SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

Equities marked time again today as traders wait to see if the money printing starts up in earnest again.

So the current sideways move could resolve into a bull flag and continuation IF Benny opens the money gates again.

The real economy continues to languish.

The Hunger Games And a Dystopian View of America's Future from Chris Hedges

"One may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realise that no system, which implies control of society by privilege seekers, has ever ended in any other way than collapse."

William E. Dodd, US Ambassador, Address to the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, 1933


"America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits, the tax cuts, policies and rewards, flow in one direction: up."

Bill Moyers

Spokesmodel for the 1 Percent Interviews Our Heroine

If you wish to see a vision of the future of America you may want to read the book that many of your brighter 'young adults' are reading, The Hunger Games, in which an almost frivolous, certainly decadent, and highly predatory elite located in the Rocky Mountains (Aspen?) rules the 13 districts of North America through its heavily armed squads of Peacekeepers.

Poverty and privation is the rule in most of the districts as the economy is largely extractive rather than productive. For whatever reasons, most districts seem rather lightly populated and underdeveloped. I suspect it is a nod to neo-feudalism where efficiency and productivity take a back seat to control.

I started reading the first book because I like to keep a finger on the pulse of what the kids are reading.  It gives us something to talk about, in addition to hearing the names and habits of these fellows in One Direction.

I ended up reading all three books. They are easily read and quite entertaining as a story, with decent character and plot development for a young adult book. They have a huge following judging by the backlogs for them at the public libraries.   I am sure that many teens have not read them, or read them with understanding, in the same way that most adults are similarly unaware of what is happening around them.

But there are certain pivotal books that capture the thinking minds of the young, and give us a cultural indication of what they are thinking and where they may be heading.  In my own generation, The Catcher in the Rye was one such book.

On one level beneath the drama and entertainment, The Hunger Games is a disingenuously brilliant political satire about today. 

Is this the future? No one can say. But for the moment at least, that is the direction in which we are heading. All that may be lacking is a war or natural catastrophe.

But certainly something is in the wind, if one only looks at the recent proliferation of dystopian essays and novels, which seem to spring up during periods pregnant with change. And this is certainly a recurrent theme even in important scholarly works as cited in Inequality Matters: Why Nations Fail.

Here is a recent video discussion with Alex Jones and Chris Hedges that piqued my interest, even though I am not a regular listener to Mr. Jones. But it reminded me that I wanted to write a brief piece about the substory in The Hunger Games.

And below that is one of the better maps of Panem which I have found, showing the Capitol and the Thirteen Districts, with a brief description of what they supply to their parasitic elites.  Spoiler Alert.  A rebellion occurs, triggered by a seemingly trivial act of defiance and individualism by the heroine. Much of it is powered by those hardy souls in District 13.

I have seen the first movie based on book one, and it does not quite capture the depth and detail of the book, given the limitations of the time and the medium.  But it is well done for what it is, but it is a supplement, not a substitute.



Watch the entire interview here.

"And may the odds be ever in your favor."

Speculation in China On Possible Assassination Attempt on Number Two Man Xi Jinping

It is hard to tell exactly what is happening in China from these reports of two top officials who were injured on the same night in two separate car accidents, one in which Xi was sandwiched between two military jeeps, and another where He Guoqiang was mysteriously hit from behind by a truck.

Perhaps there is a need to create an initiative in driver safety in China especially for their military and truck drivers.

But it does underscore the variability and risks with a key world player where the leadership is unusually opaque.

The China Post
Media speculate Xi injured in accident
10 September 2012

There were a series of media reports saying that Chinese Vice President and presumptive future top leader Xi Jinping was injured in a traffic accident, barring him from some public functions.

Xi and He Guoqiang, who supervises discipline affairs in China, have been receiving medical treatments at Beijing's 301 Military Hospital after they were injured in two separate road accidents on the evening of Sept. 4, according to reports of Boxun, a U.S.-based citizen news website.

There were also reports in Hong Kong media about the accidents, sparking speculation and rumors that they were assassination attempts.

