“Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.”
Jesse
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Tag: Jesse’s Cafe Americain
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“There may be some bright moments ahead. There always are. But things are probably going to get worse, and maybe a lot worse if we continue to be stiff-necked, easily manipulated, and refuse to reform. History does not hold out much hope if we do not. I just wish there were not so many innocents in the blast radius of this madness. Learn to pray, and live simply. And count your blessings.”
“False flags abounding— from the walking Reichstag fire, about a thousand miles from the nearest border, and a phantom tax cut made up out of thin air, to assaults on our democracy from phony Russian ‘meddling’. And now for the first course in what may very well prove to be a grand banquet of consequences. The decline in the equity markets was very real today, although there was a distinct lack of tangible fear amongst the wiseguys. Although the professional cheerleaders and spokesmodels were uncharacteristically at a loss for words and rationalizations, being suitably confused by the selling— homina homina homina… We will likely see some bouncing around since we are still in monetary la la land. But the handwriting is clearly on the wall.”
Jesse
Economic Theology – Obama and the Rise of the New International Elite
Guest Post by Jesse
“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons? …In the privatization of everything, these companies have made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. There’s only one problem – they exploit everything and everyone in its wake. It’s a dream come true for businessmen – to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.”
Arundhati Roy, The Ghost of Capitalism
Thurman Arnold wrote in The Folklore of Capitalism that ‘Economic theology is the opiate of the middle class…Law, morals, and economics are always arrayed against new groups which are struggling to secure a place in an institutional hierarchy of prestige.”
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A Quiet Summer Day
Guest Post by Jesse
If for some reason what I write displeases you all that much, if we cannot agree to disagree, if you cannot bear to hear even reasoned criticism of something because you are so emotionally invested in it, then it is probably better not to read it here and feel all put out. Can you not bear to know that some people do not agree with you? Well, there seems to be a lot of that going around.
A NATION BUILT ON LIES
“The greatest want of the world is the want of men — men who will not be bought or sold; men who in their inmost souls are true and honest; men who do not fear to call sin by its right name; men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole; men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.” – Ellen G. White
The world becomes more chaotic by the day. Good luck finding a politician, business icon, or religious leader who is not bought and sold by corporate or special interests. Finding truth telling honest leaders in today’s world is virtually impossible. Charles Foster Kane, a quasi-biographical portrayal of William Randolph Hearst, is a fine representation of the billionaire clique that pull the strings in our warped, deceitful, greed driven, materialistic world.
Citizen Kane’s thematic portrayal of the American Dream is far more germane to our society today than it was when made in 1941. Financial affluence, material luxury, wielding power over others, and controlling the opinions of the masses through propaganda media, did not guarantee happiness or fulfillment for Kane or todays oligarchs. Kane was happiest as a poor child, living with his parents, playing in the snow on his sled – Rosebud.
Narcissus and Echo – God’s Eloquent Silence
Guest Post by Jesse
“The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.
The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the development of humility, objectivity and reason.”
Erich Fromm, Art of Loving
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Bullish Interruptus – Those Daring Young Men
Guest Post by Jesse
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Lately we have been seeing one day of a mad rally higher, followed the next day by a stunning reversal lower.
Today, they decided to break the mold and do both up and down moves of surprising breadth in the same day, in response to little or no new information.
Stocks were climbing higher from the start today, for no particular reason it appears, other than the desire to buy the dip. It was a fairly well-ordered but impressive move higher
But then about one o’clock today, the bulls seemed to lose their nerve, and the selloff began with the same quiet but relentless selling, taking stocks back down to nearly where the whole thing started.
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Repentance and Forgiveness the Wellspring of Joy
Guest Post by Jesse
Into the ancient holy land
Behold, the son of God is come to man.
Hoc est enim corpus meam.In Innocence fall all heroes and their creeds;
An age is done, an age from here proceeds.Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei,
Novi et aeterni testamenti.What consuming pagan fires could not do—
A covenant of love, and Word made flesh, in You.Qui pro nobis et pro multis effundetor;
In remissionem peccatorum.Sleep swells His breast, though heavy pressed,
By Golgotha, and Adam’s sin,
And the hopes of he who signs his name herein.Jesse
What a wonderful condescension and extravagance we have from God. For although we were made and formed in His image, He has sanctified that image, and thereby redeemed us in His Incarnation.
Continue reading “Repentance and Forgiveness the Wellspring of Joy”
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We are in a new era. I am hearing this on TV and in comments and on chat forums.
We are in an era where risk has been abolished by the central banks and their free money. So there is little difference between prime and subprime, between 2 year and 10 year Treasuries, and between stocks and bonds.
According to some of the Pied Piper pundits stocks are better than riskless cash, because stocks are going to keep rallying forever after, and cash is trash. Buy buy buy, and don’t be left behind.
This is the kind of mantra that the sell-side and the wiseguys of the Street too often resort to when they are taking profits from their pool after a big price run higher, and unloading mispriced junk on mom and pop, through the funds and institutions.
Once the selling starts in earnest, and it will beyond any doubt at some point, by whatever event that may happen to trigger it, this is going to get ugly very quickly. But this is the system that we have today. This will be the third bubble and bust since the repeal of Glass-Steagall, one of the highest funded PR and political campaigns in modern history.
And no one could have seen it coming.
Who runs Bartertown?”
