Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - We Watched It Coming - Never Say Again You Did Not Know

 

“By means of gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison.  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; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.

Sophie Scholl


“Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere.  The inferno could erupt anew anywhere.  The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat.  So information is a defense.   Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition."

Simon Wiesenthal


"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky. There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues."

Albert Camus, The Plague


“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”

William Wilberforce


What is surprising is not that we are called to do so much, but rather, so little.  Love and be grateful to God, treat people as you would like to be treated with respect, kindness, mercy and forgiveness.  Do not lie or steal or cheat or act with violence and lawlessness, do not be proud and look down on your fellow creatures, and act with honor and respect for the gifts of His creation.

And when we fail through weakness, we are readily forgiven if we are but genuinely repentant for our misdeeds, by action or omission.

But all too often we bargain away our souls, one piece at a time, rebelling from even these small and reasonable requests to goodness— and for relatively so little in return.  A little more money, some prestige and recognition from the worldly, more than the other guy, and a feeling of being superior to the rest of humanity. 

Those people are fools, but I am smart, and fully deserve of everything that we have been given, owing nothing to anyone, including God.  We are self-sufficient; we are like God.

And we may hold on to that poisonous bargain out of stiff-necked, stubborn pride and a willful blindness refusing to repent and admit our errors, until we allow them to drag us into the abyss, often bringing our family and friends with us.  

Misery loves company, and the sinful insulate themselves from a recognition of the foulness of their hearts by rationalizing their sinfulness by excusing it, and attempting to convert those around them to the same wickedness.

Even now most will gloss over this, or assume I am speaking only about their financial investments, or the markets in general.  Or those other guys.  Because that is where their hearts and minds are, with what they truly love and serve, to get what they want.

The worst may be those who embrace the leaven of the Pharisees, and serve some greater good until they kill goodness incarnate, and make their deal with the powers of darkness with their 'righteous anger.'

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Let me be blunt.   In the greater scheme of things the only thing that matters is your soul, for that is what this is all about.  

And most are just letting theirs go, little by little,into accepting anger and hatred, lies and violence and lawlessness.  I have seen it before, in the 50s and 60s.  Every century is like every other, but each think that they are exceptional, and that theirs is the worst.

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

Stocks took a dive today, as reality continues to puncture the terrific asset bubble that was fomented by the trousered apes and their financial system.

Gold and silver were hammered today, as they seemed to be no haven from the selling except the Dollar.  Not even bonds.

VIX took a jump higher.

The impetus for this latest selling seems to be the notion that has been spreading among the trading desks and their media is the idea that the Fed is going to surprise the markets with a 75 to 100 basis point rate increase on Wednesday.

It's possible, but not probable.

Did I mentions that there is an option expiration on Friday.

Never forget that these jokers have no conscience, and thereby no shame, in their higher priorities.

The CrashTrak model is being updated since we set some new lows today.

I am struggling with a number of probabilities here.   Did we just reaffirm and more firmly set that second low, or are we truly into a failed rally scenario and a deeper decline.

A crash may be a misnomer here.   The average duration from top to break in a 'crash' is generally about 62 days.  We are well beyond that at 190+ days.

The selling is quite orderly.   And the seasonality is all wrong.  The VIX has not yet topped 40.

The dip buyers keep coming back in, dragged by their perverse need to beat the other guy.

Winning...

I am thinking this *could* be a crash in slow motion, thanks to the interference of the Fed at al.

Or maybe more likely the genesis of a grinding bear market as we had seen in 73-74.

I will be thinking more about it.

For most the higher ground is the place to be.

But if your greed drags you out into the deeper waters, well, enjoy.

Have a pleasant evening. 

In the Garden of Beasts: First the Unholy Slaughter of the Innocents

"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.   The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens' hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps. The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small."

Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin


"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people. What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."

Theodor Adorno


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

C. S. Lewis

The efficiencies of the death camps evolved from the initial experiments in killing the disabled, the mentally ill, the anti-social, and the poor.

One does not wake up one morning, and decide to become a monster.  No, men become beasts,  but one rationalization, one marginalization and objectification of the other,  one small step and excuse  towards the horror at a time.

Do you think that we are so good as to be exempt from this?  That we are incapable of such wanton blindness towards sin?

The model for the identification, sterilization, and finally the slaughter of the weak and the vulnerable in Germany was found in the United States, an ugly chapter in American history that is rarely mentioned.

And what then, is the difference between gassing and burning those who you consider to be life unworthy of life, or exposing them to predators, denying them a fair chance or the assistance for the basics of a decent life such as a living wage, health care, warm clothing, and basic human dignity, slowly working them to an early death while defaming them as deserving of it, because you think that they are inferior, and not as human as the such as you.

