Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Calm Before Their Exceptional Madness

 

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically.  They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission.  Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941

"Demagogy enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

"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."

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965

“Unprecedented state secrecy gave the power elite vastly expanded realms in which to pursue desired political ends. Its dimensions and details obscured by state secrecy, exceptionism—the institutionalized abrogation of the rule of law—allowed for the state to decisively influence politics at key moments in a top-down, authoritarian manner while practices of plausible deniability preserved a degree of democratic legitimacy.

In other words, the power elite’s rise precluded meaningful democracy since major decisions were not to be arrived at through open, informed public debate in which responsible officials and political parties were influenced by a healthy civil society which could allow the informed, prevailable will of the public to become manifest in policy.”

Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, 2022

"Our hearts are continually prone to wander from Him; prosperity and enjoyment all too easily satisfy us, dull our spiritual perception, and unfit us for full communion with Himself.  It is an unspeakable mercy that the Father comes with His chastisement, makes the world round us all dark and unattractive, leads us to feel more deeply our sinfulness, and for a time lose our joy in what was becoming so dangerous.  Though He has indeed no pleasure in afflicting us, He will not keep back even the most painful chastisement if He can but thereby guide His beloved child to come home."

Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ, 1895

The markets were off a bit today, accommodating their recent impressive gains.

Gold and silver were similarly disposed.

Tomorrow is our stock option expiration.

Looking over the world's current crop of exceptional peacocks and pigeons can we not now, at long last, fully understand Hannah Arendt's observations about 'the banality of evil?' 

Let's see where their shenanigans may lead us.  

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Have a pleasant evening.

Neoliberalism and the Rise of Corporate Globalism

Excerpted below is a recent book review of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, by Quinn Slobodian, Harvard University Press.

I have included a link to the entire article which I recommend reading if you wish to know more about how the rise of globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism may go hand in hand within a reasoned construct.

I could have included much more and still not done justice to the themes and thoughts that it contains.

I found it particularly helpful because it provides a plausible rationale for the continuation of the European Union, despite its malformed integration of a currency union without internal financial integration of debts and transfer payments.  Not to mention its odd admixture of a remote central bureaucracy trumping traditional policy areas within the domain of national sovereignty.

It also helps to understand the stubborn commitment to global 'trade treaties' by corporate Democrats that tend to elevate international  bureaucracies and rules bodies,  dominated by corporate lobbyists, over the inclinations of their own national electorates. 

Obama's determined slogging for the TPP, even as his intended Democratic successor was being electorally eviscerated for her perceived corporatist elitism, was otherwise inexplicable given his sophistication in managing perceptions.

In this perspective these seemingly obtuse things can be seen as 'features' rather than well-intentioned but naively crafted arrangements containing unintentional flaws.

This review also positions neoliberalism within the context of the development of economic and political thought in the 20th century.  The two are inexorably entwined because, as is well established throughout human history, money is power.

The Boston Review
The Market Police
J. W. Mason

"Globalism in this story is not only, or even primarily, an extension of contacts between people, trade, production. Rather, it is the creation of a set of property rights that, precisely because they span multiple sovereignties, cannot be touched by one government without inviting conflict with another. In this sense it is positively desirable for property claims to cross national borders. Foreign investment, regardless of its value or otherwise for financing production, performs a political function that domestic investment cannot...

Organizing property and production across borders—whether through free trade, protections for foreign investment, currency unions or other devices—does more than limit the power of governments. It also serves, Slobodian writes, “to dissolve the small, discrete collective of mutual identification...in a larger unity.” Hayek spent much of his life searching for “a political model that would undermine the ‘solidarity of interests’ that naturally cohered” among similarly-situated people. Open borders played a critical role here, ensuring that economic interests were never “lastingly identified with the inhabitants of a particular region...

Today, the European Union offers the fullest realization of the neoliberal political vision. There is no sovereign people of Europe; the authority of European institutions rests on a body of law and treaties. The European Union is not a nation, but it is not simply an agreement among nations either. Unlike international agreements, European regulations are directly binding on individuals and not only on the government signing them. In many areas, European regulations and authorities don’t merely constrain, but actually replace, their national equivalents. (This is what makes Brexit so difficult.)

Europe’s incomplete integration—with its confusing mix of powers delegated to Brussels and powers retained by national governments—is often seen as a design flaw. But to Slobodian’s globalists, partial integration is precisely the goal—it means that neither the national nor the international body have the legitimacy and capacity to direct the economy. With no international entanglements, a government is sovereign; with complete integration, sovereignty moves to the higher level. What is wanted is a situation in which some powers but not others are delegated, leaving neither national nor super-national governments able to act outside of circumscribed role...

One might even call this the neoliberal paradox. State power is needed to enforce market relations and property rights, but when it rests on democratic politics, it can easily turn into a vehicle for a broader program of economic planning. So the site of power must be anonymized, hidden from politics—as in the opaque jurisdictional mazes of Europe...

From this point of view, the essential thing about the single European currency is not whatever dubious practical advantages come from having prices across the continent measured in the same units. Rather, it is the creation of the European Central Bank as an ostensibly technical decision-maker, more insulated from democratic politics than any national authority could be."

Read the entire book review at The Boston Review.

David Talbot: The Rise of America's Secret Government and the Deep State

“Our country’s cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism.  But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us.  There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history.”

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard


"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea, acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.  Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election, without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

The Deep State and the Unspeakable - Mike Lofgren

"The state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight.

The pressure to conform to an authority figure or peer group can cause people to behave in shocking ways.

It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice— certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee.

The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well-trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street."

Mike Lofgren

"The unspeakable. What is this?

It is the emptiness of 'the end.' Not necessarily the end of the world, but a theological point of no return, a climax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be broken open again to truth only by miracle, by the coming of God.

Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of The Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.

You are not big enough to accuse the whole age effectively, but let us say you are in dissent. You are in no position to issue commands, but you can speak words of hope.

Shall this be the substance of your message? Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. You agree? Good. Then go with my blessing."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable