Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Blinding Power of Hate and Fear

 

“Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.  For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?  But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself.

However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.  There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.  In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.  Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.  We ought to hate them.  Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.   But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.

The real test is this.  Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper.  Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.  Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.  You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.  If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black.

Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.  The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent.  In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.  Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.  This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

"The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.   If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World


Stocks had another wide ranging day, with the broader markets lower, which is unusual for a Monday of late. 

The NDX 100 finished higher, thanks to the Bloviating 7 of big tech.

Surprisingly the VIX was lower.

The Dollar declined.

Gold and silver declined.

Like the spokesmodels and talking heads one could spend quite a bit of time looking for triggers in today's wildly swinging action.    

Some fairly inconsequential remarks by Ackman, Gross, and Powell during the day would seemingly be suspects for the 'big moves.'

But at the end of the day it seems fairly obvious that investors are not in there moving things.

This is a market completely overshadowed by the smoldering powder keg in the Mideast, as well as a few other places where the big powers are shoving and pushing, like the Ukraine, the China Sea, etc.

Troubled times of exogenous risk make for volatile markets.

Traders may spot certain groups of bulls and bears leaning too heavily in some direction, and seek to foment a powerful technical move in the short run to take some scalps.

In a fundamentally broken market these short term technical trades can easily dominate. 

It is not capital allocation in the traditional sense.  It is all a game.  And it has been becoming moreso and for longer terms, year after year.   

This is the harvest of the moral hazard and the steadily PR campaign against the rule of law.

Nevertheless, the risks of a big even-driven move are unusually high.

Be ready for a dramatic move when it comes, but try not to feed the sharks by taking obvious long shot positions early on.  

Remember that in the aggregate they can read the hands you are playing, and have stacked the deck as well.   Yes it's a simple scam and a lot of informed people know it, and go along to get along.

It's what they do.  Blind themselves. 

Have a pleasant evening.

RIP Richard Belzer, Comedian, Actor, and Author of Several Books including 'Hit List'

 

"I think we make fun of the things that scare us the most.

The reason I wrote 'Hit List' is the 50 mysterious deaths of witnesses to the JFK assassination. We're talking about CIA agents, FBI agents, reporters, people who had foreknowledge, or people who spoke too much afterward.

There are those in positions of power who malign the pursuit of justice by intentionally associating the word 'conspiracy' with the delirious hallucinations of unbalanced minds. They’re wrong. The real-world definition of conspiracy is simply two or more persons agreeing to commit a crime. In short, they are everywhere, a constant component of daily events throughout our history, and are by no means the restless imaginings of an over-attentive audience.

There is still an active focus on media propaganda in the U.S. by Intelligence agencies to discredit conspiracy theories and solidify the official version of historical events.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Richard Belzer

Reprise: Robert J Groden, The Killing of a President

Why it is 'age restricted' I do not know.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Blue Skies - Forget 'Plastics' Wall Street Says 'Pivot'

 

"J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon made their billions through inter locking directorates and outright ownership of hundreds of nationally prominent enterprises.  Glass-Steagall is one crucial piece of a litany of legislation designed to place checks and balances on the concentration of financial resources. To repeal it would be tantamount to bringing back the days of the robber barons.   The unbridled activities of those gifted financiers crumbled under the dynamic forces of the capital marketplace.  If you take away the checks, the market forces will eventually knock the system off balance."

Mark D. Samber, End Bank Law and Robber Barons Ride Again, NY Times, March 5, 1995


"In 1999, on signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, Clinton said, 'This is a day we can celebrate as an American day' and that 'the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live' and 'today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority' and 'This is a very good day for the United States.'"

Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Clinton on Deregulation


"There is no reason to believe either equity swaps or credit derivatives can influence the price of the underlying assets any more than conventional securities trading does."

Alan Greenspan, July 24, 1998, Testimony on the Regulation of OTC Derivatives


"But bad economics was only a symptom of the real problem: secrecy. Smart people are more likely to do stupid things when they close themselves off from outside criticism and advice."

Joseph Stiglitz, What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis, April 17, 2000


"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud.   The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident."

Charles H. Ferguson


“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair


"We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright, good stocks are cheap at these prices."

