Greenwald: Lessons From Bolsonaro's Victory in Brazil

In the video below Glenn Greenwald discusses the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro, and what makes him substantially different from Donald Trump.

But he also ties in the dynamics that led to this election with the other recent political scenarios in Western democracies, like the US and the UK.

It is a short video and worth watching.

"The Right wing authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro cruised to a 10-point victory on Sunday night in Brazil, becoming president-elect of the world’s fifth most populous country and the most extremist leader in the democratic world. While some of the dynamics driving his victory are unique to Brazil, many of them are similar to prevailing political currents in North America, Eastern Europe and, increasingly, Western Europe.

Bolsonaro’s victory is highly consequential in its own right: For the 210 million people who live within the borders of the country, as well as for the region and the globe, he and his tyrannical movement now dominate. But beyond those consequences, there are valuable lessons to learn for all of the democratic world by understanding the sentiments that led Brazilians en masse to support someone who, a very short time ago, was relegated to the far fringes of political acceptability and whose ascension to power was unimaginable. I explored some of those key lessons in the eight-minute video."

Glenn Greenwald

You may see the original at The Intercept.

Caravan of Terror Surging Kind of North, a Blitzkrieg of Walking Families - 15,000 US Troops Being Deployed

Their forward progress is deceptively slight, as shown in the map below, and their numbers have decreased to 4,000.  Hmmm....

Perhaps these clever devils have taken a page out of Macarthur's  Korean war book,  those copycats, and are planning an amphibious landing at Acapulco.    A target rich environment, a rich and complacent resort town, just ripe and ready for plunder.

With this fiendish maneuver they can catch the 8.8 million unsuspecting residents of Mexico City in an insidious pincer movement—  and shame them into submission with their lack of just about everything.

Not to be outdone, Trumpolini is now mobilizing 15,000 troops to defend our Southern border.

But why has he not called upon NATO?   Hmmm, why not indeed, Comrade?

The last time one of these caravans put forward in the Spring of this year 14 people actually made it to the US border. 

If even more make it this time, perhaps 15, when then bring it, we like those odds—  1,000 to 1.  Shock and awe.  But we must be vigilant and never resist the feelings of panic and terror that support an excessive military response—  and expense.   Got to keep the MI Complex fat and happy.

What if these jokers quantumize their stealth capability using AI, and develop hypersonic capabilities supplied by You Know Who. 

They might even launch an airborne assault, and land in Grovers Mill, NJ!   On Halloween!  Hey, that's outside Princeton, near my 'hood!

See the impending doom to which my complacency and lack of hysterical gullibility has led me!  I better go pick up some milk and bread.  And find the ammo for my HK-91.  Where the heck is that anyway, in the sock drawer?

Are we losing ground in the new race to save the planet from the huddled masses, the influx of hordes of impoverished immigrants—   from Mars!!   Yes, you did not see this coming, you fools.

This is not impossible, and there is a precedent for this in the annals of science fiction.  Look it up.

What next, what terrors must we endure, as they and others like them ungratefully flee from the kindly gangs and benevolent oligarchs in Central America and the 'Red Planet' (hmmm...) in search of a better welfare deal and more freedoms to steal from the unsuspecting.

We are the victims again!

Oh the humanity!!

Given this junk and all the phone calls and door knocking, and increasingly loud and crazy ads on TV, I and many others will be glad to see this midterm election over.   And we don't even live in a swing state!   Those poor bastards must be enduring a living hell of press and pollsters and political signs covering up their broken storefronts.

But will we be caught, unsuspecting again, in 2020?

The future does look grim, indeed.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Costumes - Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday

“Freud used the term [narcissist] to describe persons who were self-absorbed, and psychoanalysts have focused on the narcissist’s need to bolster his or her self-esteem through grandiose fantasy, exaggerated ambition, exhibitionism, and feelings of entitlement.”

Donald W. Black


“A narcissist paints a picture of themselves as being the victim or innocent in all aspects. They will be offended by the truth. But what is done in the dark will come to light. Time has a way of showing people’s true colors.”

Karla Grimes


“Imagining that you are deep and complex, but others are simple, is one of the primary signs of malignant selfishness.”

Stefan Molyneux


"Do you not know that to whom you give yourselves as servants, his servants you become, whether of a corruption unto death, or of a righteousness unto life?"

Romans 6:16


"I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.  God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything."

Bede Griffiths


"I see dead people.  Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other.  They only see what they want to see.  They don't know that they're dead."

Cole Sear: The Sixth Sense

Stocks were in rally risk-on mode today, and made a heroic attempt to climb above resistance and stay there.

But alas, again it was just not to be.

Gold and silver showed weakness on the strong dollar, and in deference to the traditional hit they receive with the Non-Farm Payrolls report, which is this Friday.

Tonight is Halloween, so I must go look for the candy I bought, and then hid from myself so I would not be tempted to dip into it.

