Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lying and Dying for 'Greatness'

 

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.  The dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred.   People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence. They want to be told this publicly.  They want to know that those ‘at the top’ are on their side.  They want to feel recognized and cultivated.  For goodwill to develop and have an impact it must hear this, so that the world does not ridicule it.”

Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.  Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.  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, Escape from Freedom

"Demagogy enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

"Let's be clear about this, the oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power.

This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price.  And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains.

But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup

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

Thomas Clement Douglas

"And Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth— that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning.   He understood with equal force why the Lord had turned him back on the road.  That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis

 The leadership of the world's democracies is fallen low.  

And it may not have yet reached bottom.

"As Jesus drew near he saw the city, and wept over it saying, 'If only you knew the way for peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.  For the days are coming when your enemies will raise a barrier, and encircle and hem you in on all sides. They will smash you to the ground, and crush your children within, and will not leave one stone upon another, because you did not recognize this moment of God's mercy.'”

The Dollar was slightly higher, gold and silver finished slightly lower.

The SP 500 made a gain, the NDX not so much.

The Fed will announce it's latest on Wednesday.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Husks of the Fashionably Dead - FOMC Next Week

 

“A society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience.   A society that narrows the meaning of 'success' to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal.

People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.  They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"I see dead people.  Walking around like regular people.  They don't see each other.   They only see what they want to see.  They don't know that they're dead."

Cole Sear: The Sixth Sense

"They do not see the image of Almighty God before them, and ask themselves what He wishes.   And, for the same reason that they do not please Him, they succeed in pleasing themselves.  Hence, they become both self-satisfied and self-sufficient, and in consequence they are very well content with themselves, and rate their merit very high, and have no fear at all of any future scrutiny into their conduct.

All sin, indeed, when repented of, He will put away; but pride hardens the heart against repentance, and sensuality debases it to a brutal nature."

John Henry Newman

"People love the sentimentality of their beliefs, the traditions and tribalism and forms of a self-conception, the good feeling that they get from believing that they are better than and different from the great body of mankind.  We can be wonderfully profane.

But when it comes to applying those higher principles of belief in their daily lives, most people are highly selective, and in general want nothing to do with them, except as it is convenient, and serves their purposes without sacrifice.  And so they become spiritually dead, dried husks of souls that have slowly starved the love from their hearts.  They view themselves as superior, and therefore victims of their inferiors.   They cling to their hypocrisy like a drowning man might cling to an anchor, down to the depths of the abyss."

Jesse, Dead People, Seeing Only What They Want to See, 8 February 2018

Stocks wobbled around again.  The usual rally attempt failed into the close.

Gold and silver were under some pressure.

The Dollar drifted sideways, finishing slightly higher.

VIX fell slightly and remains on the low side for recent history.

There will be a FOMC meeting and rate decision next week.

The market seems to be anticipating a 'neutral' meeting.

Whatever that means.

Need little, want less, love more.   For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Hope and Change - The Discreet Charm of Elitism

 

"The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.  As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.  Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

President Grover Cleveland, State of the Union, December 3, 1888

"I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too.  A near miss [Miss Lewinsky that is] on that one.

He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on. This was something relatively new for a left party in the industrialized world, and it was quickly adopted by other left parties in other countries, most notably 'New Labour' in the UK.  Unfortunately, this strategy has little to offer the people who used to be the Democratic Party’s main constituents except scolding.  It merely assumes that they have, as the ’90s saying went, nowhere else to go."

Seymour Hersh, A Conversation on US Politics with Thomas Frank, July 13, 2023

"The Press of the United States?  Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.  I know nothing that I may say can influence you.  You have no souls to be influenced.  You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats.  There is no Republican Party.  There is no Democratic Party.   You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy.  You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907

Hope and change.

Right...

Stocks slumped a bit today on a dose of reality out of the earnings reports.

It was just a little leak compared to the recent 'AI-fueled' bubble action, so the bulloney boys are undaunted.

In the spirit of trend reversals, the Dollar rallied, and gold and silver lost ground.

There will be a stock option expiration tomorrow.

FOMC next week.

They never see it coming.  Because they think that they and their friends are it, above it all, blessed with the discreet charm of an effete and anachronistic elitism, the old shibboleth of 'class.'

“Religion, opium for the people.  To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife.  And now we are witnessing a transformation.  A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death–the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”  

Czeslaw Milosz

Lessons unlearned bring old and familiar consequences, familiar at least to those who study history, and don't choose to consider it to be beneath them.

In the end, it is never between you and them, but between you and God.

Have a pleasant evening.