Kempton Olney, Mother Earth vs Corporate Greed, 2024
"We seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire. Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home."
Robert F. Kennedy, Mindless Menace of Violence, City Club of Cleveland Ohio, April 5, 1968.
“And while the pensioners make for a tidier narrative, the reality is that no one benefits nearly as much from private equity as private equity itself. The system is designed so that firms put in less money and shoulder less risk than anyone else, yet reap the lion’s share of the profits. The point is to earn returns for private equity executives. Stephen Schwarzman didn’t earn $37 billion by putting teachers’ and firefighters’ interests first.
Private equity and other investment firms spent $42 million on congressional races in the 2020 election cycle, two-thirds of which went to Democrats. Just four senators and sixty-two representatives didn’t get any private equity donations. In 2022, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, pulled in more than $1.2 million in industry contributions, three times more than the runner-up. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat-turned-independent who killed the 2022 provision that would have closed the carried-interest loophole, received more than half a million dollars in private equity donations in the previous election cycle. The industry’s primary lobbying group, meanwhile, has long boasted about its ability to stave off efforts to regulate private equity’s favored strategies."
Megan Greenwell, Bad Company, June 2025
"Banking and corporations have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneur-management skills and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they control: capital. Thus capital intensification has destroyed food, manufacturing, farming and communities. All these processes result in the instability and disorder we see around everyday."
Carroll Quigley, The Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Georgetown University 1978
"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. By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery; but that misery has its purpose in the scheme of nature. Something more than a century ago we saw the people driven by just such misery to grope their way into a new order of society; they threw off the chains of hereditary monarchy, and made themselves citizens of free republics."
Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 1919
Stocks continued levitating today, lifted higher by 'buy programs' grinding the stocks futures higher, led by the SP 500.
This is right out of Robert Rubin's playbook when he was Treasury Secretary.
The difference is that he was engaging in a wrong-headed attempt to limit the collateral damage from a financial crisis.
In this case it is a monument to ego and lawlessness. And it will result in a bone-cracking market collapse.
But while the music is playing the looting will continue.
VIX is now firmly in complacent territory.
Gold and silver were shaved back a little. Just the perks of being a part of an epic control fraud.
Who is going to turn you in when everyone is dirty, including the regulators and the 'law.'
This is a good example of the lawlessness of laissez-faire taken to its logical conclusion. The natural state of human markets is not justice, equity, and rational distribution.
The misbegotten war with Iran is still in a running boil despite the peace assurances by the Prevaricator-in-Chief.
Plunging the nation into instability and disorder is not a problem for these jokers. This is how they see themselves assuming positions of great power and control, with the undermining of the rule of law.
The remedy needs to be swift, and memorable.
And because of the increase in wickedness, the love, the honor, and the sense of duty of most is grown cold.
Madness.
Have a pleasant evening.
