"Our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink.
We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend [leverage] this capital at home and abroad. I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer.
Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932
"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"It’s not just political spin, however, that explains the rose-colored coverage [in the media]. Another explanation is that the media is plain stupid — quick to accept guidance from economists on Wall Street, for example, who have a vested interest in making everything wonderful."
John Crudele
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair
The problem is not that we do not know what to do in order to revitalize and reform the economy, which has so badly lost its way beginning at least the 1980s.
The problem is that those with power and influence, and their servants and enablers, do not wish to change. They have worked very hard and spent a great deal of money to get things exactly the way that they are. It was a decades long campaign to overturn all the protections and safeguards that were instituted after the Great Depression in reforms of The New Deal.
And so they cannot even admit that there is a problem, much less identify the real source of the problem. And they will certainly not do anything meaningful to address it, at least voluntarily.
This is the credibility trap in which we are now caught. And it is leading us into madness.
Gold and silver were higher today, with silver showing an especially big kick after the quad witch option expiration on Friday.
I hope people did not get shaken out of their longer term positions.
There will be a Comex October gold futures option expiration on Wednesday the 25
th.
Stocks were iffy at best. There are unmistakable signs of slowing in the world's economic activity.
Trade disruptions and wars are a problem, but they are mostly secondary to the great mistaken application of deeply flawed economic and fiscal policies, actively promoted by a wealthy few.
Why do we seem to love lies and the hatred of others so much? Why do we repeat the extravagant pronouncements of conmen, and hate the truth? Hate goodness, and justice?
Because although we like to think that we are new, and different, and the epitome of all that is human progress and evolution, in fact we are just deluded. We are no different or better or stronger than any others. We are not new, or special, or exceptional as we are, moreso than any other that we may look down upon, and even despise.
No one can serve two masters, for they will be devoted to one, and despise the other. If they allow themselves to be dishonest in small things, they will be faithless in those things that truly matter, that have a lasting consequence.
It is a madness. And while people grow mad in herds, they only come back to their senses, one at a time. And the love of
most will grow cold.
This will end. But it is going to end badly for many.
You know what to do. But we are such faithless cheats and swindlers that we convince ourselves that we do not, because we do not wish to do what we have been told to do, and has been written on our hearts.
Greed and pride kill. Love covers a multitude of sins.
Have a pleasant evening.
