Stephen Lendman

(Shame!)

Stephen Lendman: Cyprus Postmortems (Part I)

On March 28, Cyrus Mail said banks opened for the first time in almost two weeks. They did so at midday local time. Cypriots face draconian restrictions. How they'll react remains to be seen.

Capital controls limit withdrawals, restrict non-cash transactions, freeze check cashing, and convert checking accounts into fixed-term deposits. Finance Minister Michalis Sarris "signed into law a temporary decree." It caps cash withdrawals "per person per bank at 300 euros." It "effectively ban(s) cheques and control(s) cash outflows from the country."

It permits only 1,000 euros per person to travel abroad per trip. Higher amounts require special approval. Business payments are capped at 5,000 euros per day. Others up to 200,000 euros require approval of a "special four-member committee." Amounts above 200,000 require similar approval.

Distributing company payrolls require supporting documents. They needed for student tuition and living expenses. They're required to send funds to first degree relatives studying abroad. Overseas payments or transfers by debit, credit or prepaid cards are allowed up to 5,000 euros per month per person per bank.

The same goes for comparable amounts overseas by debit, credit or prepaid cards.

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Ellen Brown

Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts...

Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.

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Fred Mazelis

The extension of drone surveillance for domestic purposes lays the basis for the use of armed drones as well. [This is] only the beginning of what is raised by the relentless militarization of daily life in America.

The enormous expansion of the use of drones - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) - over US territory has received increasing bipartisan support within the political establishment, and has provoked growing popular opposition.

Attention was called to the subject of official use of drones for surveillance purposes by a recent comment from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In a radio interview, the billionaire mayor offhandedly dismissed the growing concern over drone use by critics who raised issues of privacy and civil liberties. Bloomberg compared drones to surveillance cameras already in use around Manhattan. “What’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building?” Bloomberg said on a WOR-AM program. “We’re going into a different world, uncharted…you can’t keep the tide from coming in.”

The mayor’s remarks were significant not because they announced a brand new policy, but because he was signaling the growing approval in ruling class circles for measures that amount to the scaffolding of a police state. Bloomberg does not worry that his own privacy will be infringed – he regularly uses his private jet for weekend trips to his luxury beach house in Bermuda with barely a mention in the media. For the lower orders, however, Bloomberg’s advice can be summed up in four words: “Get used to it.”

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