Oh no, no one ever helped me.  I did it all on my own.  And so can they. 

And so you deny God Himself, and how He has saved you from misfortune, He has helped you in your failings, and He has given you the gifts that you possess, in your pride.

“It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Carrie Buck story [from Charlottesville, Va]:  a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.”

Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.”

Lord Acton


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


"Many commentators automatically assume that low intergenerational mobility rates represent a social tragedy. I do not understand this reflexive wailing and beating of breasts in response to the finding of slow mobility rates. The fact that the social competence of children is highly predictable once we know the status of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents is not a threat to the American Way of Life and the ideals of the open society.

The children of earlier elites will not succeed because they are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and an automatic ticket to the Ivy League. They will succeed because they have inherited the talent, energy, drive, and resilience to overcome the many obstacles they will face in life."

Greg Clark, The Economist, 13 Feb. 2013


"You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bandaged the injured or brought back the strays or looked for the lost; rather, you have ruled them with harshness and tyranny. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd; they were scattered and became prey for every wild beast of the field."

Ezekiel 34:2-5


“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”

William Wilberforce

Thomas Frank: One Market Under God-- Extreme Capitalism

"There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past."

Ryszard Kapuscinski

But they maintain a firm grasp on information and power, for their own sake, and sidetrack and stifle any meaningful reform.

In October 2000 Thomas Frank published a prescient critical social analysis titled, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy.

In the video below from 2015, Thomas Frank looks back over the past 15 years to when he wrote this insightful book, and ends with this observation.

"I want to end with the idea that the market is capable of resolving all of our social conflict, fairly and justly.  That is the great idea of the 1990's.  And we all know now what a crock that is.  I think what we need in order to restore some kind of sense of fairness is not the final triumph of markets over the body and soul of humanity, but something that confronts markets,  and that refuses to think of itself as a brand."

The book was not received well at the time in the waning days of the Clinton revolution and the birth of the era of the neo-cons in foreign policy and neo-liberals in economics.

This religion of the markets had yet to suffer the serial failures and decimation of the real economy which it would see over the next sixteen years.

This is an ideology, a mindset, and as Frank calls it a religion, of taking market capitalism to such an extreme that it dispenses with the notion of restraints by human or policy consideration.   It comes to consider the market as a god, with its orthodoxy crafted in think tanks, its temples in the exchanges and the banks, and its oracles on their media and the academy.

This extreme form of market capitalism, also called neo-liberalism in economics and neo-conservatism in foreign policy,  has worked its way into the mindset of the ruling elites of many of the developed nations,  and has taken a place in the public consciousness through steady repetition.  I has become the modern orthodoxy of the fortunate few, who have been initiated into its rites, and served and been blessed by their god.

It is the taking of an idea, of a way of looking at things, that may be substantially practical when used as a tool to help to achieve certain outcomes, and placing it in such an extreme and inappropriate place as an end in itself, as the very definition and arbiter of what is good and what is not, that it becomes a kind of anti-human force that is itself considered beyond all good and evil, like a natural law.

It is born of and brings with it an extreme tendency that kills thought, and stifles the ability to make distinctions between things. If not unfettered capitalism then what, communism? The adherents become blind by their devotion to their gods.

This is not something new.  It is a madness that has appeared again and again throughout history in the form of Mammon, the golden idol of the markets.  It is a way of looking at people and the world that is as old as Babylon, and as evil as sin.

For Those Who Would Play With Fear, Intolerance, and Anger

In 1990 I was at an international communications conference in Berlin hosted by Deutsche Bundespost Telekom.

On the weekend I took a long autumn walk from my hotel down the Tiergartenstrasse past the park, and up to the Unter Den Linden, and from there to the Brandenburg Gate.  The famous 'Checkpoint Charlie' was no longer standing, but you could see where it had been.

I had wanted to see the Pergamon Museum in what had been East Berlin on 'Museum Island' in the Spree River, to see the famous Pergamon Altar, and the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way.  I also visited the Alte Nationalgalarie.

Some of the other buildings were old and in a state of disrepair.  I remember how many still carried bullet holes and signs of the war, even after so many years.

But on the way there, between the Brandenburg Tor and the Staatsoper Haus, I happened to spot a memorial at Bebelplatz. And in the middle of the square was a metal plaque.

"In Der Mitte dieses Platzes verbrannten am 10. Mai 1933 Nationalsozialistische Studenten die Werke Hunderter freier Schriftsteller, Publizisten, Philosophen und Wissenschaftler."