Speaking of wearing costumes, we have all seen or at least heard of examples of the 'macho tough guy' culture that certain elements of the financial and political class likes to portray for themselves. 

Interacting with some of them is like dealing with hollow men, walking around trying to convince themselves that they are winning, and spectacularly so.   Everything that they do in their private moments seems false, and exaggerated, a caricature or poor imitation of life.   Superficially charming, even glamorous.   But inside, hollow and full of corruption.

The reality is that most of these sort are very sad, walking wounded, incapable of forming and sustaining the kinds of relationships that most people take for granted.   The fellowship that makes life tolerable;  the kinds of love that give life purpose and meaning greater than fulfilling our own appetites.

Their personal lives are generally facades thinly pasted over train wrecks.  They are unable to love or to be loved.  They just keep shoving people and things into the emptiness of their souls, in the hopes of achieving some semblance of being by consuming.

If we could see their true selves, see into their souls, we might well run away screaming.  And so would they.  So maintaining the illusion becomes the primary thing.

Their flamboyant excesses are really silent cries of psychic pain, from frightened creatures who have never successfully made the transition to adult human beings.

More to be pitied than scorned.  But who is the greater fool than we, the general public, who keep falling for their fantastic lies and false promises, allowing them positions of power from which to wreak havoc on the rest of us?  What kind of co-dependency of this?

What an odd world it is, and how strange the creatures in it.

Happy Halloween.

Remember to pray for all the departed, those who are struggling in poverty, and especially for all those who are spiritually dead and dying, that they may even yet find and choose life.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Those Who Live In Darkness - The Social Contract

"'I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers.  Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’  Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’   No, father Abraham,’ the rich man said, ‘but if someone from the dead appears to them, they will repent.’ 

And Abraham said, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not change and repent, even if someone were to rise from the dead.’”

Luke 16:27-31


"When the social contract is broken in a civilized society, the leadership is discredited & replaced. One of the costs governments were willing to pay to bailout the banks and save the bankers was upending the social contract. I wonder if the politicians realized the implications for democracy and the rise in partisanship that would result?

It is a shameful reality that scarcely any of our current politicians or newscasters are aware of what the social contract is, much less that severe damage to it was done by people like Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner and Summers.

Even our elite economists seem to have failed to learn or forgotten about the social contract. Such ideas were somehow lost when subject of political economy abandoned in favor of pure economics, especially in US academia."

Harald Malmgren

They have no choice. They have no where else to go. This is a common flaw in the reasoning of the professional ruling elite. It is hubris.

Stocks were having another wide-ranging day, shoved higher and lower by the hot winds of greed and fear.

Greed seemed to prevail, as stocks went out nearer to the highs of the day.

After the bell Facebook announced its earnings. We will have to wait for the conference call to see how those chips may fall, although the Street was cheered somewhat by the initial numbers.

There will be a Non-Farm payrolls report on Friday.

Gold and silver were weakly traded today with the Dollar rising higher, and the split personalities of the market were vacillating between risk on and risk off.

The stores of ounces of physical gold for ready delivery in Hong Kong has dropped to a rather low level again. The registered gold in NY is not very robustly supplied either, at least at these prices.

Have a pleasant evening.

Political Power and The Virus of Fear

Rarely has any story been so distorted for political reasons, so shamefully and shamelessly, since the run up to the invasions of Iraq.

Who is feeding this 'army of military age males'?   Who seeks to undermine the safety of the greatest power on earth?   I was reading some online rubbish from a hysterical blogger who says we should seek out the enablers and take care of them, if you know what that means.

And of course this is from a site that widely tolerates unreasoned hate in its comments section.

Yes, let us not only not help the afflicted.  Let us seek out any good Samaritans, and kill them.

"On Sunday, the caravan paused to rest after a week of walking in oppressive heat through the state of Chiapas and reaching the town of San Pedro Tapanatepec in Oaxaca state.

Throughout the day migrants lined up for plates of tortillas, beans and meat stew that parishioners of the town’s main church, Parroquia San Pedro Apostol, dished out. Women who identified themselves as volunteers from the office of the local municipal president distributed bottles of water from the back of a pickup truck as it inched through the streets, drawing crowds of parched migrants."

These fools.  How dare they advance this military peril against us?   How can they provide food and water to these poor, suffering families and their broods of future rapists and murders, in the disguise of simple children?   Libtard Christian idiots.  Socialists.  Them.  They are all them. and we are their victims.

Because of the law of posse comitatus the 5,200 US Army troops being deployed to the border can only act in support roles for the border police and domestic law enforcement.  Unless of course we declare war on the caravan.  Maybe they have howitzers stashed in their backpacks.   Or we could just suspend the law against military rule in the US in this crisis.

So it is likely just a headline grabbing gesture.

Because it is in the Constitution, Trump cannot merely choose to 'issue an executive order' denying citizenship to anyone born in the US that he does not approve.  It would take the process of law to do this. 

