"Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues."
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
"Beginning in the late 1970s, America's major industries discovered, and began to exploit, a critical weakness in the American national system, one that enabled them to escape or at least soften competitive discipline. Stated bluntly, they discovered that buying people off was much easier than doing their job properly. It turned out that American politicians, academics, regulators, auditors, and political parties were highly corruptible.
The structural concentration of American industry has continued over the last thirty years. At the same time, economic power in America also became more concentrated at the individual level, with a small number of households owning the majority of America's financial wealth and providing a high fraction of individual political campaign contributions. The combined result is that the United States is increasingly controlled by an amoral oligarchy that has progressively corrupted the federal government and the political system, including both political parties.
This political corruption has in turn further entrenched the wealthy and the financial sector, and has now become a major driver of America's economic and social decline. The wealthy are safe from the effects of this decline, at least for now; indeed, they have benefited from it. They are also increasingly insulated by parallel, private systems for education, security, infrastructure, and financial services. The absence of significant political or social protest in response to these changes has emboldened them to continue.
At the same time, and in part as a result of these changes, the bottom two-thirds of the American population has become less educated, less informed, less prosperous, angrier, and ever more cynical about its political leadership. There is good reason for this cynicism. In their stomachs, most Americans know that their leaders are lying to them and that the system is rigged. The American people have become increasingly scared, frustrated, and angry. In this environment it has proven all too easy for politicians, who are so easily hired by America's new oligarchy, to exploit popular anger and fatigue while actually delivering oligarchic policy.
Anyone who has ever lived or worked in a corrupt dictatorship knows what happens. When the system is rigged, when ordinary citizens are powerless, and when whistle-blowers are pariahs at best, three things happen. First, the worst people rise to the top. They behave appallingly, and they wreak havoc. Second, people who could make productive contributions to society are incented to become destructive, because corruption is far more lucrative than honest work. And third, everyone else pays, both economically and emotionally; people become cynical, selfish, and fatalistic. Often they go along with the system, but they hate themselves for it. They play the game to survive and feed their families, but both they and society suffer."
Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, 2012
The moderns have cultivated a taste for perpetual war, not only for the profit they can find in it, but the power and license it extends to their deceits.
Deceits which they have come to love, over time, as an end in themselves, as an expression of the will to power.
As he often does Charles Ferguson boldly lays it out there for anyone to plainly read.
Perhaps this is why no one in the 'establishment' wants anything to do with him and his ideas, or anyone else who casts the current state of affairs to the public with a similar moral clarity.
Stocks were wobbly a bit with another failed rally attempt.
Gold and silver had the kind of downward pressure that so commonly follows an option expiration, whereby the resolve of the new holders of contracts from in-the-money call options is tested.
The Dollar rose.
The VIX declined again.
A posture of complacency is stubbornly maintained to support the attempt to hand off positions in equities to those whom the wiseguys and insiders consider to be greater fools.
The procurers of mispriced risk are, in the closing days of the second quarter, increasingly audacious.
But what will it be like when the music stops?
Have a pleasant evening.
