The Lesser of Two Evils Is Still Evil

At the extreme the methods of both the left and the right become increasingly similar, even though their nominal objectives may differ greatly. 

Through varying degrees of force and fraud, invoking necessity and 'the lesser of two evils', dissent is repressed, and discussion is silenced.  They no longer serve the public, or principles, or higher ideals. .

They are enthralled to power and money, and serve themselves, above all else. 

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles."

Simone Weil

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lions, and Tigers and Bears, Oh My

 

"Unequal enforcement of the law will distort and destroy any capitalist society, and we may be witnessing just such a downward spiral in the financial sector.  Capitalism is not an abstract idea.  It is an economic system with a distinct set of underlying principles that must exist in order for the system to work.  One of these principles is equal justice.  In its absence, parties will stop entering into transactions that create overall wealth for our society.  Justice must be blind so that both parties — whether weak or powerful — can assume that an agreement between them will be equally enforced by the courts.

There is a second, perhaps even more fundamental, reason that equal justice is essential for capitalism to work.  When unequal justice prevails, the party that does not need to follow the law has a distinct competitive advantage.  A corporation that knowingly breaks the law will find ways to profit through illegal means that are not available to competitors.  As a consequence, the competitive playing field is biased toward the company that does not need to follow the rules.

The net result of unequal justice is likely to be the destruction of the overall wealth of our society.  I don’t mean the wealth of individuals; I mean the total wealth of goods and services that are the benefits of healthy competition.  To the extent that unequal justice prevails, entities that are exempt from the laws will, in all likelihood, be more profitable than law abiding competitors.  Then they use their profits to further weaken competitors by using their illegal profits to further build their businesses at the expense of competitors.  All of this business building activity is based on a foundation of sand, and ultimately the entire industry — or even the larger economy — becomes distorted.  The 'rogue' company gains power, changes markets, and destroys direct and indirect competitors because it is playing by different rules."

Bruce Judson, For Capitalism to Survive, Crime Must Not Pay, April 12, 2012
 

"Back in December of 2012, when it was proved in U.S. court that billions of dollars of drug money had been laundered through HSBC and yet somehow it was also found that HSBC was NOT guilty of laundering and neither was anyone in the bank, there was an outcry.  Who in the bank knew about this? Evidence uncovered by investigations into HSBC’s activities revealed, 'senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity.'

In the UK it was noted that during the time the laundering was going on, the chief executive of HSBC in 2003 who then became its chairman in 2006, was Lord Green, who is now the UK trade minister. So obviously no great concern to get to any truth about HSBC, in the hierarchy of the UK establishment.

Senator Elizabeth Warren asked, 'So what does it take? How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?'

Warren’s question, ‘What does it take?’ was finally answered by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in March 2013, when he told the U.S. Judiciary Committee that the Justice department had decided not to pursue any criminal prosecution of HSBC.  The U.S. Justice Department felt it could not criminally prosecute the bank because a criminal conviction would mean the bank would lose its license to bank in the US which would kill it and a whole range of other institutions, which the bank relies on to buy its debts and its investment products would be prohibited from doing so as soon as the bank was deemed to be criminal.

Twenty-eight banks are officially above the law and WILL NOT be criminally prosecuted no matter what they do.  Remember that’s not me saying this.  It is the U.S. Department of Justice saying it.

Not only twenty-eight banks but all their senior executives, chairman/woman and board members.  It would be very difficult to find a senior person in a bank to be criminally guilty but yet not find the institution guilty. So we could compile a list of people who are now, at least as concerns any financial and professional actions, also above the law.

When we say a bank is above the law, not only should we remember that this means specific people are above the law (at least in how they make money) but we should also remember that this also means the assets in those banks are above the law. This means if a banks does things which are illegal but lucrative – such as laundering money in order to get the use of those laundered billions to then use them as, lets say, capital to underpin loans or for speculating, for example, and by doing those illegal things it makes out sized profits for its shareholders and staff, that money, those profits are also above the law.

