"Days before his murder, as my father pulled ahead in the California polls, he began considering how he would govern the country. Days before the California primary, seated next to journalist Pete Hamill on his campaign plane, my father mused aloud about his options. ‘I have to decide whether to eliminate the operations arm of the [CIA] Agency or what the hell to do with it,’ he told Hamill. ‘We can’t have those cowboys wandering around and shooting people and doing all those unauthorized things.’
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., American Values
"One day he [RFK] came into my bedroom and handed me a hardcover copy of Camus’s The Plague. ‘I want you to read this,’ he said with particular urgency.
I spent a lot of time thinking about that book over the years, and why my father gave it to me. I believe it was the key to a door that he himself was then unlocking.
It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, but our response to those circumstances; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and service can bring peace and fulfillment. In applying our shoulder to the stone, we give order to a chaotic universe."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., American Values
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
"But even leaving this crisis aside, there is now abundant evidence of widespread, unpunished criminal behavior in the financial sector. The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the U.S. financial sector has become a rogue industry. As its wealth and power grew, it subverted America’s political system (including both political parties), government, and academic institutions in order to free itself from regulation.
As deregulation progressed, the industry became ever more unethical and dangerous, producing ever larger financial crises and ever more blatant criminality. Since the 1990s, its power has been sufficient to insulate bankers not only from effective regulation but even from criminal law enforcement.
The financial sector is now a parasitic and destabilizing industry that constitutes a major drag on American economic growth. This means that criminal prosecution is not just a matter of vengeance or even justice. Real punishment for large-scale financial criminality is a vital element of the financial re-regulation that is, in turn, essential to America’s (and the world’s) economic health and stability. Regulation is nice, but the threat of prison focuses the mind.
In this book, I demonstrate that much of the behavior underlying the bubble and crisis was quite literally criminal, and that the lack of prosecution is nearly as outrageous as the financial sector’s original conduct."
Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation
Stocks were attempting to rally back again today.
And early this afternoon in unprepared remarks during a routine Q&A Fed Chairman Powell surprised [shocked] the markets by indicating a change in outlook by the Fed, in terms of speeding up the taper, and in the manner in which they consider inflation as transitory.
A perfect setup, a drive-by market shock, for those trading 'in the know.'
Stocks tanked.
The Dollar which had been losing ground rallied sharply, climbing back
over 96, but then gave it all up and finished lower by quite bit for the
day in the 95 handle.
Gold and silver were hit hard and did not recover even as the Dollar dumped again into the close.
The VIX soared.
Have a pleasant evening.
