Martin Luther King: 'It Is Time For All People of Conscience To Call America To Come Home'

"...A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just."

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love...

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are brothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State--they are God-given.

Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close.

And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."

Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, "Why do you have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since learned that to be a follower of Jesus Christ means taking up the cross.

And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future.

We shall overcome because the bible is right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope..."

Martin Luther King, Full Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, April 30, 1967

Melin and Koutoulas: Did JP Morgan 'Loot Accounts' At Lehman and MF Global As Bankruptcy Tactic

It is one thing for an organization to use its privileged position to seize assets in a firm that it knows is going to go bankrupt. That is certainly a possible crime under the fraudulent conveyance laws, as well any violations of fiduciary responsibility.

If a lawyer, for example, knows that a client is going to go bankrupt because of their privileged view of the situation, do they have the right to seize any and all of their client assets for themselves, to secure any outstanding obligations the customer may have with them? Does this include escrow accounts and assets held on behalf of other parties and creditors?

But beyond this, what compounds the situation is any subsequent obstruction of justice, and racketeering with regard to concealing the discovery of those looted funds and assets that were taken extra-legally under some self-serving rationale, and the perversion of the process of the law as a result of this effort.

Remember, it was the concerted attempt to conceal a 'third rate burglary' that finally brought Nixon crashing down.

But I have to admit, this occurred at a time when the nation and its representatives still had an active conscience, that could be repelled in disgust at the trampling of the Constitution. It is not so clear that the soul of the nation has not been deadened by years of deceit and excess, dulled by propaganda and self-serving relativism.



The powerful always snicker, reveling at the height of their reign. They murder the messengers and prophets, to maintain their delusion. And they abuse justice, and the cries of the oppressed rise to heaven.

And then it may not be man's law but God's justice that prevails, and that will be a terrible chastisement indeed, the inevitable downfall, der untergang, of a group of wealthy people driven mad by the will to power and the illusion of their own exceptionalism. And then they will be broken in default and disgrace, as a sign to the faithful.

"For the oppression of the poor, for the groans of the much abused, now will I arise, says the LORD. I will set them in safety from those that sneer at them. The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tested in a furnace purified seven times.

You shall keep them safe, O Lord, you shall preserve them from this generation of vipers forever, where the wicked prowl on every side, where vile men are exalted." Psalm 12:5-8

The US Government Is Where Everybody, Every Policy, Everything Is Now For Sale At the Right Price

Tim Price puts things in perspective, and includes an extended quote from Doug Noland's excellent Credit Bubble Bulletin.

"I have no problem with the staff of Goldman Sachs earning millions...I have no problem with their clannish, hubristic, insular culture, having never wanted to work for the Moonies.

My main problem with Goldman Sachs is that if it operated like any other business in the world, when it and its business model effectively failed in 2008 it should have been allowed to fail properly, and closed down. But that is not what happened.

Despite self-serving articles like that from Nader Mousavizadeh in this weekend‘s FT ('[the bank] navigated the crisis with far greater skill and discipline than its rivals (and at a far lower cost to taxpayers'), the reality is that Goldman Sachs was almost certainly just as bust as Lehman Brothers in those dark days of 2008. The difference is that Lehman Brothers wasn‘t allowed to convert itself into a bank holding company and borrow emergency funds directly from the Federal Reserve. Goldman was, despite not being a bank in any conventional sense of the word. But that is only to be expected, given that Goldman Sachs and its alumni have managed to infiltrate themselves into every branch of the US administration...

When you look at Taibbi‘s original article, the more recent criticism voiced by...former Goldman employee Greg Smith (readable here) is a vicarage tea party by comparison.

But as I say, I have no problem with Goldman Sachs per se, other than that it shouldn‘t exist, or that it displays the uniquely biddable qualities of US government: everybody, every policy, everything is for sale at the right price...

Tim Price, Muppets 1, Gollums 0
PFP Wealth Management
19 March 2012

Working hard and being smart does not bother anyone. It is the lying, cheating, and stealing, that is most disturbing, especially when it involves corrupting the fundamental processes of the nation like the banking system and the money supply.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what is commonly known as corporatism, à la mode Américaine.

From what I can tell money corruption was taken from a long standing but largely personal, almost petty, retail political sideline into a well-organized, wholesale, industrial scale art form by the Clintons and, given the current climate of campaign funding wherein it  has proved so successful at raising enormous funds, that it has become increasingly en vogue, if not de rigueur.

In times of general corruption, when one is dancing they all must keep dancing, whether bankers or pols, until the music stops.


Read the rest here.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - New Moon, New Year, Dollar Oil

A slam in the early morning, a sharp rally on much higher volume, and then sideways on light volume all afternoon.

Over at KWN The London Trader reminds us that:

“This is when you see things turn and the manipulators rip it to the upside. There are buy stops on the upside that are attractive for them to target at this point.

Traders are also watching the US dollar now because tomorrow the Iranians are scheduled to start trading oil in currencies other than the dollar. This is clearly an attack on the dollar by the Iranians.

That statement by the London Trader struck me as odd, because it is also New Year in the Persian Gulf, celebrated as NowRuz. I would have thought that there would be more of a holiday.

Reader Marcel from Canada reminds me that the dark of the Moon falls on the 22nd.

Let's see how the week progresses.