SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Another Day, Another Low Volume Uplift

I think we might actually go down hard at least once before the end of the month. But that is hard to say.

Despite their bravado, the people in New York and Washington seem very afraid these days.

The Continuing Rhyme of History: "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner"

"As late as 1850, the two party system was, to all outward appearances, still healthy. Both the Democrats and Whigs were able to attract support in every section and neither party was able to win more than 53 percent of the popular vote. Then, in the space of just five years, the two-party system disintegrated in response to two issues: foreign immigration and the reemergence of the issues of slavery expansion.

A massive wave of immigration from Ireland and Germany after 1845 led to an outburst of anti-foreign and anti-Catholic sentiment. Between 1846 and 1855, three million foreigners arrived in America. Nativists, ardent opponents of immigration, capitalized on deep-seated Protestant antagonism toward Catholics and working-class fear of economic competition from cheaper immigrant labor.

Nativists charged that Catholics were responsible for a sharp increase in poverty, crime, and drunkenness, and were subservient to a foreign leader, the Pope.

In 1849, native-born Protestant workingmen formed a secret fraternal organization, "The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner," which became the nucleus of a new political party known as the Known-Nothing or American party.

The party received its name from the fact that, when members were asked about the party's workings, they were supposed to reply, "I know nothing."

The Know Nothings attracted support not only from nativists, but from large numbers of northern free soilers and southern Whigs. By 1855, the party had captured control of all New England except Vermont and Maine and was the dominant opposition party to the Democrats in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

The party platform included a 21-year residency period before immigrants could become citizens and vote, limitations on office-holding to native-born Americans, and restrictions on the sale of liquor.

One Northerner who spoke out against the Know Nothings was Abraham Lincoln, who eloquently argued that the party's nativist platform was a violation of the country's republican principles."

From US Digital History.


Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Joshua Speed, 1855

"I am not a Know-Nothing. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring "all men are created equal."

We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics."

When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for example, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Silver: 'Banging the Close' of the Comex Session

There was a fairly heavy-handed smackdown of silver into the close of the Comex day session.

Maybe four or five years from now the CFTC will do something about it as they did with the MF Global trader, who had been 'banging the market close' for a couple of years, when they wanted to show they were finally doing something about the markets.

Except he was just 'one of the usual suspects', and not too big to prosecute. And he was banging the metals up, which is counter to 'The Plan.'

Mind you, I'm not necessarily complaining. Just keeping the record straight, and making sure you all know about it so you can't say no one ever told you. And so when what happens, happens, you will know why.

Oh, you believe this price action?

And now, The Muppet Show.

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