In the middle of this square on 10 May 1933 National Socialist students burned the works of hundreds of freelance writers, publicists, philosophers and scientists.

In the federal elections of 1928, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP received only 2.6% of the national vote.  They were widely considered to be an oddity and a joke.

Even though the German economy had stabilized by that time in the aftermath of the Weimar hyperinflation of 1918 to 1924, the Crash of 1929 drove unemployment rose from 8.5% to 30% by 1932.

In the federal elections of  July 1932, the NSDAP received 37% of the national vote, but 230 seats in Parliament, it had become the largest single party.

In the federal elections of November 1932, the last free election in that nation for some time, the NSDAP received 33% of the national vote, and 196 of the seats.

In a January 1933 compromise promoted heavily by industrialists who feared socialism and communism, the NSDAP party leader was named chancellor of a coalition government.

In February 1933 there was a fire that destroyed part of the Reichstag building that was blamed on the communists.  In response, the government passed the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State , Reichstagsbrandverordnung, which suspended civil liberties and outlawed all other political parties.   This is also known as the Machtergreifung.

In March 1933, in an election marked by violent repression and the silencing of most political opponents, starting with the left but moving quickly to include the Social Democrats and the Zentrum, or Center Party, the NSDAP received 43% of the national vote, and 288 seats out of 647.

The Enabling Act, Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich, was passed, and plenary power was granted to the Chancellor to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag.

By July 1933 there were about 27,000 key political leaders and journalists, in opposition to the NSDAP, housed in newly established concentration camps in Oranienburgm Esterwegen, Dachau, and Lichtenburg.

There were no more meaningful elections until 1949.

In their fear and anger some of the German people reached for a strong and decisive leader who promised them a return to normalcy and freedom from their confusion, and sought to preserve themselves as they wished to be with the heady fumes of power.   The will to power serves none but itself.

The great majority of the people looked on, and did nothing.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort
wo man Bücher verbrennt,
verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy

The Psychopath Next Door - Snakes In Suits - The Will To Power

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.

The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all failure and weakness — Christianity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

“They often make use of the fact that for many people the content of the message is less important than the way it is delivered.

A confident, aggressive delivery style - often larded with jargon, clichés, and flowery phrases - makes up for the lack of substance and sincerity in their interactions with others ... they are masters of impression management; their insight into the psyche of others combined with a superficial - but convincing - verbal fluency allows them to change their personas skillfully as it suits the situation and their game plan.

They are known for their ability to don many masks, change 'who they are' depending upon the person with whom they are interacting, and make themselves appear likable to their intended victim...

Psychopathic workers very often were identified as the source of departmental conflicts, in many cases, purposely setting people up in conflict with each other. “She tells some people one story, and then a totally different story to others...The most debilitating characteristic of even the most well-behaved psychopath is the inability to form a workable team.

Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits

Politicians do not get the attention that so many of them deserve in this documentary.

I think organizations, and even nations, can give themselves over to a kind of collective madness, and harden their hearts over time through fear and fashion.

One of the most concerning trends is the sanctification of violent, deceptive, selfish, and self-deluding behaviour in our society.   We fear nothing but power, respect nothing but power, despise and abuse the weak in our bitterness, and believe that anything goes in the service of greed and power.

And the worst is that with all this endless war culture of selfish thieving, we fancy ourselves to be a paragon of history, the culmination of progress, and exceptional for our virtue.   There is a downfall, and a tragedy, in the making.

The Unrestrained Rule of the Will To Power and the Death of Justice

"What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power, not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency. The weak and poorly formed shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so. What is more harmful than any vice?  Active sympathy for poorly formed and the weak— Christianity."

Friedrich Nietzsche,  Der Antichrist, 1895


"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Samuel Johnson

The Malicious Practices Act of 1933 was introduced to rid the German state of its ‘oppressors’ and ‘enemies’. In particular, the German state imposed new legislation that made it illegal to speak wrongly of, or criticise the regime and its leaders.

Coupled with the 1934 act against 'treachery,' a law sufficiently broad and vague, and carried out by a special set of courts with their own processes and procedures outside of the national court system, became a powerful tool for state fascism in the form of terrorism directed against their own people and any form of dissent, freedom of speech, of those guilty of social differences, no matter how fundamental or how trivial those differences might be.

First They Came for the Opposition, and then the Weakest and the Most Vulnerable

It is surprising how many people do not know about, have never even heard about, the first victims of the Nazi concentration camps and Euthanasia programs.

