Category Archives: Alternative Perspectives

A Lesson From the Greek Crisis: Safe Deposit Boxes Are Not Safe

By

Mises.org

 Last week the Greek government imposed capital controls to prevent cash from escaping from the Greek banking system, which is on the brink of collapse.  These repressive financial measures, which were invented by “Hitler’s banker” Hjalmar Schacht in the 1930s, include the closing of banks,  limiting cash withdrawals from ATMs to 60 euros ($67) per day, and the banning of all money transfers via credit and debit cards to accounts held in foreign countries.  Despite these Draconian controls, Greek banks continue to hemorrhage cash and, after yesterday’s referendum, it is probable that the daily limit on withdrawals from ATMs will be tightened.  Worse yet, the reeling Greek public suffered another shock yesterday when Deputy Finance Minister Nadia Valavani revealed to Greek television that the government and banks had already agreed that people would also not be allowed to withdraw cash from safe deposit boxes for as long as the controls were in place.  This may be part of a fallback plan if the ECB ends its bailout of the Greek banks.  The government with the banks’ connivance would seize the cash euros stored in these boxes and compensate their lessees by crediting an equal sum of euros to their increasingly inaccessible checking deposits.  The cash would then be fed into ATMs to postpone the day of reckoning for Greece’s zombie fractional-reserve banks.

Bank woes

In the meantime, the market has been working to provide a private, nonbank alternative for Greeks to safely store cash.  In Dublin, Ireland enterprising diamond dealer Seamus Fahy, who owns Merrion Vaults, is offering a 15% discount for Greeks who are able to evade the fascist capital controls and smuggle their cash out of the country.   As Fahy puts it: “If you lived in Athens, and had 200,000 euros, wouldn’t you try to get it out?”  In addition Fahy is considering opening a branch of Merrion Vaults in Athens. He is already advertising his services on Greek-Irish community web sites.

nada

In Greece itself, where business in many sectors has virtually come to a standstill, the sales of home safes are booming.  George Moschopoulos, who has been selling safes for 40 years, reports a fivefold increase in his business in the last five years compared to the years before the crisis.  Predictably, as Greeks have drained cash from their bank accounts since the financial crisis of 2008, home burglaries have skyrocketed.  In 2012, there were almost 88,000 cases of burglary, which was a 76 percent increase from five years earlier.   This year an elderly couple was robbed of their entire life savings of 80,000 euros.

when the rules change

Of course these market alternatives for securing cash beyond the reach of corrupt governments, crony banks, and burglars hardly benefit those who have already been locked out by capital controls from withdrawing their property from safe deposits boxes.  As the Greek crisis deepens, the contagion threatens to spread to the sovereign debt and the fractional-reserve banking systems of other countries.  Faced with such a financial crisis, it is a good bet that no government will hesitate to impose capital controls, up to and  including forcibly preventing owners from accessing the contents of their safe deposit boxes.

ROBBED!
ROBBED!

Colorized Photos From The Past Will Blow You Away

by Jerome at Powerful Primates

Up until the 1970s, color photography was extremely rare, and so when we think about history prior to that time, we often envision it in black and white. Today’s technology now enables us to “colorize” historical photos, giving us our only chance at seeing what the world really looked like back then. And it was truly spectacular.

Take a trip back in time through these photos below. It’s quite incredible to see Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein in living color.

1. Claude Monet in 1923.

2. Brigadier General and actor Jimmy Stewart. Stewart flew 20 combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, and even flew one mission during Vietnam.

Jimmy

3. Pablo Picasso.

Picassso

4. Lou Gehrig, July 4, 1939. Photo taken right after his famous retirement speech. He would pass away just two years later from ALS.

Lou Gehrig

5. Times Square 1947.

6. Lee Harvey Oswald, 1963, being transported to questioning before his murder trial for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Lee harvey

7. Helen Keller meeting comedian Charlie Chaplin in 1918.

keller and chaplin

8. Girls delivering ice, 1918.

ice

9. Burger Flipper 1938.

burgers

10. Winston Churchill, 1941.

churchill

11. Albert Einstein, 1921.

einstein

12. Madison Square Park New York City around 1900.

park nyc 1900

13. Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn

14. Samurai Training 1860.

samurai

15. American Poet Walt Whitman, 1868.

Whitman

16. Hindenburg Blimp crash.

hindenbuerg

17. British Soldiers Returning from the front in 1939.

british soldiers 39

18. Joan Crawford on the set of Letty Lynton, 1932.

joan crawford

19. Country store in July 1939. Gordonton, North Carolina.

NC 1939

20. Mark Twain in 1900.

Mark Twain

21. Albert Einstein on a Long Island beach in 1939.

Einstein on long beach 39

22. Audrey Hepburn.

Hepburn

23. Union Soldiers taking a break 1863.

union 1863

24. Charles Darwin.

Darwin

25. WWII soldiers on Easter.

easter ww2

26. Clint Eastwood, 1962.

clint

27. W.H. Murphy testing the bulletproof vest in 1923.

bulletproof

28. Charlie Chaplin at 27 years old in 1916.

chaplin age 27

29. Elizabeth Taylor in 1956.

elizabeth

30. Big Jay McNeely, Olympic Auditorium, 1953.

mcneely

32. Red Hawk of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on horseback, 1905.

Red Hawk

33. Babe Ruth’s 1920 MLB debut.

babe

34. A Washington, D.C. filling station in 1924.

DC 1924

35. Boys buying flowers in 1908.

flowers 1908

36. An Oklahoman farmer during the great dust bowl in 1939.

the dust bowl

37. Louis Armstrong plays to his wife, Lucille, in Cairo, Egypt 1961.

Louie at the pyramids

38. Brooklyn Bridge in 1904.

brooklyn bridge

39. Two Boxers after a fight.

boxing match

40. 1920s Australian mugshots from the New South Wales Police Dept.