Goodbody and Company, The New York Times, October 25, 1929

The market read between the lines of the FOMC decision and in particular Chairman Powell's remarks and assumed that the Fed is in a pivot to a less hawkish stance on interest rates.

And so gold and particularly silver rallied.

Stocks went stratospheric.

The Dollar dumped back to the 106 handle.

Whether this interpretation of the Fed's intentions is valid or not remains to be seen.  

Certainly eyes will be on the data,  

After hours the corporate earnings reports were a very mixed bag.

Tomorrow we will be getting an advance look at 2Q GDP.

Regardless of this backward look, history suggests that we are heading into a recession. 

Unless this time is different.

Have a pleasant evening.

Pictures at an Exhibition of an Oligarchy

“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional. It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a group-think. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”

Krystal Ball (courtesy of Caitlin Johnstone)


"Media companies run by the country’s richest people can’t help but project the mindset of their owners, and they are naturally incompetent when it comes to viewing their own role in society.

Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn’t create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward 'elites' to his side. The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters. The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last."

Matt Taibbi


"And that's what I meant by playing ball. I was essentially told, play ball, soften your tone, and all of these good things can happen to you. But if you stay harsh that was going to cause me real harm, in those words.

It creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else."

Bill Moyers and Neil Barofsky, The Bullet or the Bribe


"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 (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy.

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, and lobbying industry."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation


"Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity...few people have yet considered the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with its neighbors."

George Orwell


"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism

The problem is not just with 'the media.'

The corruption in the developed world permeates the professions, from politics to healthcare to the media to telecommunications to the legal system to accounting and especially to the financial system.

It is a system based on deception, that abuses the power of money and other forms of career rewards and advancements and honors to promote the benefits of a relatively small group of people, to the detriment of everyone else.

What is sad is not the obviously and often justifiably angry unsophisticated who are taken in by some clumsy con man who was propped up by the powerful insiders as a strawman in the first place.

The real sadness is the well-intentioned, educated people, who historically have been the 'conscience'  of nation, that faithfully plug into their favorite, 'highly respected' media outlets, and allow their minds to be formed into the kind of unthinking, fearfully reactionary, and highly propagandized mindset that sits back and cheers on its own destruction, along with the overthrow of everything that it once believed to be good.

The corporate media bias against Sanders is just one example of many, especially if one thinks about the lead ups to war, and the blatant and persistent persecution of dissident voices, whistleblowers and reform and popular movements.

Power corrupts, and even worse, it attracts and rewards the highly corruptible.   This is why ordinary people combine to form laws, to protect themselves and their families from the abuses of power by the amoral, unscrupulous, and otherwise unrestrained.


It is a story as old as Babylon, and a betrayal evil as sin.

Dreaded Migrant Caravan - The Mobile 'Reichstag Fire' - Be Very Afraid

"Thousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the U.S. stretched out on rain-soaked sidewalks, benches and public plazas in the southern Mexico city of Tapachula, worn down by another day's march under a blazing sun.

The caravan’s numbers have continued to grow as they walk and hitch rides through hot and humid weather, and the United Nations estimated that it currently comprises some 7,200 people, “many of whom intend to continue the march north.”

However, they were still at least 1,140 miles (1,830 kilometers) from the nearest border crossing — McAllen, Texas — and the length of their journey could more than double if they go to Tijuana-San Diego, the destination of another caravan earlier this year. That one shrank significantly as it moved through Mexico, and only a tiny fraction — about 200 of the 1,200 in the group — reached the California border.

Some have questioned the timing so close to the vote and whether some political force was behind it, though by all appearances it began as a group of about 160 who decided to band together in Honduras for protection and snowballed as they moved north.

“No one is capable of organizing this many people,” Mujica said, adding that "there are only two forces driving them: hunger and death.”

Associated Press, October 23, 2018

These poor families are only over a thousand miles away, walking on foot, trying to escape the brutal oppression of a government we help to sustain in Honduras.

And they are coming for your freedom. And maybe to meddle in our elections.  See the usual clickbait and tinpot internet sites for details on this looming menace.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Seriously, if they can make it to Texas in the next couple of weeks, over a thousand miles on foot at the most direct and punishing route, I say let them in.

