Jesse's Café Américain

US equities went out of the second quarter on new lows.

There was a surprising amount of tape painting in individual stocks, that was almost funny at times. It is hard to hide behind the tape in these thin markets. I suppose that if I were fund manager carrying a large short position, I might want to artificially drive the price down to make things look better as I closed my books on the quarter.

The junior miners in particular are a real hoot to watch with their wide spreads, large short interests, openly aggressive naked short selling, and thin volumes. It takes a special kind of masochism to trade anything on the pink sheets, much less Canadian listed stocks.

Unemployment report out tomorrow, after which time the adults will be heading out to the Hamptons for the long holiday weekend, leaving the underclass of traders in charge with strict instructions and most likely a short leash.

The Non-Farm Payrolls report will be out on Friday, July 2. The consensus is for a loss of 100,000 jobs. The ADP report came in this week with a gain of 13,000 jobs, which was well below expectations of 61,000. A recovery in the US economy is an illusion.

It is typical Wall Street arrogance when they say that 'no one will be there to even hear the number, much less trade it.' As I recall, Asia and Europe will be open for business on Friday and Monday. But some might imagine them to be junior traders, taking their orders and queues from New York and London as well.

I am still running the long gold / short stocks hedge, with the add of a slight short in the long Bond which is probably anticapatory of a decline in July unless we get another leg down in equities that has legs.

Before he rediscovered his self interest, ignoring the outrageous financial frauds perpetrated by his own ratings agency, Warren Buffett famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

I find it remarkable that there is so little meaningful discussion of this in mainstream circles. Well perhaps not, considering that most of them are now owned by a few major corporations.

The key to stopping this theft of your freedom is purging the political system of the corruption of paid influence, campaign contributions by non-persons like corporations, special interest groups, and unions, the breaking up of the media conglomerates that seek to control the news, and the implementation of a system of sound money for international trade at least, using a standard that resists the manipulation of the financial system as outlined in Hugo Salinas-Price's quietly brilliant and remarkably insightful essay, Gold Standard: Protector and Generator of Jobs.

The powers that be will fight reform every step of the way, using propaganda and your prejudices and emotions against you. The best way to conquer a people is to persuade them to enslave themselves using slogans and simplistic views of the world that play on their fears and hatreds. The neo-liberal economic fraud that was scripted by the monied interests is played out daily to vast audiences using actors and actresses masquerading as politicians, analysts, and commentators.

I receive at least ten emails per day from the self-enslaving, sadly to say mostly older men like myself, that repeat the slogans and urban myths like faithful party members, seasoned with hateful prejudice and mindless propaganda, so I know that the influence peddlers and indoctrinators are doing a good job of it, subverting the middle class.

It is a little remembered fact that the greatest boost in support for the rise of the National Socialist party came not from the underclasses which had always been a minority player on the political stage, but from the more influential professional class, the petit-bourgeois: doctors, dentists, accountants, shop owners, and small business owners. They added their force to the earliest supporters , the industrialists and the monied interests, the bankers and the industrialists.

This is how the National Socialists were able to so easily co-opt the medical profession and educated classes into the early horrors of euthanasia, sterilization, and then finally extermination of whole categories of 'undesirables.' The middle class thought they could ride the wave, the will to power, in their greed and hate and revenge, but they soon learned that madness has no master, consuming all with fire.

This is how your freedom, your wealth, will be taken from you and your children, their futures devastated. So it is something with which you might wish to be familiar, so you can at least explain it to them when they are homeless in the land their forefathers gave you.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12

Here is a recent essay by Professor Ismael Hossein-zadeh that is worth reading.

"Never before has so much debt been imposed on so many people by so few financial operatives--operatives who work from Wall Street, the largest casino in history, and a handful of its junior counterparts around the world, especially Europe.