The first victims of the Konzentrationslager, concentration camps, were largely the political opposition to Hitler:  the Social Democrats, the intellectuals, the communists.

"The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, The SA (Sturmabteilungen; commonly known as Storm Troopers), the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons—the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy.

German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. The SS established larger camps in Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo, the German secret state police, until 1936."

But as brutal as they were, these first concentration camps were meant to remove and intimidate opposition to the regime.  We must never forget how the people of conscience among the German people were cowed into submission, to remove and silence their voices and serve as an example to the rest.

The first victims of mass murder were the disabled, the emotionally impaired, and the unproductive.  Hitler personally signed an order to begin the 'mercy killings' of men, women and children who were in state run hospitals and schools, and even in private care.   The reason they were murdered is that they were deemed to be too expensive to live, too unrproductive, too much of a drain on the people and the state.  This even included people with what today might be considered treatable and transitory mental illnesses such as depression.  If you showed the wrong kinds of weakness, you were disposed of, and often brutally by starvation.

Why have most of us never heard about this?  For two or three reasons perhaps.

First, of course, is that the weakest, then as it is now, have few to rise up and speak on their behalf against the power of an over-reaching State and the sociopaths among us.  Where is the lobby that speaks on behalf of the poor and the disabled, the sick and the defenseless?   Yes, the churches and different groups may speak out, but they are easily marginalized and overwhelmed by slogans and insults.

Second, the sad truth is that this first mass killing compromised the greater part of the German professional class:  the lawyers, the doctors, the nurses, the economists, the media, and other ambitious placeseekers.

People who knew what was happening either approved or pretended not to see it.   It was a very poor career decision to oppose such a policy, especially since as I noted above the most visible opponents of the new regime were being carted off to Dachau starting in 1933.

And German propaganda was weighing heavily from early days on the notion that some people were not fit to live in a society that must be economically and physically tough.  They hardened the peoples' hearts, slowly but surely.   The needs of 'the State', which was really a gang of self-absorbed sociopaths caught in the will to power and riches, resembling thugs and gangsters, were judged to be the highest priority.

Officially starting in 1935, although the actual persecution began in 1933, homosexuals were considered to be unproductive members of society.

The Nazis believed that male homosexuals were weak, effeminate men who could not fight for the German nation. They saw homosexuals as unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. The Nazis held that inferior races produced more children than 'Aryans,' so anything that diminished Germany's reproductive potential was considered a racial danger.

Of course all of this line of thinking found its full fury in some of the most horrific organized mass killings in human history, primarily of the Jews, and to some extent the Slavs.  Although it certainly included other non-Aryan groups like gypsies.  It was a terrible and horrible act.  It is hard to imagine where and how far it might have gone if it had not been finally stopped.

But people also tend to forget that although there was organized murder on a large scale beyond any question, the camps were also important hubs of slave labor, with the weakest being murdered outright, and the rest slowly worked to death in the war factories and special projects.  Always the decisions had a strong economic element of 'practicality.'  It was the triumph of utilitarianism and madness.

Like most terrible and horrible acts, it did not begin with a single event, a single decision.   It began with a profound intolerance for other people, ideas and dissent; and then, when it found its political footing and felt more confident, it found the will to murder the weakest, the most vulnerable, and those who had no one to speak for them.  And its unquenchable thirst for power, money and blood was unleashed.  For when all the laws of God and men have been knocked down and flattened, who then can stand when the cold winds blow across the land.

This is how a nation and a people can begin their long and painful descent into barbarism and bestiality:  by a program to stifle dissent, and then to use the media and the journals to harden the hearts of the people with fear, and corrupt practical ideas about who is or is not 'worthy of life,'   marginalizing the poor, the vulnerable, and the different.

People craft romantic images of themselves and their group as strong and more cunning and ruthless than most, exceptional, like predators entitled to their prey.  And so over time they become truly distorted and corrupt, grotesques, and make themselves into beasts.

This is how it is always with the will to power.  And in the end it only serves itself, consuming all.





Aktion T4 - A Timeline of the Nazi Euthanasia Program

Behind Germany’s Refusal to Grant Debt Relief: Financial Eugenics and the Will to Power

"What is at stake is a rather heroic rebellion by a very beleaguered people against a doctrine which has been destroying their lives — the austerity doctrine and the whole neoliberal project. For the rest of us, what is at stake is whether we have the moral courage in the sense of ethical responsibility to stand up to it."

Jamie Galbraith, Greek Revolt Threatens Entire Neoliberal Project

It is probably less an issue of ethical responsibility and more an act of self-interest for most.  Having taken their fill of the Third World, and now working their way into the developed nations, why would anyone assume that Greece would be sufficient for the maw of neoliberal greed.