They may be good prospects for our Olympic teams.  Especially the women and children.

And we could use some resourceful and self-reliant people, because we are obviously becoming a bunch of hysterical nincompoops who will believe just about anything.  And the bigger and more fearful and hate-filled the lie the better we like it.

Bill Binney In His Own Words: 'A Collaborative Conspiracy to Subvert the Government of the US'

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe that they are free."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

William Edward Binney is a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) turned whistleblower who resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency.

He was a high-profile critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration, and later criticized the NSA's data collection policies during the Barack Obama administration.

In 2016, he said the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election was false.

Wikipedia, Bill Binney

Because of his analysis in conjunction with Veteran Intelligent Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) that has tended to carefully debunk the Russia Russia narrative, Binney has not been given much airtime on certain channels within the mainstream news media.  So like you I had not heard of him except recently when reading something else.

I found this recent interview to be very interesting.  I am not qualified or sufficiently well-informed to assess it, but listen to it for yourself and see what you think. It would seem to be worth your time at least.

He has some good things to say about Donald Trump and draining the swamp. And you know how I feel about his Presidency. So there must be something there for me to find it worth hearing.

He discussed a number of controversial topics including 9/11, etc.

Binney certainly has the right pedigree to be an informed whistleblower, and he has never been brought to heel or silenced, so he must have something going for him.  He does seem to be extraordinarily well-informed. I would imagine that if it was possible that he would be charged or discredited or smeared.

About Fake News

"It is part of the business of a newspaper to get news and to print it; it is part of the business of a politician to prevent certain news being printed.   For this reason the politician often takes a newspaper into his confidence for the mere purpose of preventing the publication of the news he deems objectionable to his interests."

Alfred C. Harmsworth, Journalism as a Profession

I have been meaning to say something on the subject of 'fake news' for a little while now. And as it sometimes seems to do, my procrastination has one again served me well.

A long time reader, Malcolm, sent this email below to me this morning, and I thought it was so to the point as to be worth sharing, with a few minor edits as it was a casual email.

The other week another reader sent me a list of purported 'fake news' sites, and congratulated me for being included on it.  I forget the source of this list, as I was preoccupied with other things at the time.  I was happy to note in the details that they had failed to categorize Le Cafe as being biased or slanted in any particular way.  It was simply labeled 'unknown.'   So I have a fake news site, but they do not yet know exactly what makes it fake, or why.

According to the document, apparently anyone can nominate a site to the list, without a stated reason, whether it be a personal dislike or some more factual analysis.  According to their document, someone later looks at the site and decides what kind of fake news it is.    Apparently they had not gotten around to Le Cafe yet, although they did see fit to include it on a fake news list.

As Winnie-the-Pooh's friend Eeyore would say, 'thanks for noticing me.'

I would like to think that when I have facts I put down the facts, and when I have an opinion or am not sure of the facts, or am putting my own interpretation on the facts, I make that clear also. That is the best that someone who is merely human can do.

Rarely in the real world, with all its variables and differing decision making weightings, are the facts so simple that 2+2=4.   And that is especially the case when it comes to public policy decisions, because of the underlying assumptions and objectives that lead to the selection of the variables and how they are to be combined and weighted.  But those who say 'it is simply math' rarely seem to state, or perhaps even understand, their own inherent biases and selectivity.

Fake news is a neat little label. So too is the label of Russia friendly that has been applied by some other group to various blog sites, such as our friends at Naked Capitalism for instance, for similarly arbitrary and undefined reasons.   I think they defeated their own credibility fairly quickly.  But it is a potentially dangerous trend, and it was especially discouraging to see it adopted by the once 'party of the people and diversity.'

This gets back to what a pundit, in a remarkable moment of irony and apparent lack of self-awareness, recently referred to as America's Epidemic of Infallibility.

To me, this culture of infallibility, or a superior appeal to authority and positional power, is a natural outcome of the notion that the professional class is a natural ruling elite as determined by the record of their schooling and connections and accumulatd accolades.

