"Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The war has taught them the possibilities of propaganda ; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose.
American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy."
Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 1919.
"Congressmen Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Brian Mast (R-Fla.) introduced H.R. 23, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which would 'impose sanctions with respect to the International Criminal Court engaged in any effort to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.'
The bill, which was fast-tracked by the 119th House rules package, was initially approved last June by the Republican-controlled lower chamber with the support of 42 Democratic lawmakers. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri."
Brett Wilkins, Groups Urge Congress, Trump to Reconsider Sanctions on ICC, Common Dreams, January 6, 2025
“The mainstream media must be considered part of the deep state. Its assumptions, biases, priorities, and defaults are very much a function of the interests of a tiny elite of corporate wealth whose interests the media necessarily serves regardless of this or that outlet’s position along the ever-narrowing spectrum of allowable political perspective."
Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, June 2022
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects."
R. J. Rummel, Death by Government: A History of Mass Murder and Genocide Since 1900
"A poor man is ever at a disadvantage in matters of public concern. When he rises to speak, or writes a letter to his superiors, they ask: Who is this fellow that offers advice? And when it is known that he is without coin they spit their hands at him, and use his letters in the cooks' fires. But if it be a man of wealth who would speak, or write, or denounce, even though he have the brain of a yearling dromedary, or a spine as crooked and unseemly, the whole city listens to his words and declares them wise."
Li Hongzhang, as quoted in The Cry for Justice edited by Upton Sinclair, 1915
"People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.”
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
"The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, and justice nothing."
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture for Literature, 1970
Stocks sold off today for the same 'technical' reasons that they rallied yesterday.
People feel the need to look for 'reasons' why the market do something on a given day.
Sometimes there is a reason, some key piece of data or an exogenous event.
Often enough the manner that stocks react does not seem to be customary to a particular piece of data.
I don't think I can stress enough that while markets tend to be more (relatively speaking) rational in the long run, in the short run they are a gamblers' game, a game of liar's poker.
If you bear that in mind, and understand the games these jokers play, you might do a little better.
And keep in mind that the big players who are buying 'order flow' know in the aggregate where the specs and mid-tier guys are leaning and to what extent.
Its a game of timing and information.
And the smaller players watch what the big guys are doing, in the pits and on the squawk boxes.
You don't have to believe it. But that's how it is, and even moreso today than it was when I started out when some manner of regulation prevailed. Now its more like the 1920s.
Gold and silver rallied, as did the Dollar.
Gold is coiling in a triangle within the larger triangle. At some point it is going to run.
It was a little surprising that silver decoupled from tech stocks, but that speaks to the nature of today's action.
Bitcoin did follow its NDX correlation and gave up the 100K handle and then some.
VIX popped up off its moving averages. See what I mean?
As a reminder US markets will be closed on January 9 for the observance of Jimmy Carter's funeral.
Carter did not get along at all with the 'deep state.' And they played him hard and dirty for it.
The masks of the respected ujnspeakable seem to have dropped off a little in the last ten years or so.
And the Non-Farm Payroll report drops first thing on /Friday morning.
Stack your decks carefully then on Wednesday afternoon.
Have a pleasant evening.
