How State Spooks Supply ‘Security’

Why does “the National Interest” demand that Jewish children hitchhiking home remain in jail, while Arabs approaching Jewish towns with hammers and screwdrivers be released?

Thursday night, a friend and I are hitchhiking home from yeshiva for Shabbat. We left late and thus find ourselves stuck at Elad Junction at 3 A.M. (classic teenage planning….) Suddenly, a white vehicle stops next to it. Two men in plainclothes jump out from it and present themselves as police officers. Apparently our long payos, caught their attention… They immediately begin searching our bags. Suddenly one of them victoriously raises an object in the air and shouts, “A cutter and a marker!” Before we even realized why my hobby of carving trees was so important, we found ourselves in handcuffs being led to the Unit for Nationalistic Crimes. One of the officers snidely told us, “They’ll know how to deal with people like you.”

We got to the Unit’s headquarters in Maale Adumim and the officers there were quite pleased to see us. They were happy to deal with “dangerous, Jewish terrorists.” I found myself being interrogated for several hours for “Involvement in a crime with racist motivation.” They accused me of intending to use the cutter to puncture ‘Palestinian’ tires, even as I began explaining my hobby of wood-carving to them. The lack of Arab towns near Elad also seemed to be lost on the interrogators. But no matter, they brought me the next day for a hearing in court.

Just before our hearing, we got to observe the hearing of an Arab youth caught with a firebomb in his hand. The judge ordered the boy released because he was just a youth. It seemed as though I’d have good chances with this judge…

Somehow in my case, the judge’s compassion was not so forthcoming. She explained that she could not release me because there is “a national interest against this youth.” In short, she ordered me kept in jail for four more days and gave the interrogators more time to harass me for hours on end. As part of one interrogation tactic, they even arrested my mother in order to apply pressure on me. This tactic that has been explicitly banned by the courts, but the ‘national interest’ here must have overruled that precedent. After four days, and many conversations on wood-carving, I was ordered released.

Yet the story does not end there. After the prosecution realized they could not connect the two ‘Jewish terrorists’ to any crime, they decided to try another route and filed an indictment for possessing a knife. They then requested remand for the duration of the proceedings relating to this misdemeanor offense. While the judge did not agree to their request, he did place me under house arrest. From what my lawyers have told me, I may be the only person in the history of the State to sit under house arrest for this charge. I guess that shouldn’t be so surprising though, given the ‘national interest….’

Just a pair of kids from Hizme

Let’s move a year forward to recent days of violence and rioting. The Henkin Couple was murdered a few months ago and since then, shootings and stabbings have become commonplace throughout Israel. On Wednesday March 2nd, another regular day, two Arabs penetrated the town of Eli and attacked the father of a family. Later that night, two Arabs penetrated the town of Bracha and stabbed two soldiers. As that attack was going on, two other individuals were seen approaching the town of Yitzhar. The Emergency Response Team was called and forces arrived at the scene. Two Arab youths from Hizme were caught in the area with iron bars, hammers, and gloves.

Shabak interrogators arrived and questioned the two ‘innocent’ Arab youths. The youths claimed they came from the Jerusalem area to look for gold near Yitzhar. The interrogators immediately recognized this as a reasonable claim and decided to release the two youths. They were just looking for gold! After all, Yair Lapid did say that all of the money is buried between Itamar and Yitzhar! It makes perfect sense!

The mother of these two youths was not arrested. They were not even brought for a court hearing. The gold-seeking Arabs were sent home without any restrictions. After all, I guess there simple was no ‘national interest’ against them…

From Hakol Hayehudi, here.

Take Your Money Out of the Bank!

Two BIG Reasons NOT to Keep Your Cash in the Bank

It’s bad enough depositing your money into a bank account and earning essentially zero interest on it, or in some countries, having a negative interest rate.

It’s even worse knowing that once you deposit your money in a bank, it’s not really yours anymore. You have turned over your property to the bank in return for a debt claim. You become an unsecured creditor holding an IOU.

Worst of all, there’s the “bail-in,” which we all became familiar with during the 2013 banking collapse in Cyprus. Some uninsured depositors got half of their money back, although, at one bank, customers received nothing of their deposits over the “insured” amount.

In 2014, the leaders of the Group of Twenty (G20) – representing the world’s 20 largest economies – declared the Cyprus model should apply globally. They did so in a mind-numbing tome entitled Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution.

Deposits in banks that are “too big to fail” will be promptly recapitalized with their unsecured debt. And… guess what? The largest chunk of unsecured debt is your bank deposits. Insolvent banks will recapitalize themselves by converting your deposits into worthless bank stock. This avoids taxpayer-funded bailouts that proved politically unpopular during the last financial crisis.

Oh, and get this… the G20 has also declared that derivatives – the toxic contracts Warren Buffett calls “financial weapons of mass destruction” – are secured debts. Since your bank deposits are only unsecured debt, guess who gets your money if the bet goes the wrong way for the bank? Answer: It’s not you.

Heads, the bank wins. Tails, you lose.

It’s practically guaranteed, too, that in the next financial crisis, there’ll be a whole slew of bank failures. That’s despite the fact that the mainstream financial media assures us that central banks have imposed higher capital requirements, stress tests, etc., on banks to ensure that when the “big one” hits, your deposits will be safe.

Don’t believe a word of it. The amount of capital that banks hold compared to the money on deposit is frighteningly low. In the US, the five largest banks have a capital ratio as a percentage of assets of only 6% – although that’s double what it was in 2008. In effect, if every depositor in a bank demands their money back simultaneously – the classic “bank run” – the largest US banks could repay only six cents on the dollar before they ran out of money. And since most banks don’t keep a lot of cash on hand, it could even be less.

It’s worth remembering that historically, US banks were much better capitalized. For instance, in 1842, US banks had an average capital ratio of 60% – ten times that of the largest banks today. That was an era in which bank competition was based on safety because no deposit insurance was in effect.

This chart from Bloomberg News says it all:

Sure, in many countries your bank deposits are “insured.” In the US, the first $250,000 in your account qualifies for deposit insurance through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). But for every $100 on deposit, the FDIC has only $1.06 with which to back it. Doesn’t that make you feel warm and fuzzy about the safety of your bank deposits?

Continue reading…

From Lewrockwell.com, here.