"Go in through the narrow gate. The gate to destruction is wide, and the road that leads there is easy to follow. Most will go through that gate. But the gate to life is narrow. The road that leads there is so arduous to follow that only a few people are determined enough to struggle to find it." 
Matt 7:13-14

Sumi Jo Singing Bella Fantasia While waiting for Pope Francis in Seoul on Aug 15th

Nomi Prins: All the President's Bankers

I posted on Nomi Prins before at this link  http://innovationandeconomicanalysis.blogspot.kr/2012/01/nomi-prins-bailouts-downgrades.html

From Jesse's Cafe:

This is a walk through the twentieth century, and how the United States became, by design, a combination military, industrial, and financial global superpower. And how the US dollar hegemony was created over a number of political administrations by groups of well connected, powerful families and friends.

It may seem a bit long, but she opens it for questions about the 48 minute mark, so it really is not. Nomi speaks briskly with many fact laden vignettes and scenarios that help to explain how the current system has evolved.

The facts she brings out about the 50's onwards were sometimes new to me, and absolutely fascinating. About minute 40 she shows the culmination of this historical process with the Clinton Whitehouse, and begins to describe where we are today, and how it appears that the problem will be insoluble without some major events taking place to change this alliance in power between the financial and the political.

The talk served to solidify some of my own thinking, and removed some of the shadows of doubt that I have had about where things are going and why.

She does is not able to delve into the international ties between the global central Banks, particularly between London and New York. She instead concentrates on what she might call 'the Big Six' of American Banks, which is a large enough subject itself.

I strongly recommend that you listen to it if you are at all interested in this subject.

Or if you have the time to invest, you may wish to read her book which also sounds very interesting. I have not done so yet, and I am not sure when I could get to it.

But this video is a very good start, and will probably make you much better informed than 90 percent of the people out there. Whether that is a good thing or not is another matter.

Matt Taibbi: Griftopia (audiobook)

Free audiobook. Where have these been all my life.

I am not much for listening to audiobooks. Alas, the droning of a human voice tends to make me fall asleep, a feature of my being that I have often put to good use with headphones on international flights.

But after the first ten minutes I was hooked on this one. Taibbi's verbal fireworks and colorful images kept me interested, and gave me a wonderful alternative to watching the latest professional wrestling antics and extended infomercials on financial television today. Without headphones. Old habits die hard.

Taibbi takes an icepick to the façade of American politics, and the vagaries of its financiers. And like another polemicist Hitchens, is able to wield his words with great effect and to delight of his readers. Alas, sometimes he forgets to save the sword for injustice, and on occasion becomes the kind of condescending, major league ***** he generally derides, about spiritual matters and the preferences and sincere beliefs of others of which he has little or no understanding, like a little boy who is restless in his seat and doesn't matter who knows about it.

Or the raw American tourist who travels abroad for the first time, and makes fun of the way in which the people dress, talk, and their unfamiliar local customs. The difference is between that of a wit and a boor, and that is a line that is easily crossed, as in telling some genuinely funny stories about human foibles, and then going for the big finish by throwing your shit-encrusted boots up on the dining room table for a laugh. But at least he is still resisting the elitist and all-judging allure of the neo-cons, which Hitchens was unable to do towards the latter part of his career. The show must go on.

Enjoy.

"The important thing to remember about the Alan Greenspan era is that despite all the numbers and the inside-baseball jargon about rates and loans and forecasts, his is not a story about economics. The Greenspan era instead is a crime story. Like drug dealing and gambling and Ponzi schemes, bubbles of the sort he oversaw are rigged games with preordained losers and inherently corrupting psychological consequences. You play, you get beat, in more ways than one.

Greenspan staked the scam, printing trillions upon trillions of dollars to goad Americans into playing a series of games they were doomed from the start to lose to the dealer. In the end the printed wealth all disappeared and only the debts remained. He probably did this just because he wanted to see his face on magazine covers and be popular at certain Upper East Side cocktail parties. His private hang-ups in this way shaped the entire scam of modern American politics: a pure free market for the suckers, golden parachutes for the Atlases...

There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money. The grifter class depends on these two positions getting confused in the minds of everybody else. They want the average American to believe that what government is to him, it is also to JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

The fact that an unapologetic fat cat like Kudlow—one who talks and acts and dresses like a fat cat—can, when convenient, throw on the mantle of a populist revolt and get away with it reassures us that for all the talk about pitchforks and revolutions and fighting back, the Tea Party movement remains in thrall to the authority of the rich and powerful. Which renders the so-called movement completely meaningless...

The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show...Our leaders know we’re turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what’s happened.”

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.kr/2014/08/matt-taibbi-griftopia-audiobook.html

Japanese GDP Plunges 6.8% As Consumer Spending Collapses By Most On Record

From Zero Hedge:

Compared to the 3.6% drop in GDP when Japan last hiked its consumption tax in 1997, today's Q2 GDP collapse of 6.8% annualized is an utter disaster (even if it is slightly better than the expected -7.0% expectations thanks to a surge in the deflator). Inventory additions added 1.0% growth. Consumer Spending collapsed 5.2% QoQ - the most on record. Of course, in the traditional of Keynesian hockey-sticks, this XX% collapse in Q2 is expected to surge back to a 2.5% growth figure in Q3 and lead Japan to the holy grail once more.. only it didn't quite work out that way last time for Japan. Simply put this is the worst posible outcome for bulls, small beat not enopugh to rejuice QQE. As a gentle reminder of just what happened in 1997 - the last time Japan hiked taxes - we provide the eerily analog chart below...