It is an old concept, sometimes called 'might makes right,' and the age old confusion of wealth and power with virtue.   If virtue were the basis, the natural path to all great power and wealth, then it would a much better world indeed.  But alas, we all know that it is not that way.

It seems that this whole notion of 'fake news' and 'Russia friendly' as it is being used recently is just the same old thing.  It is an attempt by those who are in power and their friends and enablers to control the dialogue in order to promote their own interpretations and policies.  And further, to stifle any dissent from their actions, in an attempt to maintain and enhance their positions and privileges from whence their power to do so arises.  This is as common a thing in corporations as well as societies.

As always, one must read everything with a skeptical eye, and take nothing on 'authority,'  especially now in our age with so many disgraced professions, having been corrupted by the spirit of their own exceptionalism, which is pride, and greed.

Question everything.  And never be afraid to call out those who stand, nakedly of the facts, on an appeal to authority, generally cloaked only with intimidation in jargon, and in very nice and civil terms question their pronouncements with all due respect and humility.

Respect and humility.  Really, Jesse?  Well, there is the resort to humor, which is certainly not pious by its nature.  Humor and caricature is the tool of the commons in dealing with the powerful, and wrong.  Making a joke of something, even if it is a bit pointed, is much less consequential than telling the pridefully mistaken to go shit in their hat.  

And one rarely can achieve a good outcome for their message of reform by writing it on a brick and shoving it into the other fellow's face, especially if the other guy is carrying the bully stick of the state.  There may be a time for that, but that is the difference between reform and revolution.

Those who resort to bullying and exclusion have already identified their character and the weakness of their propositions.  And the more incorrect they are, then it seems the louder and more mean-spirited that they get.

As badly as I made have made this point, here is what Michael has to say.

The mainstream media are up in arms over fake news. The establishment media, along with the political and economic elite of our country, have wound themselves up into a full hysterical fit of fear and loathing over fake news. What's not explained is where the line is located that divides 'fake' news from 'real' news.

Is it the selective publishing of half-truths, unverified rumors, and innuendo? The unquestioning regurgitation of anonymous assertions from shadowy insiders with blatant agendas and conflicts of interest? Perhaps the promotion of stories through hyperbolic overwrought headlines? A focus on the sensational and salacious? The selective exclusion of non-conforming views? The unilateral preemptive dismissal of alternative viewpoints? The manufacture of drama?

Is it the willingness to be infiltrated and influenced by intelligence operatives? The promotion of self-interested pundits? The refusal to call out and banish liars and cheats? Maybe it's the low budget for reporting and editing services, or the reliance of underpaid interns and independent hacks, or the lack of actual investigation? Or maybe the intermingling of news and editorial and advertising? How about the unabashed pursuit of profits?

No, it must not be any of that. Because the 'real' news is long and deeply guilty of those transgressions.

The problem is, we are told, that the purveyors of fake news just make stuff up from whole cloth. I'm shocked, shocked. Because the hypocrisy is monumental. The mainstream media has thoroughly compromised its credibility. This particular weed called fake news could only have grown in a garden long neglected and abused by its caretakers in the media.

To these fretting complainers, I believe that 'real' means responsive to and cozy with the elite. I think 'real' means owned and managed by people deeply connected with Wall Street and Washington. I think 'real' means willing to do the bidding of the war lobby, the US Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs, the CIA, and fossil fuel lobbies.

The mainstream media has long since abandoned any semblance of pretending to do anything except regurgitate the spin, propaganda, lies, deceptions, and memes of the would be ruling class and of their enablers. They have proven themselves interested only in serving their patrons in government and finance, for the sake of power and profits. They barely cling to the weakly stated pretense of journalism, hollow and meaningless now, and contradicted by reality almost every day.

The mainstream media is in a crisis of its own making. Fake news is merely a symptom of a general disregard for the integrity of the facts.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson on Congress and their 18 Percent Approval Rating

"Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters."

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check

Congress has an approval rating hovering around 18% according to the latest Gallup poll.  

Yikes! How can that be in a 'democratic' system?

 

Even President Obama's approval rating is hovering around 48% with about the same disapproval in our polarizing society.

 

Can 18% of the people pick the representative they like, while ignoring the other 82%?

Is it the fault of the people, the voting public?

Yes, but mostly by inaction, and their obvious confusion in the face of well funded onslaughts of command, control, and propaganda across most of the media spectrum. 

 

Gerrymandering.  Disgracefully obvious voter suppression. A insider controlled two party candidate selection process. Distorted primaries.  Rabid framing of the issues based on stereotypes and emotions.  Purposeful deceit.  Secrecy.  Manipulation.  Even the results of polls and headlines are distorted to support the 'messaging.'

 

And powerful private interests would definitely like to convince you that government is necessarily evil by its very nature, and that you should just get rid of it, and trust the monopolies and moneyed interests to be naturally benevolent and virtuous.  

They have been waging this campaign to overthrow democracy and repeal every reform, one by one, for thirty years.  And they seem to be winning, little by little, in overturning most safeguards for fairness and justice. 

 

The massive pollution of the airwaves by corporate funds and the moneyed interests with an almost incessant stream of persuasion and propaganda.  They phrase the questions carefully, and then give us the answers they want the people to hear.

And most people still believe what they see on television, the radio, and the mainstream media.

 

You give the 'wrong answer' on television, and you are never invited back.  You are also cut off from access to power and information.   You would not believe have many times I have heard this.  

 

The key morning message from Bloomberg Television this morning was an old meme from almost exactly this time last year by David Zervos, chief market strategist of Jefferies, with Eric Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle nodding approvingly:

"Stocks are for lovers, gold is for haters."

"In short, he said that if you're somewhat of a pessimist — a hater — and think the Fed's monetary easing can't go on forever, and the system is destined to crash, then you think we're going back to the 1970s and want to be in hard commodities, such as gold. But if you think the U.S. economy is eventually going to emerge from this period of low growth and eventually recover, much like the 1990s, then you're a lover and should be in equities."

 

Yes, that 'worked' as stocks greatly outperformed metals for quite some time now, about three years.  The trend is your friend.  And so is the Fed and their method of implementing monetary policies.  Not so much for workers and real median wages though.  I think we can stipulate that Wall Street has been a major beneficiary of the Fed and the government.  Why not, they paid well enough for it.

 

And yes, we are just about at that point in the banal insipidness of our economic discussion.  Whatever works for whatever reason, just go with it.   Bear and bull markets make people economic forecasting geniuses.  Until they don't.  And then they blame you for listening.

Speaking of geniuses, next year will you may have the privilege to vote Bush v. Clinton, or Clinton v. Bush.

You get to vote for the candidates that the insiders select for you.

I am not sure about Wilkerson's assessment that 95% of the Congress are just stupid.  Jim McGill's opinion on lawyers in the second video is of course exaggerated, but has some merit.  And it seems applicable to quite a few other professions these days, where people say what their paychecks demand.

Corporate Media and Censorship In America

"Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.

That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."

John F. Kennedy, The President and the Press, 27 April 1961

"There are men, now in power in this country, who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit."

John Lindsay

This link below is a fairly long and very interesting discussion of the recent crisis in the Ukraine, and what some of the bigger picture implications and reasons for it may be.

However, I am starting this video towards the end, so that you can hear one key point that Professor Stephen Cohen of Princeton makes that is in my opinion essential.

He states that there is no longer a place in the popular mainstream media for debate over the different positions and opinions on key policy questions outside of a narrow range of acceptable views as decided by a few major media outlets.  If there is a dissenting view that is distasteful to the powerful interests that influence the government, they will not allow it to be heard or discussed rationally, except perhaps in a few scholarly journals out of the reach of most.

And in this I think he is absolutely correct. And it is not just about issues such as a new Cold War, but on a broad range of social and financial topics as well.  Journalism as I once knew it no longer exists except in select locations on the Internet.

Staged discussions between paid 'strategists' from the two major political parties with commentary from a few corporate media representatives is not journalism, and does not provide the platform for the serious discussion of issues that affect all of us.

The seeds for the decline of American mainstream media were sown by the overturn in 1987 of the Fairness Doctrine which required broadcasters to air both side of controversial subjects, and not just the officially sanctioned sides of a carefully selected and phrased question or topic. 

