Jesse's Café Américain

Robert Johnson: Davos Man Fears Social Instability Due to Inequality and Injustice

"No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order."

September 30, 1934

"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

January 9, 1940

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented...

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."

Elie Wiesel

"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

Frederick Douglass, Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation,, April 1886

"Albert Camus, a great humanist and existentialist voice, pointed out that to commit to a just cause with no hope of success is absurd. But then, he also noted that not committing to a just cause is equally absurd. But only one choice offers the possibility for dignity. And dignity matters. Dignity matters."

David Simon

Robert Johnson: US System Is Broken and Heading Towards Social Conflict

Robert Johnson: Ugly Money Politics

Robert Johnson: The Convergence of Finance and Politics

Remember

“We cannot understand Fascism, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard...because what happened can happen again...For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened...

Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it."

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man

"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...

There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today... they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters.

Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology, the inferno could erupt anew anywhere."

Simon Wiesenthal

"We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered...

My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death."

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning

"Upon her recent passing at the age of 76, I took the opportunity to reread Bubby's memoirs. In four different instances, my grandmother had stood—amid the smoke of the crematoriums, the barking dogs, the trampling boots and swinging clubs—on the infamous 'selection line' at the head of which Mengele and his minions stood, pointing left and right, sentencing some to back-breaking labor, and sending others to the gas chambers. In each of those instances, somebody would come along and say or do something that would change Bubby's fate from certain death to tenuous life. In one such incident, she already had been sent to the line of those marked for death when a man appeared as if from nowhere, physically removed her from that line and shoved her into the other, without saying a word.

Indeed, the miracles and the mysteries of the events of those days abound along with the horrors and the tragedies. In contrast to the vile actions of the "Angel of Death" were the noble and heroic actions of many "Angels of Life" who stood ready to risk their own lives for the sake of saving that of a stranger.

It is thanks in no small part to "Angels" like these, who stepped out from behind their own misery and grief to come to the aid of others, that generations now live on to tell the story. How clearly we see the infinite ripple effects of single acts of kindness and compassion, even if accomplished in a split second..."

Yossi Refson, Angels of Light

"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

"This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere chose to believe Hitler's claim that he had suppressed an imminent rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed. Evidence soon emerged, however, that showed that in fact Hitler's account was false...

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behaviour...In a letter to Hull, Dodd forecast an even more terroristic regime. 'The people hardly notice this complete coup d'etat. It takes place in silence...I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.'"

Erik Larson, The Garden of Beasts

"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

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Something for Everyone, a Comedy Tonight

And a cry went up from the people, 'Save us AAPL!' And so they did, and the people were amazed.

Most absurd sell side comment: 'Maybe the other retailers were doing so badly because everyone was buying the iPhone 6.'

Marissa Mayer threw out some new era junk after the bell, spinning off their Ali Baba holdings, and trumping any mundane things like earnings and growth, which YHOO doesn't have. Time to declare victory, and on to a new enterprise, MM.

The post-Greek elections bravado from yesterday melted away overnight, as Europeans started actually listening to the new Greek government, and their words permeated their psyches.

It did not help that CAT's results and guidance floundered, along with a few others. You can write that off to 'the strong dollar.' Everyone must make sacrifices for the Miles Gloriosus of currencies.

The money masters are wondering when they will be able to ravish Greece, and pick her bones, like the sacking of the Parthenon for souvenirs back home.

And then the durable goods orders results came out and the Street went into a swoon.

Gold bounced back nicely after a hit yesterday that could be attributed to both the usual OPEX antics, as well as the general trend to whistle past the Greek elections.

Tomorrow we have another FOMC meeting. My own opinion, for whatever it might be worth, is that the Fed will do nothing about raising rates this year, except to talk about them. They *might* do a symbolic 25 of 50 bp 'one and done,' but this has nothing to do with real tightening, and more with given themselves some room to lower rates when the real economy starts swooning later this year or next.

But even that seems a little less likely in their current playbook with the QE plays on the table. There is so much bad paper, and the opportunity to print even more to make it go away is very tempting, especially with 'the strong dollar' strangling the real economy of real companies and real people.

Gold is flashing a potentially bullish formation. I think the breakouts and key support are pretty obvious, given that it is a 'slanted W' or double bottom formation. But it need to break out decisively to start being active rather than potential.