"The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated. The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered. The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite, and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.
The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.
The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the full loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.
For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end. Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.
America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality.
The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.
These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counterbalance of mind prevails against them. They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations.
What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that the economy has become concentrated and incorporated in the great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and moreover the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy; and military men and policies have increasingly penetrated the corporate economy.
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
Stocks rallied today, for no particular reason.
The chip sector led stocks higher based on upgrades from Barclay.
Wash - rinse -repeat.
Leave your shame at the curb.
Gold and were hit hard from the early trading, but managed to take much of it back with gold even finishing in the green.
Looks like a gut check ahead of the Comex precious metals option expiry on the 26th.
The US Dollar did nothing.
The VIX did nothing.
We may see some market moving data this week.
FOMC and Non-Farm Payrolls for January coming next week.
Have a pleasant evening.
