President Grover Cleveland, State of the Union, December 3, 1888
"I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too. A near miss [Miss Lewinsky that is] on that one.
He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on. This was something relatively new for a left party in the industrialized world, and it was quickly adopted by other left parties in other countries, most notably 'New Labour' in the UK. Unfortunately, this strategy has little to offer the people who used to be the Democratic Party’s main constituents except scolding. It merely assumes that they have, as the ’90s saying went, nowhere else to go."
Seymour Hersh, A Conversation on US Politics with Thomas Frank, July 13, 2023
"The Press of the United States? Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it. I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”
Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907
Hope and change.
Right...
Stocks slumped a bit today on a dose of reality out of the earnings reports.
It was just a little leak compared to the recent 'AI-fueled' bubble action, so the bulloney boys are undaunted.
In the spirit of trend reversals, the Dollar rallied, and gold and silver lost ground.
There will be a stock option expiration tomorrow.
FOMC next week.
They never see it coming. Because they think that they and their friends are it, above it all, blessed with the discreet charm of an effete and anachronistic elitism, the old shibboleth of 'class.'
“Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death–the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz
Lessons unlearned bring old and familiar consequences, familiar at least to those who study history, and don't choose to consider it to be beneath them.
Have a pleasant evening.