And the Communications Act of 1934 was further gutted by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which permitted corporate conglomerates to acquire and establish powerful monopolies across the press, radio, and television.

I am finding too many cases where topics are being effectively censored by implicit agreement of the corporate media to either not cover a story, or to permit only certain aspects and views of an issue to be heard.

I am no big fan of the governments of either Russia or China.  It is the oligarchs who like the way these statist governments operate, but only when they are making deals with them and getting their way.   It was Bill Gates who came back from a tour of China in 2005 and praised this new kind of capitalism.

I have been to both Russia and China, and I prefer neither of those brands of oligarchy and monopoly in alliance with the State.  And so I am concerned about the modern attraction by the powerful in the West to emulate them, to manage the news, to establish monopolies, and to hide behind secrecy as they engage in undemocratic backroom deals with powerful interests as a standard matter of doing the business of the nation.

This de facto censoring of the news in the West is not a healthy situation.  And so we must get information about important topics where we can.   The coverage of too many news topics, from Snowden to the financial crisis to the Ukraine, have been disgracefully one sided and carry the stink of propaganda wrapped in a  press under the thumb of a few moneyed interests.

You may wish to listen to the entire interview which I found to be most interesting.  Please click on the link below to start the interview at the point of discussing censorship.

Stephen Cohen, The New Cold War: It's Five Minutes to Midnight

Related: National Publications Refuse Journalist Bill Cohan's Expose of Price Rigging in the Silver Market

               Salon, Obama's Unprecedented War on Whistleblowers

Tweeting the Decline and Fall of Western Civilisation, One Institution At a Time

“[Edmund] Burke said that there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate, more important far than they all.”

Thomas Carlyle

"In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people."

Hugo L. Black

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."

Hunter S. Thompson

“We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.”

B.W. Powe

Quod erat demonstratum. (that which was to be demonstrated)

Anti-Gold Scare Tactics Seem To Be Largely Ineffective

I have seen the most recent surveys in Asia that show the appeal of gold as a store of wealth, but I had not known of similar results elsewhere.   I also think that physical silver is enjoying some strong interest that is barely mentioned.

The propaganda of the Western banks and their friends at Shill & Troll seems to be almost as heavy handed and fairly obvious as their trading tactics of dumping large numbers of contracts to see at market in quiet periods. 

They are free have their way in their phony, rigged markets, but perhaps the old saying from Abraham Lincoln really holds true:  You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Press’ anti-gold scare tactics largely ineffective
by Michael J. Kosares

Gallup poll ranks gold second best long term investment after real estate

Under normal circumstances, I might let a rutty headline about gold in the Financial Times pass without much notice. I say “rutty” because the Financial Times has long been stuck in a rut as one of the principle apologists for Keynesian economics — big banks, big deficits, big governments and powerful central banks. It doesn’t think much of gold enthusiasts and gold enthusiasts do not think much of it. (Although I still read it every morning.)

When I took-in the headline — Bumpy ride in store for gold with price forecast to fall 15% — with my morning coffee, my first reaction was to disregard it, as I do most of the day-to-day, routinely negative Financial Times’ reports on gold. Scanning the article (with the hope some nugget of important information might be gleaned), something tugged at the back of my mind with respect to the entities referenced — Gold Fields Mineral Services (GFMS), Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. All three obviously were predicting 2014 would be a bad year for gold. What was nagging was their near-term record in the art of gold forecasting...

Read the entire article here.

Thomas Frank: Pity the Billionaires, Marxism for the Master Class

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society....to justify and extol human greed and egotism.”

Gore Vidal


"It is not Man but nature that raises into one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity -- the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The superior caste -- I call it the fewest -- has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few...

The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types -- the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all. A right is a privilege. Everyone enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence.

Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of equal rights."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Der AntiChrist

In light of the recent outcries by billionaire Tom Perkins for fair and loving treatment, I thought it might be interesting to explore the mindset that pictures the doyens of Wall Street, and those who have taken fortunes out of the dot.com and housing bubbles, as the real victims of the financial collapse and The Recovery™.

