as a way of measuring. What's gold an ounce now…$1800? What was it back at the time the worker started saving? I can remember when it was $32 an ounce…shows my age.

Alas and alack, who will audit the auditors? http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2011/3291026.htm

I do think that when workers discover how the wage system works to give over all the wealth they create into the hands of the employing class (what is like 10% of the people own 88% of the wealth in the USA?) they begin to see the outline of it all–the totality, if you will. That's been my experience at the grassroots. Of course, with most of the left talking reformist trash when not guilt tripping the working class with talk of affluenza, it's a long process made longer and harder. And then, there's all that acculturation associated with obeying power structures to keep oneself safely on the road to approval by authority. (sigh)

Positive Money have this new campaign and I have been doing the small amount I can to get it out into the wider web.

Its a very good animation and there is a forum on the Positive money site
I am hoping it will be something like a college ABr to which to return for refreshment between bouts of activism.

My ex wife has introduced me to the work of Naseem Taleb he had a hit book called the Black swan a few year back, interesting chap haven't seen anything to suggest he is ready to put his shoulder to the cause of banking reform but he is certainly very critical of the competence levels of the teenaged scribblers of the square mile.

Subscribed to follow the blog so I don't know if that sends e mail updates anyway nice to pop in Hi and see ya soon,

Rog

And Golem, thanks for the welcome and the link, I will peruse when the children are in bed later; and I think you must have helped me post too, as I had all sorts of problems getting my Google account to work, so thanks for that as well.

Welcome. I don't think anyone here minds how much bandwidth somewone uses so long as gthey use iot politely and thoughtfully. From what you have written I think you might also enjoy Deep politics forum here in the UK. Look under Links.

Mr kelly's death was truely awful and sordid and cynical to say nothing of cruel and sadistic. I have never found the suicide explanations to be even remotely believable.

And re the 'temporary' measures that somehow seem to morph into permanent features of the landscape, well again we have many precedents, going back to the Cold War's humidi-crib for the nascent MI complex, but more recently the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, the wire-tapping and data mining, et al. All such hardening of the body politic's arteries makes us less free, or poorer, or both.

The next shoe to drop will be the removal of worker's rights under the cover of essential belt-tightening. Wisconsin is just the first volley. Next we will have a federal militarisation of police forces unable to be funded by local or state governments rendered slaves to Wall St via bankruptcy, often due to the sort of shenanigans Matt Taibbi has written about with regard to Jefferson County. More of the 'God's work' done by Mr Obama's 'savvy businessman' friends.

They couldn't risk the return of the draft yet, it might backfire, but that is on the long-term agenda for sure, once the other hatches have been battened down. As a 'temporary measure', mind!

Sorry to take up so much bandwidth on a blog I've never visited before, but I have to warn you that the quality of post and comment means I will return. I came from the excellent Naked Capitalism, which itself entered my field of vision via some other truth-telling finance or econ maven, maybe Steve Keen or Michael Hudson. This points up both the strength and the weakness inherent in this newfangled online habitat; good ideas abound – the Tobin tax, property taxes, TBTF limitations, the MMT approach to national accounts, Ellen Brown's centralised money creation via North Dakota style state banks, Bill Black's reminder that regulators in the US once had teeth sharp enough to put 1500 bankers and lawyers in prison, Mr Shaxson's ideas re the proliferation of tax havens, renewing Glass-Steagall and rescinding Gramm-Leach, redirecting government deficit spending to poorer people to jump start aggregate demand, the re-monetisation of silver, repudiating or even simply the idea of re-negotiating debts run up via fraud-induced bubbles.. there is no shortage of measures which may each fall short of the term 'solution', but which make more sense from any genuinely rational point of view than the 'more of the same for us and less of everything for you' mentality that currently obtains in all the corridors of power that matter.

But while we may chatter about them here on this blog, or over at another, the juggernaut meanwhile plows serenely ahead in the knowledge that we are just a few sharks who might take a scrap of paint from the hull, below the waterline, while they sail through the waters of mass ignorance on the top deck with not a hair out of place.

Our new normal is that there is a fictional official narrative in virtually all matters of genuine importance, and a true (or at least truer) explanation that is suppressed.

The GFC is naturally the most prominent of these at present, and the history of official lying does let's face it go back a long way, but to me there has been a real confluence, a co-ordinated centering of elite-friendly approved narrative globally since 911, certainly in the West.

911 itself is emblematic of this trend, because even if your Occam-brand razor slices thru some of the more extreme Truther claims, which themselves may have been centrally psy-opped, it will be blunted by the thickets of bullshit that characterise most of the official report, or useless in the pockets of omission that round out the rest of it. Like the JFK hit, confusion reigns in the absence of reliable official information, and this is of course the desired outcome.

Then we had Iraq and the millions of us worldwide who did enough legwork online to know we were being had, and marched down our high streets and inundated our local rags' letters pages and harrassed our craven, US-controlled politicians to prevent the catastrophe which duly occurred anyway, and then we had the dubious pleasure of watching them all squirm a few years later while admitting we were right. Most of them of course, being Teflon-coated real-politikkers, knew that this unpleasant task might well lie ahead while they were greasing the wheels of war, but were happy enough to assay contrition and bewilderment for a while, before moving on to the next dirty job, which someone has to do, right?

New evidence has just cropped up re the death of David Kelly. Who seriously believes now that he killed himself? He was not the sort of man that could have been honey-trapped like Spitzer or DSK, and he was even more immediately dangerous to an elite which had decided on war. Of course, there will never be clarity on this, the issue will bubble away and this very confusion of he-said she-said official vs 'conspiracy' narratives is just what the doctor ordered for those who commission these acts.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386967/Mystery-helicopter-landed-scene-Dr-Kellys-death-body-found.html