Jesse
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Having created this asset bubble, again, in conjunction with the financiers and Wall Street, the Fed is deathly afraid of anything that will break the mirage and put the banking system at risk.
And we are seeing, like a dog returns to its vomit, the Banks start taking up the kinds of leveraged risks that brought us to the brink in the great unwinding of the housing bubble in 2008.
Surely they must care. Surely they must have a caution for the damage they will cause to untold thousands of innocents. And if not the money men, then those who are sworn to restrain their greed.
As John Kenneth Galbraith observed in his masterwork, The Great Crash of 1929, ‘The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.’
And you can toss in the political and corporate media elite in there as well. It’s a club, and you aren’t in it.”
Jesse
The King In Yellow
Guest Post by Jesse
“Love is not easy; it is not our natural state. It seems weak and foolish, and is despicable to the fallen of this world and the next, who by the declaration of their hearts and minds say non serviam, I will not serve.” – Jesse, Love Is the Refuge of the Way
Stocks bubbled sideways today, digesting the recent gains, and treading water as additional earnings and economic news comes out.
I have made no secret of it, that the US equity markets seem very fully valued at this point, and are overdue for a stiff correction in the neighborhood of ten percent. That they have not even had a 3 percent correction in quite some time is a testimony to the amount of hot money and speculative froth underpinning them.
Peak hubris. We’re there on a number of fronts, socially, financially, and politically. I have not seen anything like this since the tech stock bubble. The housing bubble was much broader and deeper, and much more profound in the levels of its corruption. This one seems more like an ‘echo bubble.’ In all three instances the primary actors were the Wall Street financiers, the Banks, and the Fed.
THE GREAT SNAKE OF RISK
Here is a link to a paper from Artemis Capital titled Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk. It does a decent job of describing the setup for a hyper-correction that may occur based on the systematic mispricing of risk and market manipulation by the Banks, both global and central. In other words, the third collapse of a major financial asset bubble since the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.
Requiem
Guest Post by Jesse
Here are the readings for Mary’s church service.
“The souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God,
no torment shall ever touch them.
In the eyes of the unbelieving they appeared to die,
their going looked like a tragedy,
their leaving us, like a desolation;
but they are at peace.
If they experienced hardship as the worldly see it,
their hope was rich with eternal life;
slight was their affliction, but great their blessing will be.God has put them to the test
and proven them worthy to be with him;
he has tested them like gold in a furnace,
and accepted them as a sacred offering.
They who trust in him will understand the truth,
those who are faithful will live with him forever, in love;
for grace and mercy await those whom he has chosen.”Wisdom 3:1-6, 9
Times of General Corruption
Guest Post by Jesse
When historians look back on this period of the last forty years and diagnose what went wrong, they might do worse than to conclude that at the root of it was a general failure of character, from the top down.
The replacing of honor and duty with egoism and greed as the most honored of civic virtues was a long and slow process. It took root and was nurtured in a portion of the population that was served by it during the Reaganomics revolution, but eventually spread to those institutions and groups that had generally provided a bulwark for freedom and justice against the perennial amorality of the greedy.
Although they were certainly not the root cause of it, the Clintons played a prominent role in sealing the deal between the political and the financial class, and throwing the whole thing into a higher gear. They made political corruption, which heretofore had been hidden in the closets, fashionable.
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Wall Street told US manufacturers to move their production to China in order to increase profits from lower labor and regulatory costs, or Wall Street would finance takeovers of the companies, and the new owners would raise the firms’ profitability by moving production offshore. Large retailers, such as Walmart, ordered suppliers ‘to meet the Chinese price.’
When the jobs were in the US, most of the gains in productivity went to labor. Therefore, real median family incomes rose through time, and the consumer purchasing power this income growth provided drove the US economy to success for ever more people. When the jobs were moved to Asia, the growth in real median US family incomes stopped and declined.”
Paul Craig Roberts
“A credibility trap is when the managerial functions of a society have been sufficiently compromised by corruption so that the leadership cannot reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without implicating a broad swath of the powerful, including themselves.
The moneyed interests and their aspirants tolerate the corruption because they have profited from it, and would like to continue. Discipline is maintained by various forms of soft financial and social coercion.”
Jesse
SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE
“This cartoon by Joseph Keppler, who was the, both the editor and main cartoonist for Puck, which became one of, a very popular satirical weeklies in the post-Civil War period, expresses a general public discontent and concern about the growing impact and power of large businesses in the United States in the Gilded Age, particularly as this indicates, by businesses that have become monopolies in one way or another, and their control over the political process.
This is the period of time when the Senate is beginning to be conceived of as a millionaire’s club, it’s not quite called that yet, but it’s getting there, and certainly the sort of power and influence of business has become palatable.
And this is a wonderful snapshot, if you will, of the relationship between the two, with the bloated figures, having squeezed their way through the door saying, ‘Entrance for Monopolists,’ and surrounding the Senate with the Lilliputian figures of the different senators, all of whom would be recognized by, by viewers because their faces are, you know, are quite realistic, and the influence is quite clear between the monopolists and their impact on the legislators who are either going to be manipulated by or intimidated by these figures.
The quote from the Gettysburg Address referred to the democracy, ‘the government by the people and for the people’ as opposed to, in this case, the corruption of it, which is, ‘by the monopolists and for the monopolists.'”
Josh Brown, American Social History Project, City University of New York