Xi, aged 59 and a new-generation leader in China, has been widely tipped to take over the top Communist post from General Secretary Hu Jintao at the Communist Party Congress expected to take place in October this year. Xi is also expected to take over national presidency in next March.

But there were rife rumors after Xi canceled a public appearance for a meeting with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sept. 5.

There were also unconfirmed reports that Xi was suffering from a painful spinal cord problem.

The media cited internal Beijing sources claiming that Xi was involved in a mysterious car accident in Beijing.

His vehicle was sandwiched by jeeps and Xi was said to have passed out during the collision before being rushed to Beijing's 301 Military Hospital with injuries.

According to the source, He Guoqiang, the secretary of the Commission for Discipline Inspection, was involved in a separate road accident on the same night when a truck traveling at high speed hit his car from behind, causing it to turn over.

He also was rushed to the 301 Military Hospital and was said to be in a more critical condition.

There were rumors that the perpetrators could be military officers and supporters of Bo Xilai, former commerce minister and Chongqing party boss, who has been in detention for investigation concerning unspecified “serious discipline violations” since March.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was given a suspended death sentence last month for her role in murdering British businessman Neil Heywood. Bo was believed to have helped cover up the crime.

General Liu Yuan, political commissar of the General Logistics Department of the People's Liberation Army of China, was reportedly to have personally coordinated the medical treatment for Xi and tightened security at the military hospital.

Liu, son of former Chinese President Liu Shaoqi, who was persecuted by ex-Communist leader Mao Zedong, was once thought to be among the senior military officers that have built close ties with Bo, son of another former Chinese Communist leader.

But Liu was thought to have ceded relations with Bo because of his close relations with Xi, who is expected to treat Liu as one of his own men in the influential military sector...

Inequality Matters: Why Nations Fail

"To Egyptians, the things that have held them back include an ineffective and corrupt state and a society where they cannot use their talent, ambition, ingenuity, and what education they can get. But they also recognize that the roots of these problems are political.

All the economic impediments they face stem from the way political power in Egypt is exercised and monopolized by a narrow elite. This, they understand, is the first thing that has to change.

Yet, in believing this, the protestors of Tahrir Square have sharply diverged from the conventional wisdom on this topic. When they reason about why a country such as Egypt is poor, most academics and commentators emphasize completely different factors.

Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture. Others instead point to cultural attributes of Egyptians that are supposedly inimical to economic development and prosperity. Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success.

A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. If these rulers would only get the right advice from the right advisers, the thinking goes, prosperity would follow. To these academics and pundits, the fact that Egypt has been ruled by narrow elites feathering their nests at the expense of society seems irrelevant to understanding the country’s economic problems.

In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Political power has been narrowly concentrated, and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it, such as the $70 billion fortune apparently accumulated by ex-president Mubarak. The losers have been the Egyptian people, as they only too well understand.

We’ll show that this interpretation of Egyptian poverty, the people’s interpretation, turns out to provide a general explanation for why poor countries are poor. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor.

Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities.

We’ll show that to understand why there is such inequality in the world today we have to delve into the past and study the historical dynamics of societies. We’ll see that the reason that Britain is richer than Egypt is because in 1688, Britain (or England, to be exact) had a revolution that transformed the politics and thus the economics of the nation. People fought for and won more political rights, and they used them to expand their economic opportunities. The result was a fundamentally different political and economic trajectory, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution and the technologies it unleashed didn’t spread to Egypt, as that country was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which treated Egypt in rather the same way as the Mubarak family later did. Ottoman rule in Egypt was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798, but the country then fell under the control of British colonialism, which had as little interest as the Ottomans in promoting Egypt’s prosperity.

Though the Egyptians shook off the Ottoman and British empires and, in 1952, overthrew their monarchy, these were not revolutions like that of 1688 in England, and rather than fundamentally transforming politics in Egypt, they brought to power another elite as disinterested in achieving prosperity for ordinary Egyptians as the Ottoman and British had been. In consequence, the basic structure of society did not change, and Egypt stayed poor."

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery.