"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."
John Kenneth Galbraith,
The Age of Uncertainty, 1977
"How can you know anything about the working class? You do not live in the same locality with the working class. You herd with the capitalist class in another locality. It is the capitalist class that pays you, that feeds you, that puts the very clothes on your backs that you are wearing. And in return you preach the brands of metaphysics that are especially acceptable to them because they do not menace the established order of society.
But do not come down to the working class and serve as false leaders. You cannot honestly be in the two camps at once. The working class has done with you. And, furthermore, the working class can do better without you than with you."
Jack London,
The Iron Heel
"What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years.
Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won’t on their own. The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade."
Thomas Frank,
Rendezvous With Oblivion, NYT 2006
"And the Lord asked me, 'Son of man, can these dry bones have life again?'”
Ezekiel 37:3
Stocks wanted to continue their rally higher, and the futures came in with the old heave ho higher.
But the euphoria is wearing off a bit, and they managed to avert a loss, finishing nearly unchanged.
The weakness in the tech complex was the tell since this is a tech bubble of the AI variety after all.
The Dollar rallied higher.
Bitcoin is blasting up with the speculation in stocks.
And poor old gold and silver were hammered lower again, down to the lower support bound for the short term.
I took some time to read the things that I wrote in 2016, the last time Trump defeated an overconfident party insider.
There was a euphoria in stocks back then, with the metals getting slammed after an initial rally higher on election night. I remember it well.
I found this old video shown below from Thomas Frank about that election. The comments then are still striking today.
They'll never learn. Because they don't want to.
Have a pleasant evening.