External sovereign debt, as well as occasional default on such debt, is not unprecedented [1]. What is rather unique in the case of the current global sovereign debt is that it is largely private debt billed as public debt; that is, debt that was accumulated by financial speculators and, then, offloaded onto governments to be paid by taxpayers as national debt. Having thus bailed out the insolvent banksters, many governments have now become insolvent or nearly insolvent themselves, and are asking the public to skimp on their bread and butter in order to service the debt that is not their responsibility.

After transferring trillions of dollars of bad debt or toxic assets from the books of financial speculators to those of governments, global financial moguls, their representatives in the State apparatus and corporate media are now blaming social spending (in effect, the people) as responsible for debt and deficit!

President Obama's recent motto of "fiscal responsibility" and his frequent grumbles about "out of control government spending" are reflections of this insidious strategy of blaming victims for the crimes of perpetrators. They also reflect the fact that the powerful financial interests that received trillions of taxpayers' dollars, which saved them from bankruptcy, are now dictating debt-collecting strategies through which governments can recoup those dollars from taxpayers. In effect, governments and multilateral institutions such as the IMF are acting as bailiffs or tax collectors on behalf of banksters and other financial wizards.

Not only is this unfair (it is, indeed, tantamount to robbery, and therefore criminal), it is also recessionary as it can increase unemployment and undermine economic growth. It is reminiscent of President Herbert Hoover's notorious economic policy of cutting spending during a recession, a contractionary fiscal policy that is bound to worsen the recession. It is, indeed, a recipe for a vicious circle of debt and depression: as spending is cut to pay debt, the economy and (therefore) tax revenues will shrink, which would then increase debt and deficit, and call for more spending cuts.

Spending on national infrastructure, both physical (such as roads and schools) and social infrastructure (such as health and education) is key to the long-term socioeconomic developments. Cutting public spending to pay for the sins of Wall Street gamblers is bound to undermine the long-term health of a society in terms of productivity enhancement and sustained growth.

But the powerful financial interests and their debt collectors seem to be more interested in collecting debt claims than investing in economic recovery, job creation or long-term socioeconomic development. Like most debt-collecting agencies, the IMF and the states serving as banksters' bailiffs through their austerity programs may shed a few crocodile tears in sympathy with the victims' of their belt-tightening policies; but, again like any other debt-collecting agents, they seem to be saying: "sorry for the loss of your job or your house, but debt must be collected--regardless."

A most outrageous aspect of the debt burden that is placed on the taxpayers' shoulders since 2008 is that most of the underlying debt claims are fictitious and illegitimate: they are largely due to manipulated asset price bubbles, dubious or illegal financial speculations, and scandalous conversion of financial gamblers' losses into public liability.

As noted earlier, onerous austerity measures to force the public to pay the largely fraudulent external debt is not new. Benignly calling such oppressive measures "Structural Adjustment Programs," the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have for decades imposed them on many less developed countries to collect debt on behalf of international financial titans.

To "help" the indebted nations craft debt-servicing arrangements with external creditors, the IMF imposed severe conditions on the way they managed their economies--just as it is now imposing (in collaboration with the European and American bankers) those austerity policies on the debtor nations in Europe. The primary purpose of such restrictive conditions is to divert or transfer national resources from domestic use to external creditors. These include not only belt-tightening measures to cut social spending and/or raise taxes, but also selling-off public enterprises, national industries, and future tax revenues.

Calling such fire-sale privatization deals "briberization," the ex-World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz revealed (in an interview with the renowned investigative reporter Greg Palast) how finance ministers and other bureaucratic authorities in the debtor countries often carried out the Bank's demand to sell off their electricity, water, transportation and communication companies in return for some apparently irresistible sweetener. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billions off the sale price of national assets..."

Ismael Hossein-zadeh, The Vicious Circle of Debt and Depression: It Is a Class War

Here is a lengthier history of the undermining of the US political system using financial fraud from Renaissance 2.0.

The bailout of AIG is near the core of the great fraud. Crack that nut, and we may learn something about financial fascism and the Fed. That is why they may dance around it, but they will never take down the principals and bring the truth out into the light of day.

Le monde est sourd. The world is deaf, and the truth has no place to lay his head in their hearts.