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Yet, tomorrow, the U.S. Senate will be voting on an annual defense budget that costs $778 billion—$37 billion more than Trump's last defense budget and $25 billion more than what President Biden requested. All this for an agency, the Department of Defense, that continues to have massive fraud and cost overruns year after year and is the only major government agency not to successfully complete an independent audit.
Isn't it strange how even as we end the longest war in our nation's history concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful military-industrial complex?"
Bernie Sanders, Nov 16, 2021
"What grabbed our attention in that paragraph from the Credit Suisse report is that the Board of Directors is actually acknowledging that trading positions posed “catastrophic risk” to the bank. What also grabbed our attention is that banking regulators in the United States have been reading this same kind of assessment of catastrophic risk within the mega banks on Wall Street since the financial crisis of 2008, while doing absolutely nothing meaningful to rein it in.
Even more striking, banking regulators and Congress continue to allow the majority of the largest trading houses on Wall Street to continue to own federally-insured deposit-taking banks where the taxpayer would be on the hook for bailouts if they blow themselves up."
Wall Street on Parade, Congress, the Banks, and Catastrophic Risk, 11/17/2021
"No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth. We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality."
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev
"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Hannah Arendt
Stocks caught the wobbles again today, but did not all out bed.
Except for the broader index, the Russell 2000.
Gold and silver bounced back up, as the Dollar fell off the 96 handle.
This is going to end badly, for most of us at least. But great riches for a few.
First time, shame on you.
Second time, shame on me.
Third time's what again? The charm?
And who could have seen it coming?
Have a pleasant evening.