Since the bank and its senior staff are above the law and breaking the law is profitable, a) no one has an interest to say no, b) shareholders and staff will directly benefit from breaking the law. They will make more money by participating in law breaking or by investing in a bank which is law breaking. They will, in fact have an interest making sure it continues."

Golem XIV, The Twilight of Justice, March 2013

"Let your love be sincere.   Hate what is evil, and hold on to what is good.   Love one another with with the love of a family.   Be an example in showing respect to others.  Do not be neglectful in your service, but enthusiastic in spirit, as a servant of the Lord.  Rejoice in hope; be patient in suffering, and faithful in prayer.  Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, and provide hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who provoke you.  Pray for them, and do not curse them.   Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.  Live in harmony with one another.   Do not be arrogant, but associate with the humble.  Do not claim to be wiser than you are.  Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but have a regard for what is good in the sight of all.  If it is possible, as best as you can, live peaceably with all.   Friends, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the judgement of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will do justice, says the Lord.'”

Romans 12:9-19

 

Stocks managed to extend their rally and edged a little higher.

This has the hallmarks of a squeeze on those who took cash or short positions as a result of the new hostilities in the Mideast.

VIX continues to wallow with its MACD histogram now at a low for the year.

Gold and silver endured a major bear raid this morning, no doubt led by the bullion banks and their cronies.  

The Banks are the dreadnoughts in the ongoing financial and currency wars.

Speaking of gold, analyst Jan Nieuwenhuijs believes that the People's Bank of China is covertly buying large amounts of gold in preprartion for a change in the global monetary structure. You can read the full article here.

"The PBoC is in a hurry to buy enormous amounts of gold, indicating it’s preparing for substantial changes in the dollar-centric international monetary system.  

Based on information from industry sources and my personal calculations, total gold purchases by the Chinese central bank (reported and unreported) in Q3 accounted for 179 tonnes.  Year-to-date the PBoC bought 593 tonnes, which is 80% more than what it bought in the first three quarters last year.  Its total estimated gold holdings are 5,220 tonnes, more than twice what’s officially disclosed at 2,192 tonnes.

The movement towards gold by central banks is showing no sign of slowing down. Mainly the Chinese central bank is on a voracious buying spree since 2022, and it’s obtaining way more metal than what is officially reported."

I think we're going to need a bigger boat.

The big, tectonic changes happen slowly, gradually, and then like an avalanche or earthquake of revelation, all at once.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Pied Pipers of the Apocalypse

 

"Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and 'weaponizing' the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die

"The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria."

Frank Herbert, Dune

"Anyone can be misled by a clever person, and no one likes to readily admit that they have been had. It is a sign of character and maturity to realize this, and admit your were deceived, and to demand change and reform.  But some cannot, even when the facts of the deception are revealed.  The more incorrect that the truth shows them to be, the louder and more strident they become in shouting down and denying reality:  cognitive dissonance.

The more extremely held the views, left or right, the more ardent the self-deception and surrender of individual identity.  Because at the extremes, it is no longer about justice, but about the objectification and irrelevance of the individual, the elevation of ideology over truth, and the dehumanisation and demonisation of 'the other.'"

Jesse, The Economic of Demagogues, 18 June 2012

“What comes out of a person, that is what makes them unclean.  From within people, from their minds and hearts, come wicked thoughts, immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness.  All these evils come from within and they make one unclean.”

Mark 7:20-23

Stocks ended the day in rally mode, spreading that green around to kick off the month of March.

Smells like a wash, preceding a rinse to me.

Next week we will have Jay Powell's testimony to Congress, and of course the Friday Non-Farm Payrolls report.

Gold and silver rallied higher.

They are coming into some important overhead resistance.  

They need to take it out and stick it with several closes to confirm an intermediate trend change.

The Dollar chopped back down.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Those Who Are Not

 

"Since 1998, in our corrupt political system, the private healthcare sector has spent more than $10.6 billion on lobbying and over the last 30 years it has spent more than $1.7 billion on campaign contributions to maintain the status quo.  We have the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry right now has 1,500 paid lobbyists in Washington, D.C. to make sure that in some cases we pay 10 times more for the medicine that we need."

