“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 Kapuściński, Writing About Suffering
"The US must win, since it has infinite ammunition: there is no limit to the dollars the Federal Reserve can create. What needs to be discussed is the terms of the world’s surrender: the needed changes in nominal exchange rates and domestic policies around the world."
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 12 Oct 2010
"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it. People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it. Intellectual regurgitation is prized over independent thought. Voices of the dispossessed, different, and un(formally)educated are neglected regardless of their morality, import, and validity. Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status."
Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class, April 4, 2016
"Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation."
Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion, 1 September 2006
"There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice, that does not live by secrecy."
Denis Brian, Pulitzer: A Life, Oct 1, 2001
“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
Émile Zola, as quoted in Dreyfus: His Life and Letters, 1937
"The one who sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new.'”
Revelation 21:5
Stocks came into the new year on weakness that prompted selling from the market open, despite the shenanigans in the overnight futures markets.
The Dollar rose sharply to 109 and held.
Gold rallied sharply, as did silver.
VIX remains nearly oblivious.
One day does not a trend make.
But the past week or so has been a rough time for equities, at a time when Santa Claus usually comes to Wall Street.
There is an established order that is holding on tight to a privileged position that looks increasingly unstable.
As the tremors mount, secrecy abounds to hide the force and fraud that sustains them.
There will be change. It may not come quietly.
Have a pleasant evening.