I think that part of this comes from the phenomenon that for some people, gratitude is their natural response to good fortune, even if it has come from hard work. Whereas others are possessed by a restlessness, an insatiable spirit, and their response to everything is 'I deserve more!.' 

Tom Perkins not only wishes his wealth, and his banal collection of toys, but he wishes to have public adulation as well, or at least the power to compel people to defer to him.

Mr. Frank thinks that this time around the cultural response to a Great Depression is 'backwards,' as compared to that of the 1930's, and one might tend to agree. There certainly has not been the rising of a national sympathy for victims, or a proper outrage at the arrogance and excesses of the financiers.

But this might overlook the fact that the US was a bit of an outlier back then, as only a few countries turned towards progressive reforms, while other developed nations embraced the hardness of totalitarianism, and even went so far as systematically murdering the weak.

But it is a mistake that the US is some sort of paragon, if one recalls John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The allure of selfishness and evil is a natural tendency that we overlook in our economic models, among other things. And we certainly ought not overlook the consecration of the country to the principle that 'greed is good,' or more plainly to Mammon, in the latter part of the last century.

I agree with him that Obama has been a pivotal disappointment, and I was interested to hear the reasons why he thought this was so.  Overall I found his perspective to be interesting, as though he was not an American historian and journalist, but some foreign observer sharing an exterior perspective of wonderment.

I have started the tape beyond the introductory remarks and welcomes at this talk he gave in Seattle.

"Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.

This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them.

He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist

Chris Hedges On the Power of the Modern Media and Fox News

“He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.

The big lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason.

The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-dont-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one...Confusing a targeted audience is one of the necessary ingredients for effective mind control.

The eternal demagogue will arise anew. He will accuse others of conspiracy in order to prove his own importance. He will try to intimidate those who are neither so iron-fisted nor so hotheaded as he, and temporarily he will drag some people into the web of his delusions. Perhaps he will even wear a mantle of martyrdom to arouse the tears of the weak-hearted. With his emotionalism and suspicion, he will shatter the trust of citizens in one another."

Joost Meerloo M.D., The Rape of the Mind

Hedges specifically discusses Fox News, and deservedly so,  because it has set the tone for the modern news programs. There were never more ironic words than their slogan, 'fair and balanced.'  But he could have included a few other corporate copycat channels as well, including the financial channels which have become little more than infomercials for Wall Street and the one percent.

Most 'news shows' in the states have become extended op-ed's where paid professional hucksters and 'strategists' spout slogans and sound bytes at one another, with a fairly cavalier attitude towards an intelligent exposition of the facts. 

Emotions are more powerful than facts in the modern mass media. Frighten the people, anger them, give them an object for their fear and anger, and in their rage you can move them in whatever direction you wish.

And you can look to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the weakening of the FCC, the proliferation of cable channels with hours of programming to fill, and the concentration of the media in the hands of a few corporations, or perhaps more correctly global conglomerates, for the cause of this terrible decline in what is lightly these days called journalism. And in the destruction of a literate news media, thereby lies the deterioration in public and political discourse.

This is not about right versus left.  It is about politicians, financiers, and intellectuals of a predator class who think they can strike a Faustian bargain, and unleash the will to power, and control it for their own ends.

But the madness serves none but itself.

Propaganda and Perception Management, and the Process of Dehumanisation

"Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."

Erich Fromm

Perception management and propaganda are the way in which the powerful speak to the rest of the people, and bend them to their will.

It becomes a process that dehumanises everything and everyone it touches, trapping them in deep wells of selfishness and subjectivity.

They think that they have no blood on their hands because they murder the weak and the helpless with money and fraud, rather than with knives and gas, and mislead and destroy many more souls with their lies and deceptions.

It would have better for them if they had never been born, so hard the judgement will be that is given to them.


Infancy



Vile Adolescence

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

The US Economic Recovery In One Picture

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery.

Propaganda Campaign Attempts to Mask the Economic Risks and Reality

The propaganda campaign by the US government is trying to mask the fact that the economic recovery plan is failing and that America is rapidly losing confidence in Team Obama.

You cannot have a sustained recovery without changing the underlying conditions that caused the failure in the first place.