Unless of course the President were to grant himself extraordinary powers, unopposed by the two other branches of government, so that he could deal with this terrible threat.

Where will this go?   How will it end?

“I want to address for a moment some of our political leaders who were here. Ladies and gentlemen, it has to start with you as our leaders. Stop the words of hate. If it comes from you, Americans will listen. You don’t have to follow the prone to evil path. We can also be prone to good. If you decide to take that path, it starts with speech. Words of hate are unwelcome in Pittsburgh.”

Rabbi Jeff Meyers, Tree of Life Synagogue

The stoking of fear and hate ends in the blood of innocents, always.  Over time it spares no one.

Have we learned nothing?  Have we sunk so low that we no longer fear the reproach of civilized people, or the judgement even of God?

We seem to have no shame, no sense of history, no compunction about lying and wallowing in lies, and relatively little enough decency left in our public life.  And after all, it is the midterm elections you know. 

It is all about power and money.   People are just tools, objects, and collateral damage.

When you unleash the madness, the unspeakable, you do not control it—   it controls you.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wax On, Wax Off - In the Garden of Beasts

"The real danger comes from encouraging or inadvertently tolerating inflation and its close cousin of extreme speculation and risk taking, in effect standing by while bubbles and excesses threaten financial markets."

Paul Volcker


"Investors still seem looking for a bounce among consumers but the downturn in housing and autos will remain not only this year but all of 2019 and likely beyond; more sectors to join in slow motion decline of US economy that will evolve into recession."

Harald Malmgren


"What most occupied the attention of the State Department [in 1934] was the outstanding German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington, there were white shirts [of the wealthy career diplomats and career politicians], Hull's red pencils, and mounting frustration with [Ambassador] Dodd to press America's case [for full payment of the sovereign German debt]...

In Berlin, Dodd was unmoved. He thought it pointless to pursue full payment, because Germany simply did not have the money, and there were far more important issues at stake...

Through his first year in Germany [1933], Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest...

Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the [Hitler] regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger...

For Dodd, a diplomat by accident, not demeanor, the whole thing was appalling. He was a scholar and a Jeffersonian democrat, a farmer who loved history and the old Germany in which he had studied as a young man. Now there was official murder on a terrifying scale. Dodd's friends and acquaintances, people who had been to his house for dinner or tea, had been shot dead.

Hitler's purge [June 30, 1934] would become known as 'The Night of the Long Knives,' and in time would be considered one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement...

This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere chose to believe Hitler's claim that he had suppressed an imminent rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed. Evidence soon emerged, however, that showed that in fact Hitler's account was false...

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behaviour...In a letter to Hull, Dodd forecast an even more terroristic regime... 'The people hardly notice this complete coup d'etat. It takes place in silence...I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.'"

Erik Larson, In The Garden of Beasts

Neutron bombs kill broad swaths of human being without inflicting serious collateral explosive damage on physical infrastructure and systems.  Fed monetary policy and GOP fiscal policy are like economic neutron bombs.

The early 'risk on' trade and big acquisition by IBM of Red Hat had the bulls and their spokesmodels all giddy this morning.

Alas, it was not meant to be—  again.

Stocks gave up all their morning gains, and sold off hard, although they did come off the lows of the day as the financial TV carnies pointed out so hopefully.

'What will turn this market around?' they plaintively whined.   'The puppies aren't eating the puppy food.'

Let's see, besides hot money and bullshit, what has been the backbone and mainstay of this 'Trump rally' for a very long time.

US equities will soon be coming out of the 'blackout period' for buybacks of their own stocks, which has been a major and sustaining force of stock price gains in this latest financial asset bubble. Before they were financing these buybacks, designed to hollow out the company's value while enhancing executive option gains, with corporate debt.

 Now they also have a huge grant from the US government in the form of tax cuts in addition to the tax subsidies for executive compensation. The wealth transfers will continue until they can no longer be sustained— because it pays so well for the decisionmakers.

It's a big club—   and you aren't in it.   No matter what political party of economic school to which you proudly pledge your loyalty and proclaim your faithfulness.   You are not counted by them as among the winners.  You are cannon fodder, food for predators, a foolish chunk of meat.

The dollar was up again today, to the higher levels of its recent trading range.   Gold and silver were lower as a consequence, although gold came back a bit on a the big stock sell off.

Before the internet changed everything, people who love books used to go to actual bookstores and search the stacks for those little gems that they would read and add to their collections.

As a long time collector and reader I used to frequent the antiquarian book stores in the Pittsburgh area, where I went to graduate business school,  including a couple located in the very quaint residential Squirrel Hill section to the east of the city.

This is the site of the vicious attack on a group of worshipers in the Tree of Life Synagogue.  It must have been jarring to have this happen in such a quiet and friendly residential neighborhood.  They are all in my thoughts and prayers. 

Have a pleasant evening.