SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.

The FOMC minutes suggested that some of the Fed board think they can cut back on QE in 2013.

Well they can, but it won't be because the economy has recovered.

Unfettered Capitalism and the Great Crash of 1929

“The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced.

The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not...

When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality.

The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed...

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.

For the alleged commodity "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity "man" attached to that tag.

Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation.

Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed...

Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance, as well as its business organization, was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944

FDR: Advice to Young Progressives

It is interesting to compare Franklin Roosevelt's advice to the Young Democrats of his day, to the actions and politicies of the present Democratic President.

"From the beginning, democracy has meant progress and its battle ever since Jefferson's time has been a steady conflict with the forces of reaction and special favors. Every time the policies involving greater opportunities for the common man have triumphed, our political enemies have sought to minimize those policies and to neutralize the decisions of the people. Today is no exception to that classical course of events.

Uniformly the party of Nicholas Biddle of Jackson's time, of Quay and Hanna of the Cleveland era and of the Theodore Roosevelt period has bowed to the progressive wing to the extent of pretending accord with the objectives of the progressive administrations but has found fault with the methods requisite for putting and keeping these principles at work.

Uniformly have they appealed to such elements in our own party as dreaded the departure from ancient habits or were responsive to the powerful agencies that financed and controlled local politics. Probably the hoariest story of corruption in American elections is the history of those monied magnates who contributed vastly to the campaigns of candidates of both parties with the idea that they could continue control regardless of the way which the political cat jumped.

Just as there are progressives in the Republican ranks, so there are reactionaries in our own party. Political affiliation is often the child of hereditary principles, begotten in the first instance of issues of terrific importance in the beginning but which have no more significance at present than the inflamed controversy of a century and a half ago as to whether the Capital of the United States should be at Washington or somewhere on the Monongahela River.

Always has it been the aim of the enemies of liberalism to seek to attach to themselves such members of our party. Sometimes they have succeeded; sometimes they have failed.

When they have succeeded they have not infrequently been successful in their efforts to supplant a Democratic administration with a Republican administration. Such happenings, though they have brought dismay for a period, have not sufficed to stop the general and inevitable movement to make our country a better country for all of us rather than to make it a lush pasture for the seekers and holders of privilege.

Every Democratic Administration has left a progressive mark on our own history and has influenced world progress as well. But when it has been succeeded by a typically Republican Administration, progress has slipped backwards—sometimes a few feet and often many miles. It has been said that a great many voters today want us as a nation to stop, look and listen. What they fail to understand is that nations cannot stand still because by the very act of standing still, the rest of the procession, moving forward, inevitably leaves them in the rear. Therefore, their desire to stand still actually means moving backward in relation to the rest of the world.

Republican and Democratic reactionaries want to undo what we have accomplished in these last few years and return to the unrestricted individualism of the previous century· Republican and Democratic conservatives admit that all of our recent policies are not wrong and that many of them should be retained-but their eyes are on the present; they give no thought for the future and thus, without meaning to, are failing to solve even current social and economic problems by declining to consider the needs of tomorrow. Radicals of all kinds have some use to humanity because they have at least the imagination to think up many kinds of answers to problems even though their answers are wholly impracticable of fulfillment in the immediate future.

Liberals on the other hand are those who, unlike the radicals who want to tear up everything by the roots and plant new and untried seeds, desire to use the existing plants of civilization, to select the best of them, to water them and make them grow-not only for the present use of mankind, but also for the use of generations to come. That is why I call myself a liberal, and that is why, even if we go by the modern contraption of polls of public opinion, an overwhelming majority of younger men and women throughout the United States are on the liberal side of things.

In considering the present and the future of American politics or policies, you have the right and the duty to say to those who want to stand still—Have you no program other than standing still? We are not satisfied if you tell us glibly that you believe in taking care of old people, that you want the young people to have jobs, that you want everybody to have a job, that you believe in a fairer distribution of wealth—we insist in addition that you give us specifications of how you would do it if you were in power."

Do not let the reactionaries and the conservatives get away with fine phrases. Pin them down and make them tell you just how they would do it.

The Democratic Party will fail if it goes conservative next year, or if it is led by people who can offer naught but fine phrases.

Last Winter, in speaking at the Jackson Day Dinner, I referred to the sad state the country would be in if it had to choose between a Democratic Tweedle Dum and a Republican Tweedle Dee. I want to amend that simile, so let me put it this way: The Democratic Party will not survive as an effective force in the nation if the voters have to choose between a Republican Tweedle Dum and a Democratic Tweedle Dummer.

If we nominate conservative candidates, or lip-service candidates, on a straddle bug platform, I personally, for my own self respect and because of my long service to and belief in, liberal democracy, will find it impossible to have any active part in such an unfortunate suicide of the old Democratic Party.

I do not anticipate that any such event will take place, for I believe that the Convention will see the political wisdom, as well as the national wisdom, of giving to the voters of the United States an opportunity to maintain the practice and the policy of moving forward with a liberal and humanitarian program. A large part of the responsibility for such a choice of fundamental policies lies in the hands and in the heads of the younger men and women of the nation. Be vigilant to keep Tories from controlling your own ranks—just as vigilant as you will be to keep Tory Republicans from controlling your own nation."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Advice to the Convention of Young Democratic Clubs of America, August 8, 1939

C. S. Lewis: On Hatred, and the Blinding Power of Extremism

“Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself.

However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.

But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.

Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.

You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black.

Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity