"It is precisely this — high-powered computers and the swagger of those who operate them — that is causing worries over high-frequency trading’s increasing sway. 'The markets used to be about capital formation,' said Mr. Quast, the consultant. 'Now 80 percent of trading is driven by some form of statistical arbitrage. We are buying into a statistical house of cards that could unravel very quickly.'”
Landon Thomas, Trading Firms that Shape Markets, 3 September 2009
"We’re told that we’re a polarized society, right? That’s the way the ruling classes have manipulated people for more than two thousand years: divide and rule. And sure, there are differences between the Left and the Right over reproductive rights, school prayer, gun control, government regulation, and now, immigration. But on at least two dozen issues you’ll find combined Left-Right support from 75 to 90 percent of the population. You’ll find it on breaking up the big banks; you’ll find it on civil liberties [privacy]; you’ll find it on getting rid of corporate welfare and crony capitalism; you’ll find it on criminal-justice reform. There is huge Left-Right support to crack down on the corporate crooks of Wall Street."
Ralph Nader, How We Can Change Society, December 2016
"The American economy increasingly serves only a narrow part of society. Too many of America's elites-among the super-rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia-have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility. They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned.
Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, January 2012
"The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated. The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered. The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite, and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.
The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States."
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful industries. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, [corporate media], and lobbying industry.
If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.
Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly, which I analyze in detail below. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising.
I’m not against business, or profits, or becoming wealthy. I have no problem with people becoming billionaires—if they got there by winning a fair race, if their accomplishments merit it, if they pay their fair share of taxes, and if they don’t corrupt their society.
But that’s not how most of the people mentioned in this book became wealthy. Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful."
Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, 2012
Stocks had another wobbly day as the markets square up ahead of the inflation data on Thursday.
But make no mistake, most of this indecisiveness in stocks and bonds is the great wash and rinse, the transfer of the wealth of the nation into a few manipulative hands that produce nothing.
Gold and silver fluctuated as the Dollar gained back a bit.
VIX fell as complacency remains entrenched during one of the more perilous geopolitical phases since the last Iraq war.
One of the more discouraging developments I have seen is the great falling away among the faithful.
And in retrospect it is most pronounced among those who might be considered our modern Pharisees: excluding and self-obsessed, focused on the forms and ceremony of religion and not the spirit, certain of their own relative righteousness, preoccupied with being served rather than serving, cynical and strikingly agreeable to accepting a 'necessary evil' to achieve some greater good as they define it, and devoid, if not mocking, of the essential commandments of mercy and love.
Perhaps it has always been this way, perhaps it is a cyclical thing that we learn and forget, but it seems to be more of a dominant theme since the 1990s, and the rise of our new, gilded age.
And with this falling away of the faithful, good pagans, and the faithful in name only, we see the proliferation and vitality of cults, and the worship of the new idols of the age: status, success, fame, and power.
Who then can remain standing against the great tide of evil.
Have a pleasant evening.
