The Bucket Shop was very quiet today. There was no precious metal action noted in the delivery report from yesterday, and in the warehouses we saw the usual moving around of bullion.
This is certainly a change from the beginning of this active month for gold, which saw a sizable number of contracts being claimed for 'delivery.'
Well, there is always some benefit in anything, and the quiet markets give one time to think, about things past in the light of the present. I was thinking about the manipulation of the markets, and of the unfolding tragedy in Greece, and of the serial abuses of political power , enable by a remarkable harshness and willful ignorance which seems to be endemic to our times.
Earlier today in a short piece about the discouragement in the people I recalled a famous quote from William Gladstone, said during his efforts to extend suffrage to the working class people of Great Britain. It was related to the long effort to achieve justice. You may read it here.
One may cite any number of other figures from different periods of time, who took the long hard fight with unfailing energy and good spirits. More recently Gandhi and Martin Luther King come to mind.
I think that in his attempt to extend suffrage to the working, landless classes of Britain, Gladstone rightly assumed, or perhaps more properly believed, that the working poor of his day were educable, that no human being was without value, was useless. He is an interesting figure in a period of history that itself was interesting, with great figures who are too often forgotten now.
How many educated people really know anything about an earlier figure from that century, William Wilberforce, who was a leading proponent in the long fight for the abolition of slavery? He provided an example and an inspiration for that same effort later in the US though an effort that was long and arduous.
The 19th century, in the wake of the post-Napoleonic victory, was a time of desperate differences and dichotomies in England, of the miserably poor and the incredibly rich, with London itself at the epitome of one of the world's greatest empires. One encounters this sort of thing quite famously in Dickens, for example. We marvel at the grandeur of empire, and forget to look at its foundations built on squalor and human misery.
I find that the times where certain key people notably consider the quality of human life, what it means to be human, to be often situated at pivotal moments in history. The response to that question by a nation often plays an important role on the path that their society takes.
Justice is most often not an issue for a single person or a class of people per se. It is more often the manifestation of a more general disorder in thinking. The same sort of thought process that sends the disabled to houses of death can propagate itself to the weak, the outcast, and the other. It is not a great leap once the threshold of inhumanity has been breached.
Injustice rarely travels alone. It is always accompanied by a cohort of issues. And therefore justice cannot be achieved in one matter, unless it has a more general place in the hearts of those who would pursue it.
So it would seem to be that those who ignore the manipulation of gold and silver, for example, might have a care that such abuse of power does not become so commonly accepted for the sake of expediency. Because the abuse of one form of wealth by the state can quite easily be extended to any other holdings, whether they be pension, or savings, or even livelihoods. As we saw so vividly in the past, the arguments that one form or wealth or person is unworthy is a malleable thing in the hands of the unscrupulous.
And further, those who fight for justice in the area of precious metals and other markets would do well to consider how hollow and uninspiring their fight might be, if they care only for those forms of justice that fill their pockets, but care little or even accept and promote other forms of injustice against other people and classes of property and human values. Even the worst of the crooks will cry foul when they perceive an injustice done to themselves, and quite loudly as we have seen.
Justice in interconnected. It is a well known platitude of course, but it is also a fact, that no man is an island, sufficient unto himself. Our modern masters of the universe may fancy themselves to be exceptional, better than any in all of history, but like other they are standing not only on the shoulders of giants, but on the common base of all their fellows, of their own good will and pursuits of happiness.
They make seek to distinguish and raise themselves up in their own minds and society by stigmatizing and stereotyping others as less worthy of justice and life. But they may soon enough find themselves on the receiving end of that same sort of dehumanization at the hands of the more powerful. History has proven this over and over again.
As Edmund Burke famously observed, 'when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.'
Or to more simply quote the Boss, 'no one wins unless everyone wins.'
Have a pleasant evening.
