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.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Images and Shadows - Dueling Jawbones

 

"And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?"

Plato, Republic: Allegory of the Cave

"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, [Sheldon Wolin, 'Inverted Totalitarianism'] since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: 'inverted totalitarianism,' a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on 'private media' than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of any nation on Earth).

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of superpower. 

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal.  Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].

One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life [culture wars] so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust.

Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.  Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation.

Toward the end of his study he [Wolin] produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism:  'rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power.'

It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin’s analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong."

Chalmers Johnson, A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled, May 16, 2008

Today's market action just made me laugh.

Fed Chairman Jay Powell and His Merry Pranksters did good work to soothe the risk markets today, doing their required 25 bp rate increase, but wrapping it well and tenderly with whispers of all the right dovish nothings.

But alas Yellen, the Iron Banker, responded to the Congress today that there were no formal plans to backstop the entire banking system by insuring all deposits fully.

Which by the way would require an Act of Congress, as if.  

These jokers are too busy trying to take away food relief for the hungry and any hopes for decent healthcare at affordable prices. 

And so after the warm Fed afterglow, the risk markets headed south in what might be termed as a 'fit of pique.'   Or  a 'hissy fit.'

Les enfants terribles of the financial system, the Banks, led stocks lower.

The Dollar dropped.

Gold and silver rallied higher.

VIX rebounded.

Let's see what tomorrow may bring.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Audacious Oligarchy - The Power Elite

 

"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 idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.

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.

For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end.  Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.  America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality.  

The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude.  In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle.  Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.

These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counterbalance of mind prevails against them. They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations.

What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that the economy has become concentrated and incorporated in the great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and moreover the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy; and military men and policies have increasingly penetrated the corporate economy.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

Stocks rallied today, for no particular reason.

The chip sector led stocks higher, based on upgrades from Barclay.

Wash - rinse - repeat.   

Leave your shame at the curb.

Gold and silver were hit hard from the early trading, but managed to take much of it back with gold even finishing in the green.

Looks like a gut check ahead of the Comex precious metals option expiry on the 26^th.

 Different month, same crooked scams.

The US Dollar did nothing.

The VIX did nothing.

We may see some market moving data this week.

FOMC and Non-Farm Payrolls for January coming next week.

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening.

Authoritarianism of the Utopias: The Singularity of the Will to Power

 

"The two most important words in this excerpt from Biden’s remarks are the words 'not normal.'  But isolating the not normal events to the growth in the MAGA movement severely circumscribes the public debate that needs to be happening around why American democracy is under such a serious threat.  The MAGA movement is merely a symptom of the real disease: billionaire money funneled as dark money to front groups that are fueling authoritarianism to further their own agenda.

Since 2001, long before MAGA emerged, life in the United States has been like living through an endless streaming of a badly-scripted sci-fi series.  The failure of the U.S. government to come clean with the American people about unprecedented events has created a petri dish lab of paranoia that has been molded and shaped to their advantage by dark money front groups.

The threat to our democracy is real and growing.  But it didn’t start with the MAGA crowd.  It started with the dark money crowd — which won’t be satisfied until it owns every member of Congress, every lifetime-appointed federal judge, and every key politician in every swing state.  Until there is a groundswell in America demanding serious campaign finance reform, this is the best democracy that money can buy."

Pam and Russ Martens, American Democracy Is Under Grave Threat, 7 September 2022


“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whip their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy— then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72


"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.  .

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.  His method is to poison the channels of public information.  With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Henry Wallace, 9 April 1944


"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."

Jimmy Carter, Sept. 27, 2015


"The party defined what was legal and what was not. Just as in Hitler's Germany where the heinous 1936 Nuremberg Laws were a legal fiction dictated by racial obsessions, from the outset, Bolshevism subordinated justice to party interests. For Lenin, dictatorship of the proletariat was rule by force and unrestricted by any law. The presumption of innocence was replaced by a universalized presumption of guilt. Utopian ideals were used to legitimize abuses against political enemies defined only in connection with the interests of a self-appointed revolutionary vanguard.

Extreme radical systems had unique features, including rationalization of power, definition of the enemy, and designated goals. They represented efforts to establish total control over society through systematic aggressions against any form of autonomous associations and initiatives, as well as the persecution and eventual extermination of ideologically defined adversaries.  The ideology behind the tragedy of Communism and Nazism is aptly summarized in this apocalyptic statement as the vision of a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods - the denial of the right to life to those who are defined as 'degenerate parasites and predators,' the deliberate de-humanization of the victims."

Vladimir Tismaneanu, Understanding Radical Evil


"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy.  I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.  Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy.  They extend aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.  Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare.  We should be aware of the symptoms."

William E. Dodd, US Ambassador to Germany, Letter to President Roosevelt, 1936


"But there is a sort of 'Ok guys, you're mad, but how are you going to stop me' mentality at the top."

Robert Johnson, Audacious Oligarchy

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Shall We Stop This Bleeding? - A Shining City on a Hill

 

"It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue, and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.  Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."

Joseph Heller, Catch 22


"Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.  By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union."

Andrew Jackson, Message to the Senate On the Veto of the Second Bank of the United States, 1832


"Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires.   You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration.  We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.   I do not mean that they may not wish to come out of hell, but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good.   They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved."

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Stocks slumped badly today, purportedly on a warning from SNAP and the economic data from this morning, which fell a bit short on the PMI.

Unsurprisingly, they managed to take back quite a bit of their losses in the afternoon trade. 

The Dollar fell further, dropping into the 101 handle. 

Gold and silver rallied, and held most of it. 

Tomorrow is a not inconsequential option expiration for precious metals on the Comex. 

Dolly will be going in for surgery tomorrow, and her return will most likely happen at the end of the day. 

Old age is no joke, even for good little dogs. 

So unless something unexpected happens, there will likely be no commentary tomorrow night. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Old As Babylon, And Evil As Sin - Comex Option Expiration

 

"The whole town and all its inhabitants are quite drowned in carnival din, masks and confetti.  And on top of that the news of the Reichstag fire.  Dancing on a volcano."

Alban Berg, Letter from Berlin, September 1, 1933


“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


"There are so many ways of escaping from that which one fears, and not the least of these is hatred.”

Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir


"When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.  

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population.  It limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination."

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas


"Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all the objective, logical considerations, we find that which goes beyond the merely rational: the struggle against evil, against the servants of the antichrist. 

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; and when he yields to the forces of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on and on to the next and to the next, at a furiously accelerating rate."

Die Weiße Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942


“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis


Stocks were able to rally today, and managed to hold on to the gains and go out near the highs.

The Dollar declined back to the bottom of the 102 handle.

Gold and silver rallied well, but were sold back down during the afternoon, still managing to hold on to some of their gains.

There will be a fairly significant precious metals option expiration on the Comex this Wednesday the 25^th.

 Pricing shenanigans are customary.    It's what they do.

Have a pleasant evening.