Japanese GDP growth was almost twice as bad as the last time Jap[an hiked its taxes...





As Consumer Spending collapsed...





Here come the hockey-sticks...





* * *

Let's hope the last 10 months was just coincidentally 90% correlated to 1997!!




http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-12/japanese-gdp-plunges-68-consumer-spending-collapses-most-record

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, the rulers of the darkness in this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places. Therefore, take on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand these days of evil and, all things having been done, to remain standing...And pray that freedom of utterance remains, that we may proclaim the good news. Pray that we may declare it without shame and with courageous love, as we ought to do."
Ephesians 6:11-20

Greatness In a Dark Time

From Jesse's Cafe:

Some say that most of the time everyone wants to be great, because they have a natural desire for acceptance, recognition, and praise. Perhaps this is so.

And in a dark and pathological time this means that everyone wants to have power. Power becomes the standard of value, the coin of the realm in a deeply fallen world.  And in such a perverse world the only virtue is greed. 

So they who serve the world want to be tough guys, unafraid, quick and intemperate on the attack, harsh.  Yes that is the mark of power, of one of the formidable wielders of weapons. As if there can be any just weapon that we may take up on our own, that is not given to us by the Lord for His purpose.

If by some chance that person may also wish to serve God, then they may desire that they could take up the sword like an avenging angel, and smite those enemies of God, who are all too often those who merely annoy and offend them. This is because their idea of what it is to be a human being has been subtly poisoned by the times; in their brokenness they exalt themselves.

And all too often that feeling of offense simply becomes a blind hatred of 'the other.' The other may merely be the different, and interfering 'do-gooders' who try to help them, and finally all of the weak.  The will to power despises weakness.  Then they are no longer of God, but have given themselves over to the darkness.  And they fully become its creatures.  Those who take up the sword for their own purposes in God's name will die by it in a death without redemption.

This is a subtle but very effective snare, a sin wholly against the Spirit. We embrace the world and its values not in our love of it, but in our hatred of it as we see it. And so we grasp that same sword of power wielded by the forces of darkness in high places. And we use it as wewill with intoxication, and are lost.

 

This is not service, or greatness, not as counted in God's economy. This is a willfulness and a destruction of the self that comes from sin, but that in its own insidious way may encompass many of the trappings of a religion: the ornaments of ritual, and symbols, and all the showiness, the noise and pomp of human office-- but always and remarkably devoid of God's love. 

 

We may love the services and outward manifestations as we prefer them, the old and familiar or the hip and modern or whatever our personal preference may be, but come to hate the very Church that gives them life and meaning.  We destroy our beloved because we will to possess, to compel, not to love.

 

Worldly power is a perversion of heavenly power in that it expresses itself in the ability not to create and fulfill life, but to diminish and destroy it. And it exults in what it thinks is its power over life, which is death. How much money, how much power is enough? The will to power is a pathological sickness, that becomes all consuming and insatiable.  And thereby in the excesses it anoints its angels of death.

Be on your guard always, and do not allow yourselves to be among those simple ones who will be taken in during the dark times, as the love of many grows cold. Stand firmly, but humbly, to the end. And you will have your greatness.

"Do you desire to be great? make yourselves little. There is a mysterious connexion between real advancement and self-abasement. If you minister to the humble and despised, if you feed the hungry, tend the sick, succour the distressed; if you bear with the froward, submit to insult, endure ingratitude, render good for evil, you are, as by a divine charm, getting power over the world and rising among the creatures. God has established this law. Thus He does His wonderful works.

His instruments are poor and despised; the world hardly knows their names, or not at all. They are busied about what the world thinks petty actions, and no one minds them. They are apparently set on no great works; nothing is seen to come of what they do: they seem to fail. Nay, even as regards religious objects which they themselves profess to desire, there is no natural and visible connexion between their doings and sufferings and these desirable ends; but there is an unseen connexion in the kingdom of God. They rise by falling...

Let this be the settled view of all who would promote Christ's cause upon earth. If we are true to ourselves, nothing can really thwart us. Our warfare is not with carnal weapons, but with heavenly. The world does not understand what our real power is, and where it lies. And until we put ourselves into its hands of our own act, it can do nothing against us. Till we leave off patience, meekness, purity, resignation, and peace, it can do nothing against that Truth which is our birthright, that Cause which is ours, as it has been the cause of all saints before us.

But let all who would labour for God in a dark time beware of any thing which ruffles, excites, and in any way withdraws them from the love of God and Christ, and simple obedience to Him...

Such is the rule of our warfare We advance by yielding; we rise by falling; we conquer by suffering; we persuade by silence; we become rich by bountifulness ; we inherit the earth through meekness; we gain comfort through mourning; we earn glory by penitence and prayer. Heaven and earth shall sooner fall than this rule be reversed; it is the law of Christ's kingdom, and nothing can reverse it but sin."

John Henry Newman

" ...if I can help somebody as I pass along, If I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he's travelling wrong, then my living will not be in vain."

Martin Luther King