Bernie Sanders, September 2022

"Yet the system of corruption depends on another factor beyond secrecy, one that is perhaps even more important: impunity.  Impunity means that the rich and powerful escape from punishment even when their malfeasance is in full view.   Impunity is epidemic in America.  The rich and powerful get away with their heists in broad daylight.  When a politician like Bernie Sanders calls out the corruption, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal double down with their mockery over such a foolish 'dreamer.'  Our major institutions, the ones that should know better, are often gross enablers of impunity."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Age of Impunity, May 2016


"There is now abundant evidence of widespread, unpunished criminal behavior in the financial sector.  The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the U.S. financial sector has become a rogue industry.  As its wealth and power grew, it subverted America’s political system (including both political parties), government, and academic institutions in order to free itself from regulation.

As deregulation progressed, the industry became ever more unethical and dangerous, producing ever larger financial crises and ever more blatant criminality.  Since the 1990s, its power has been sufficient to insulate bankers not only from effective regulation but even from criminal law enforcement.  The financial sector is now a parasitic and destabilizing industry that constitutes a major drag on American economic growth.

The rise of predatory finance is both a cause and a symptom of an even broader, and even more disturbing, change in America’s economy and political system.  The financial sector is the core of a new oligarchy that has risen to power over the past thirty years, and that has profoundly changed American life."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation


Stocks had another ranging day, ending slightly higher.

Gold dropped, under pressure most of the day.

Physical inventories are very thin in Hong Kong.

Silver moved higher, taking back some of its recent decline.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

The VIX receded after the big rise yesterday.

Who do the powerful of this world serve?  The simple truth of the matter is this— non serviam.  In all things they will not serve any other but themselves. 

May God have mercy and forgive us, especially in that moment when we will finally see ourselves as we really are, stripped of all worldly ornaments and illusions, and then know what we have done, and what we have failed to do, with perfect clarity.

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 - This Great Masquerade of Evil - Hypocrisy and Madness

 

 "Never again will we try to persuade a foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.  In conversation with them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of them.  They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.’ 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

 

“I fooled myself.  I had to.  I didn't want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent.  I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.” 

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

 

"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” 

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

 

"The foolish ask nothing better than not to have to understand anything, and they even used to get together and try not to understand, because the last thing of which a person is capable is to be malicious and foolish all by themselves.  Without understanding, they form spontaneously into herds, not according to any particular affinities but in obedience to the petty ideology, which swallowed up the whole of their small lives, allotted them by birth or chance.  They would far rather kill than have to think."

George Bernanos, Under the Sun of Satan

 

“This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Word, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.  Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior.  Christians are called to compassion and to action. " 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

 

Gold and silver were utterly hammered today, in honor of the usual rigging that occurs around the Non-Farm Payrolls report. 

Even though I was in cash and waiting for it, the sheer brazenness of the running of the stop loss orders was amazing. 

But we live in exceptionally brazen times. 

Stocks ignored everything else and rallied to new highs. 

There is an exceptional amount of hysteria and foolishness in public discourse today. 

Look deeply into your own hearts. 

Disengage from the sites that keep reinforcing the lawlessness and hysteria which may have overtaken your hearts with brazen and incendiary lies.  Or not.

I wonder about weapons and restraints, like zip ties, that some of the protesters were said to be carrying as they attempted to breach the House, with 80 hostage-ready Congressmen sheltering therein.  That could have been quite a spectacle. 

Change is coming.   I am not optimistic for areas of deep concern to me such as financial and political campaign funding reform.

And yet, through it all, there is always His loving kindness and tender mercies, like shafts of light in a dark and cloudy day.

By their fruits you will know them.  

Little children, beware the love and service of idols.

Have a pleasant weekend. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Credibility Trap

"A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so.  Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.

And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed.  In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy.

Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.  The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious, organized hypocrisy.

Jesse, 18 September 2013

Stocks bounced today.

The dollar edged higher.

Gold and silver rallied.

The VIX declined.

There will be a precious metals options expiration on the Comex next week.

Have a pleasant evening.