In addition to the media blitz dissected by Yves Smith in the essay excerpted below, I have never seen such a load of rubbish being put forward with regard to the markets in US financial assets and commodities, and I have seen quite a bit in the last twenty years. In particular, the campaigns against gold and silver in particular are heavy-handed, obvious, and reaching the point of hysteria.

The shorts are trapped, hopelessly trapped, and unable to deliver on their massive short positions. They are only able to manipulate the price in short term bursts, and continue to dig themselves deeper as the world demand continues to drain them.

Whoever heard of a bubble in which the major money center banks are so perilously short it? A bubble requires a broad participation and belief, and the encouragement of the market makers. And now a statement from an "SEC official" that there is a gold bubble. This, from the very people who allegedly could not see the tech, housing and credit bubbles until they fell on top of them.

And of course there are the funds and the wealthy, who mouth the same party line while lining their portfolios with huge positions and personal holdings.

Various exigencies can compel the big players to make statements swearing gold and silver are no good, no store of value against all the evidence of history. But the fact remains that the US dollar reserve currency regime is falling apart, tumbling like the humpty-dumpty construct that it is. And the status quo is shitting their collective pants about it, and the likely backlash from the public when their deceptions are exposed.

Don't expect the Ancien Régime fiancier to fall easily, quietly, or quickly. But it will change; change is the only inevitability. And we all suspect what will remain standing when the dust settles. All this noise seems more like haggling over a larger quantity for a better price, and a clearer path to the exit.

Naked Capitalism
The Empire Continues to Strike Back: Team Obama Propaganda Campaign Reaches a Fever Pitch
By Yves Smith

I’ve seldom seen so much rubbish written by people who ought to know better in a single day. Many able people have heaped the scorn and incredulity on three articles, one a piece on Rahm Emanuel slotted to run in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, another an artfully packed laudatory piece on Timothy Geithner by John Cassidy in the New Yorker and a more even handed looking one (I stress “looking”) in the Atlantic.

Ed Harrison has skillfully shredded parsed the Geithner pieces . Simon Johnson thrashed the New Yorker story. A key paragraph below:

"The main feature of the plan, of course, was – following the stress tests – to communicate effectively that there was a government guarantee behind every major bank or quasi-bank in the United States. Of course this works in the short-term – investors like such guarantees. But there’s a good reason we usually don’t guarantee all financial institutions – or act happy when other countries do the same. Unconditional bailouts lead to trouble, encouraging reckless risk-taking and undermining responsible governance. You can’t run any form of reasonable market system when some big players hold “get out of bankruptcy free” cards."

Banking expert Chris Whalen was so disturbed by the numerous distortions in the New Yorker piece that he had already fired off a long letter to the editor by the time I pinged him, with these starting paragraphs:

"Jack Cassidy tells us that “Timothy Geithner’s financial plan is working—and making him very unpopular.” Unfortunately this is completely wrong. Cassidy’s comment just illustrates why the New Yorker has fallen into such obscurity, namely because it is more Vanity Fair than its vivacious sibling and unable to perform critical journalism.

In fact, the banking system is continuing to sink under bad loans and even worse securities losses. Telling the public that the banks are “fixed” is irresponsible. Unfortunately this false perception is widespread, including among major media such as CNBC and also with a number of my clients in the hedge fund world."

...Yves here. The reason that people who can discern clearly what is afoot are so deeply disturbed is simple, and all the comments touch on it. The campaign to defend Geithner and Emanuel, both architects of the administration’s finance friendly policies has gone beyond what most people would see as spin into such an aggressive effort to manipulate popular perceptions that it is not a stretch to call it propaganda.

This strategy, of relying on propaganda to mask their true intent, has become inevitable, given the strategic corner the Obama Adminstration has painted itself in. And this campaign has become increasingly desperate as the inconsistency between the Adminsitration’s “product positioning” and observable reality become increasingly evident...

Read the rest of this thoughtful and informative piece and its many associated links and references can be read here.

Lord have mercy on us, for what we have done, and what we ought to have done but did not,
and from what we may yet deserve to reap from our misuse and debasement of your bounty.