The above interview with Galbraith is worth reading.  For one thing it contains the seed of the current spin that Tsipras called the referendum in order to lose it, and to somehow save himself and betray the Greeks.   And for another you will be able to read what Jamie Galbraith really thinks, the parts that the friends of the financial establishment have carefully excluded from their versions of the story.

The calling of the referendum was politically brilliant, because it defused the notion of an extremist government standing irrationally against the Troika.  This derailed the path towards a 'color revolution' backed by the oligarchs, to take out these mad leftists who were not speaking for the people.  

Remember the economic decision involving Europe which provoked the recent coup d'état in the Ukraine?  In that case the government did not have the backing of the people, and it took hold, at least in the Western portions of the country.   Wash, rinse, repeat.

Of course the Greek referendum was famously too close to predict when first called by Syriza, and surprisingly late in the game for most everyone else as you may recall   And Tsipras called it to lose? How soon some choose to forget.  But it changed the course of events in a dramatic way.  As it was it did not help their bargaining position, but as Galbraith says they did not expect it to improve their bargaining position because their counterparts were implacable and not negotiating in good faith.

But it put the field of play into better terms if your goal is playing for survival, and time.  Syriza is knocking down all the rationales and excuses to visit harsh terms on Greece that the Troika and their enablers are using.  They are exposing the Eurocrats for what they really are.

Empires set on unsustainable foundations are like financial bubbles and Ponzi schemes.  They are inherently non-productive and consuming, so they must continue to grow, or choke on their own detritus.   Transferring wealth as your major economic policy requires a steady source of new supply.

Most of the American media has fallen into line with the neoliberal agenda. It might seem surprising, but power has its attraction under corporatism, even for people who would ordinarily consider themselves to be 'liberal.'

There are concerning things happening in the Western world, and a lack of traction towards individual freedom amongst 'the great democracies.'

We look with a sense of foreboding at Germany's growing desire to bring their version of order and efficient management of lands and people to the rest of Europe.

The growing militancy in Japan, and Abe's aggressive pushing aside of constitutional restraints, is undernoted in the West, but of great concern to those in Asia.

Greece would look to the US for assistance in vain, given that Obama's representative to the continent is Victoria Nuland, the bearer of color revolutions and the reaping of ancient lands and cultures for profit.  

No, even the developed nations of the West have been caught up in the will to power.

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing--that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.

The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish.   What is more harmful than any vice?  Active pity for all failure and weakness--- Christianity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

At least in this latest incarnation of the will to power some, including the Pope thank God, are speaking out early, publicly, and strongly against the rising tide of injustice, the senseless abuse and indifference towards people, especially the vulnerable and the weakest, and the impulse towards dehumanizing bureaucratic rule and neo-totalitarianism. 

How many human lives, how much misery, how much of the richness of the land, are we willing to sacrifice to the indifferent god of the markets and its insatiable Banks.

As always silence is complicity, and apathy is a comfort to something as old as Babylon, and evil as sin.

Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief

Posted on July 11, 2015 by yanisv 

Tomorrow’s EU Summit will seal Greece’s fate in the Eurozone. As these lines are being written, Euclid Tsakalotos, my great friend, comrade and successor as Greece’s Finance Ministry is heading for a Eurogroup meeting that will determine whether a last ditch agreement between Greece and our creditors is reached and whether this agreement contains the degree of debt relief that could render the Greek economy viable within the Euro Area.

Euclid is taking with him a moderate, well-thought out debt restructuring plan that is undoubtedly in the interests both of Greece and its creditors. (Details of it I intend to publish here on Monday, once the dust has settled.) If these modest debt restructuring proposals are turned down, as the German finance minister has foreshadowed, Sunday’s EU Summit will be deciding between kicking Greece out of the Eurozone now or keeping it in for a little while longer, in a state of deepening destitution, until it leaves some time in the future.

The question is: Why is the German finance Minister, Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, resisting a sensible, mild, mutually beneficial debt restructure? The following op-ed just published in today’s The Guardian offers my answer. [Please note that the Guardian’s title was not of my choosing. Mine read, as above: Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief ). Click here for the op-ed or…

Greece’s financial drama has dominated the headlines for five years for one reason: the stubborn refusal of our creditors to offer essential debt relief. Why, against common sense, against the IMF’s verdict and against the everyday practices of bankers facing stressed debtors, do they resist a debt restructure? The answer cannot be found in economics because it resides deep in Europe’s labyrinthine politics.

In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent.

Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks.