20s mugshot

41. Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield.

sophia and jane

42. Brothers Robert Kennedy, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy outside the Oval Office.

kennedys

43. Clint Eastwood working on his 1958 Jag XK 120 in 1960.

clint with his jag

44. Cornell Rowing Team 1907.

cornell rowing

45. View from the Capitol in Nashville, 1864.

nashville

46. Baltimore Slums, 1938.

slums 1938

47. Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels scowls at a Jewish photographer, 1933.

goebbels

48. Henry Ford, 1919.

henry ford

49. An RAF pilot getting a haircut while reading a book between missions.

RAF haircut

50. Unemployed Lumber Worker and His Wife 1939.

1939 unemployed

51. Alfred Hitchcock.

hitch

52. A car crash in Washington D.C. around 1921.

DC crash 1921

53. President Lincoln with Major General McClernand and Allan Pinkerton at Antietam in 1862.

Lincoln 1862 Antietam

The Great TPP Deathtrap for India, China & 10 Other Member-Nations

The Terms of Destruction

The Clues are all there in Obamatrade and Obamacare

by Jon Rappoport

The truth emerges out of the shadows of secrecy…

Let’s start here. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade treaty, coming down the homestretch toward ratification, involving 12 nations which account for a staggering 40% of the world’s GDP. The TPP encompasses 775 million consumers.

Waiting in the wings is something much larger. It is the intention, up the road, to fold India and China into the treaty.

China is the most populous nation in the world. 1.4 billion people. India is the second most populous. 1.28 billion people. India is projected to overtake and pass China by 2025.

During his seven years in office, the most publicly recognizable PR man in the world, Barack Obama, has sweated and hammered on two policies. Just two. He is now in a panic over forcing one of those: the TPP. The other one was Obamacare. That’s it. Everything else was a Sunday picnic in the park.

Obamacare, the US national health insurance plan, when you strip it down to basics, was about one thing: bowing to drug companies.

It brought huge numbers of new people, previously uninsured, into the game. Meaning those people would be able to take the drugs—and the prices for those drugs would remain high.

So it is with the TPP, as it turns out. One of the major priorities is forcing member countries to accept higher pricing on medical drugs. Which was exactly the deal in Obamacare. Big Pharma backed Obamacare for the express purpose of cutting out debates about lowering costs on drugs.

In that respect, Obamacare and the TPP are mirror images of each other.

One other vital detail: the TPP will also allow pharmaceutical companies to push drugs and force them into markets where, ordinarily, they could be rejected as unsafe.

The problem? Well, how about this: every year, in the US, by a conservative assessment, medical drugs kill 106,000 people.

That number comes from Dr. Barbara Starfield, who at the time (July 2000) was a revered public health expert working at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her assessment, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, was published on July 26, 2000, in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

I have often cited her review, and I’ve presented other references that back her up. In fact, if you go to a web page on the FDA’s own site, you will see a similar assessment of medical-drug devastation, including an estimate of non-lethal but debilitating harm:

The FDA website page states there are 2 million serious adverse reactions (ADRs) from the ingestion of medical drugs, annually, in the US. When the FDA says “serious,” they aren’t talking about headaches or slight dizziness or temporary nausea. “Serious” means, among other effects, stroke, heart attack, neurological damage; maiming of that magnitude.

Therefore, per decade, that adds up to 20 million ADRs. 20 million. In the US alone.

And a million deaths per decade in the US, caused by FDA-approved medical drugs.

Getting the picture?

The new normal: dying to get well.
The new normal: dying to get well.

Now here is the payoff, the bottom line: where, in the world, do traditional and older healing methods and remedies survive to the fullest degree?

To put it another way, what are the biggest uncaptured markets and populations that drug companies yearn for and dream about?

China.

India.

This is the future path of the TPP. This is where the Pharma-guided TPP wants to go most fervently. This is the ultimate prize in Pharma’s battle plan. This is the TPP jackpot.

This is ultimately where Pharma wants to replace traditional herbs with…what? Chemical death and destruction.

I put it that way because it’s true, when you eliminate the propaganda and look at the track record.

1.4 billion people in China. 1.28 billion people in India.

Would you care to extrapolate the death numbers? And the “serious adverse-effect” numbers. Per year? Per decade? For China and India combined? Do the math.

If in the US, with a population of 325 million, medical drugs kill 100,000 people per year, the number of deaths for the combined populations of India and China (2.68 billion people) comes out to 824,000 per year. 8.24 million deaths per decade.

Serious adverse drug reactions in a population of 2.68 billion? More than 16.4 million per year. More than 164 million per decade.

If you told some cold-eyed lunatic military planner you could achieve those results, with chemical warfare, on a sustained basis, year in and year out, with absolutely no detection, with no blowback, no criminal war trials, with enormous accrued profits, with claims of “curing disease,” he would jump out of his chair and order champagne and call you a genius.

That’s where we are. That’s what the TPP, up the road, is all about.

China and India are the ultimate targets. Make no mistake about it.

And waiting in the wings: Indonesia, with the fourth largest population in the world: 252 million people.

Let me know when you see the statistics cited in this article unequivocally presented in any major mainstream news outlet in the world, along with their relation to the TPP.

In the meantime, I’ll take a brief coffee break…and be back in a hundred years.

Jon Rappoport

Fast Track