Rigging Justice: More Tales of the New Oligarchy and the Supreme Court

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

Hannah Arendt

"Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us - if at all - not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men
The stuffed men."

T. S. Eliot

The power of Big Money is often ostentatious, heavy with sanctimonious ceremony and media envy, but sometimes it is even more powerfully subtle.

The Supreme Court has a limited docket, and apparently a penchant for choosing certain lawyers of repute to bring cases before them.

 So Big Money hires those lawyers.

The people tend to vote for the less repugnant of the choices that the two political parties in their elections.

So Big Money gets ahead of the curve and pre-selects the candidates from the two major parties.

How can you fail to win the debate when you frame the questions, pick the debaters, and control how it is reported and scored?

 

Where are the great minds, the outstanding leaders, the moral beacons?   Has greed overwhelmed all virtue, leaving only shallow passions and self-deceptions?  Have we become an audience of cynical voyeurs in a digital Colosseum?

 

We are becoming a nation of waiters, bankers, and corporate-sponsored intellectual bordellos.  We can commit despicable, even heinous acts, and think we can rationalize and lie our way out of almost anything.  Winning!

Death by cynicism and expediency in the latter days of Empire.

 

And justice, for some.

"The Reuters examination of the Supreme Court's docket, the most comprehensive ever, suggests that the justices essentially have added a new criterion to whether the court takes an appeal - one that goes beyond the merits of a case and extends to the merits of the lawyer who is bringing it. The results: a decided advantage for corporate America, and a growing insularity at the court.

Some legal experts contend that the reliance on a small cluster of specialists, most working on behalf of businesses, has turned the Supreme Court into an echo chamber - a place where an elite group of jurists embraces an elite group of lawyers who reinforce narrow views of how the law should be construed...

The court generally has a conservative, pro-business majority, but even one of its most liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, accepts the corporate tilt of the specialist bar that dominates the docket."Business can pay for the best counsel money can buy. The average citizen cannot," Ginsburg said. "That's just a reality."

Read the entire story at Esquire here.

Weaponizing Social Science: Pentagon Plans To Shape and Control Mass Civil Breakdowns

 

To protect and promote our vital corporate interests with advanced social techniques, a compliant press, and boatloads of dark money, at home and abroad.

 

Managing perceptions. 

O brave new world, that has such creatures in it.

We had a dream.  And now its becoming a nightmare.

We come in peace.

 

"A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies...

Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements....

Minerva-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the "study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements," he said, including how "to counteract grassroots movements."



Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, "when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project."

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists."

Read the entire story in The Guardian here.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - On the Cusp - With All Respect To Willem Buiter

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake.  Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."

Sir Eddie George, Governor Bank of England to Nicholas J. Morrell, chief executive of Lonmin Plc.

George Osborne, Staring at the Abyss Once Again

Gold ran up to almost the exact resistance of the bear flag. No coincidence there.

Silver also took back the 17 handle.

Follow through is everything.

Looking at the Comex delivery reports, there are a large number of gold contracts being stopped, not so much silver.

But in the warehouses, gold is relatively quiet, while silver bullion continues to see movements in size.

 

US Silver coin sales are setting a record this year.  Imagine that. 

 

With all due respect to Willem Buiter, the Citibank economist who spotted the 6,000 year bubble in precious metals, gold and silver will more likely be considered de facto money when today's paper dollars, and the lords of the central banks who created them, are nothing more than dirt under a toddler's fingernails.

I think the gold market in the US is a paper fake.  There is almost no doubt in my mind now.  It is no more tied to fundamentals than Liar's poker is tied to the US currency levels.

During the day I mentioned to Bill Murphy that the physical markets will some day deliver a size twelve shoe, with likely some impressive velocity, into the posterior of the US financialized markets.

And at that point, the smarmy hands of Wall Street will once again come slithering towards our pockets, perhaps wearing the cuff links of the Federal Reserve, and be expecting a bailout to 'save the system.'

God have mercy, if we allow that to happen again.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 h

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

"This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price.

And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, May 2009

World markets were selling off overnight, and so were US markets early this morning.  The Greek stock market lost almost 13 percent in one day.

 

Encouraging words about printing euros from the ECB helped to turn the markets around, with a buying campaign in the SP futures and some opportunistic dip buying in techs saving the day.

 

The pigmen are rubbing their hands and licking their chops, looking for a 'Santa Claus rally' to fill their bellies into the quiet trading of year end.   That is a stock market rally that occurs in the very quiet holiday trading at year end and the first week in the new year.

 

Have a pleasant evening.