To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well.
Once the sordid operation was complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while the debt grew larger, forcing creditors to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.

Our government was elected on a mandate to end this doom loop; to demand debt restructuring and an end to crippling austerity. Negotiations have reached their much publicised impasse for a simple reason: our creditors continue to rule out any tangible debt restructuring while insisting that our unpayable debt be repaid “parametrically” by the weakest of Greeks, their children and their grandchildren.

In my first week as minister for finance I was visited by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup (the eurozone finance ministers), who put a stark choice to me: accept the bailout’s “logic” and drop any demands for debt restructuring or your loan agreement will “crash” – the unsaid repercussion being that Greece’s banks would be boarded up.

Five months of negotiations ensued under conditions of monetary asphyxiation and an induced bank-run supervised and administered by the European Central Bank. The writing was on the wall: unless we capitulated, we would soon be facing capital controls, quasi-functioning cash machines, a prolonged bank holiday and, ultimately, Grexit.

The threat of Grexit has had a brief rollercoaster of a history. In 2010 it put the fear of God in financiers’ hearts and minds as their banks were replete with Greek debt. Even in 2012, when Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, decided that Grexit’s costs were a worthwhile “investment” as a way of disciplining France et al, the prospect continued to scare the living daylights out of almost everyone else.

By the time Syriza won power last January, and as if to confirm our claim that the “bailouts” had nothing to do with rescuing Greece (and everything to do with ringfencing northern Europe), a large majority within the Eurogroup – under the tutelage of Schäuble – had adopted Grexit either as their preferred outcome or weapon of choice against our government.

Greeks, rightly, shiver at the thought of amputation from monetary union. Exiting a common currency is nothing like severing a peg, as Britain did in 1992, when Norman Lamont famously sang in the shower the morning sterling quit the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Alas, Greece does not have a currency whose peg with the euro can be cut. It has the euro – a foreign currency fully administered by a creditor inimical to restructuring our nation’s unsustainable debt.

To exit, we would have to create a new currency from scratch. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the US military’s might, three printing firms and hundreds of trucks. In the absence of such support, Grexit would be the equivalent of announcing a large devaluation more than 18 months in advance: a recipe for liquidating all Greek capital stock and transferring it abroad by any means available.

With Grexit reinforcing the ECB-induced bank run, our attempts to put debt restructuring back on the negotiating table fell on deaf ears. Time and again we were told that this was a matter for an unspecified future that would follow the “programme’s successful completion” – a stupendous Catch-22 since the “programme” could never succeed without a debt restructure.

This weekend brings the climax of the talks as Euclid Tsakalotos, my successor, strives, again, to put the horse before the cart – to convince a hostile Eurogroup that debt restructuring is a prerequisite of success for reforming Greece, not an ex-post reward for it. Why is this so hard to get across? I see three reasons.

Europe did not know how to respond to the financial crisis. Should it prepare for an expulsion (Grexit) or a federation?

One is that institutional inertia is hard to beat. A second, that unsustainable debt gives creditors immense power over debtors – and power, as we know, corrupts even the finest. But it is the third which seems to me more pertinent and, indeed, more interesting.

The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM, or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency. The former relies on the fear of expulsion to hold together, while state money involves mechanisms for recycling surpluses between member states (for instance, a federal budget, common bonds). The eurozone falls between these stools – it is more than an exchange-rate regime and less than a state.

And there’s the rub. After the crisis of 2008/9, Europe didn’t know how to respond. Should it prepare the ground for at least one expulsion (that is, Grexit) to strengthen discipline? Or move to a federation? So far it has done neither, its existentialist angst forever rising. Schäuble is convinced that as things stand, he needs a Grexit to clear the air, one way or another. Suddenly, a permanently unsustainable Greek public debt, without which the risk of Grexit would fade, has acquired a new usefulness for Schauble.

What do I mean by that? Based on months of negotiation, my conviction is that the German finance minister wants Greece to be pushed out of the single currency to put the fear of God into the French and have them accept his model of a disciplinarian eurozone.

 

The European Union, Greece, the Will To Power, and the Viceroys of Monetary Repression

"Talk to IMF people and they will go on about the impossibility of dealing with Syriza, their annoyance at the grandstanding, and so on. But we’re not in high school here. And right now it’s the creditors, much more than the Greeks, who keep moving the goalposts. So what is happening? Is the goal to break Syriza? Is it to force Greece into a presumably disastrous default, to encourage the others?

At this point it’s time to stop talking about 'Graccident'; if Grexit happens it will be because the creditors, or at least the IMF, wanted it to happen."

Paul Krugman, 'Breaking Greece.'

"Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax."

Even more than she thinks about all those now struggling to survive without jobs or public services? "I think of them equally. And I think they should also help themselves collectively."

How?

"By all paying their tax. Yeah."

Christine Lagarde, Can the Head of the IMF Save the Eurozone 

 

This is no longer about the Greek debt. This is now about a small group of technocrats dictating domestic policy, and alas, enforced 'obedience' from a distant a central authority, using the power of monetary rather than military control.   It is painfully obvious.

So where are the economists?  Where are the analysts who pretend to authority on monetary matters, but who in fact blow with the wind from one incompatible position and crackpot theory to another, wherever their advantage may be?

Why are they not pointing out that monetary and public policy union over a large and diverse geographic area without 'fiscal transfers' between local economies, as exists in the US between the states for example, is inherently unstable, if not barking mad?  

You cannot have one distinct part of a region setting monetary and fiscal policy to suit their own needs, and expect the rest of a vast area with varying economic situations, demographics, and cycles to dance to their indifferent tune.   We know this.

This is not some theory.  This is hard experience, and one of the great issues of the 19th century in the US where New York Banks set monetary policy and drove the economies of the rest of the nation, particularly the agricultural areas of the West, into near rebellion through their callous disregard.

What are these people thinking?  This is not a political and economic union. This is neo-colonialism.  This is degenerating into a despicable parody of the white man's burden.  And they know this. 

So what is the purpose of their experiment?  What are they trying to prove?  That they are superior, apart from the power that they obtain solely from their privileged positions?

I was just listening to Larry Summers, speaking condescendingly (in his mind I am sure it was compassionately) about not trying to change the Greeks and countries like them culturally, but instead bringing them along gradually while offering 'competent administrative assistance.'  

Are you kidding me?  From the serial destroyers of wealth at the EU and the Fed?  What do these fellows imagine themselves to be, the new Viceroys of India?

Are they trying to show that if the world moved to a single currency that the different regions around the globe would still be able to maintain their national sovereignty while operating under a centralized monetary control in the City of London and Wall Street?   Well, if so, they have failed. 

They have shown such a notion to be ludicrous, a mere pretext for the eventual tyranny of an aloof central authority of self-defining and self-deluding 'superior beings,' whose burden it is to bring order and self-control to the weak minded inferior races.  

Inferior races!  This is Greece, the cradle of Western civilization.  This is the country that stood against the onslaught of the fascists, and bought time for the Allies.   This is the nation that was placed under a series of authoritarian puppet regimes by the Truman Doctrine as their thanks.  How convenient are our memories.  

And this is a nation that has been brought very low, into the spiral of a depression, by the monetary chicanery and neo-colonial vendor financing of Brussels and Berlin, through the puppet governments and Western economic hitmen under which they have suffered for far too long.

This is nothing more than the high water mark of a long trend to the will to power, that is as old as Babylon, and evil as hell.

Social change happens slowly at first, and then all in a rush. We have seen this recently in the States, and the rate of change, when it comes, can be breath taking. 

And the things that these hypocrites fear most are being brought about by their clumsy and incompetent pretensions.  There is no irony sweeter than the course of history, and human nature.

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - It Is Not About the Debt, But About Power and Obedience

"This nation is getting remarkably adept at turning its less affluent citizens upside down and shaking them, until literally every single cent falls out of their pockets.  And then it induces them to take on debt so they can be shaken down some more."

Malcom McMichael

"There is a certain irony to Europe starting to worry that austerity is hurting Greece's economy. For years, Europe's leaders have insisted Greece cut deficits in exchange for concessions. Greece's economy has already shrunk 25 percent, and it is having trouble honoring its obligations in part because it has had so much austerity."

Matt O'Brien, Europe Is Destroying Greece's Economy For No Reason At All

As we saw today, the celebrations about the 'capitulation' of Greece were premature to say the least, if not fabricated almost entirely in the case of the financial markets.

 

The amateurs may have gotten carried away by their own theories and predictions but the professionals in the markets and the media certainly knew better.

Greece offered what they labeled 'harsh cuts' for themselves, and crossed some mythical 'red lines.' And I think in sum they put most of the money up.  Whether they would have stuck with it is another matter entirely. 

But what people forget is that as it is now the EU is no longer about money.  It is all about power, and the gathering of more of that power for a central authority, and above all, obedience.    If it were about money, and bailing out their Banks which has largely been done, it would be over already. 

 

Greece is being made an example of for the benefit of the others.  And the liberal use of propaganda and financial terrorism, the stirring the emotions of the people against the Greeks by portraying them falsely, calls to mind, and may even be the prelude to the same sorts of crimes that haunted the twentieth century. 

 

And I would hope that the non-Europeans will take no comfort in this, because these same sorts of arguments and oppression are being used in our own places every day.  We cannot afford to pay these people a living wage.  We cannot provide adequate healthcare to everyone.  We cannot treat everyone the same in the legal system and afford them equal protection under the law.  We cannot afford to treat the mentally ill and the disabled humanely, so let us just throw them on the streets to fend for themselves.   It is too complex, too costly.  Let the markets sort them out.  Our new god will judge.

The Greek debt crisis is about money to the same extent that Germany claiming Czechoslovakia was about protecting native Germans, or the invasion of Iraq was about preventing the use of their weapons of mass destruction.  

 

These are blatant acts of will, the will to power. 

The manipulation of the gold and silver markets this week is mostly about skinning anyone foolish enough to have purchased option calls on the Comex. Given the balance of calls at about 1180 to 1220 coming into this week at 1200, I would say things went pretty much according to plan.

Who in the heck is still giving The Bucket Shop their money?  Because, as the old joke goes, it is the only game in town?

 

The Pope caused a fuss by saying that Christians who invest in the making and selling of armaments to wage aggressive war are hypocrites.  And that financial repression and fraud are the result of setting a love of money over the love of our neighbor.

 

The corporatists and their enablers do not want to hear about that.  The markets are their new gods.  It is never really the money, but the power and the willful pride to it.

 

So too are the hypocrites who make their money by knowingly participating in these control frauds and con games, even if they might say that they are just along for the ride. 

 

They did not mug that innocent traveler or stranger.   They just went through his or her pockets after the fact, they just fenced their property.  They just made a bet on whether the victim would receive a broken arm or a concussion.   All while saying and doing nothing to help.  As Czeslaw Milosz said, 'A true opium of the people is the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.'  

 

And this will end badly, for many.  And especially for those who believe they are winning, again. 

 

The times they are a changing.  But not nearly fast or soon enough. And so history repeats.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

The Will To Power in the Exceptional

"Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the powerful emotions which heighten our vitality; it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity...

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in a man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

 

 'What is truth?' asked the cynical bureaucrat Pilate, and then turned and washed his hands of it.

 

 

 

"Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction...

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge."

Chris Hedges

 

“All life has inestimable value even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor, are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image, destined to live forever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect...

All too often, as we know from experience, people do not choose life, they do not accept the Gospel of Life but let themselves be led by ideologies and ways of thinking that block life, that do not respect life, because they are dictated by selfishness, self-interest, profit, power and pleasure, and not by love, by concern for the good of others...

As a result, the living God is replaced by fleeting human idols which offer the intoxication of a flash of freedom, but in the end bring new forms of slavery and death...

Francis I

 

I have long felt that the basis of our economic and political discussions are a distraction, and by design.   They force us to operate from some fundamental policy assumptions that prevent a discussion of our current state of affairs in a necessarily frank and fundamental manner.

El Greco, Fábula of Boy Lighting Candle With a Fool and an Ape

With regard to economics and political systems, a 'practical person' may decide on whichever form of government serves their own private interests best.  

 

The amoral person chooses what is expedient, and in this they are little different from the worst, because they will go along with whatever serves their own power and self-interest above all.  They will rationalize themselves into a hell on earth, or hereafter.

 

A 'moral being' must choose what is just, as defined by some higher principle of justice for all.  And that choice must be made because it is inherent in being human.

 

Just as love is the touchstone in religion, justice is the touchstone in public policy. 

 

Exceptionalism is no virtue, no mark of the chosen, but merely the sin of pride, wearing the silks of rationalization and self-delusion.  And this is at the root of every fallen angel, every lost soul, and every failing nation.

 

I am not here making an appeal to the careless few based on either faith or reason.  Alas, I fear they are now beyond both morality and common sense, until a reckoning comes.

 

Rather, in this solemn season I am reminding the faithful and the many of a message they have probably heard, and forgotten, so often.  A man cannot serve two masters.  He will love the one, and hate the other.

 

The ultimate question is, 'whom do you serve?'  Choose as you will, but you will live with your choice, forever.  We do not choose all at once, but every day, and in all our actions, whether we are consciously aware of our choice or not.

Your carelessness and self-approval, your reputation and connections, your associations and positions, will be of no comfort and value to you then.  When exposed by the light your life of self-absorption and exceptional selfishness will be an ever stinging rebuke of burning regret and torment.  Not that you have betrayed and traded away so much that is good, but that you have done it for so little.

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

Czesław Miłosz