Bill Sardi – Lew Rockwell
Sometimes what is happening before our very eyes escapes recognition – that a major change in modern American society is underway.
For example, when Starbucks Coffee Company went public in 1992 with an existing chain of 165 coffee shops and a track record of success, who would have guessed a revolution was underway – that Americans would begin paying $3–4 for a hot cup of java instead of 10-cents for a cup of mud.
Anybody who would have invested in Starbucks early on would have seen the value of its stock rise and rise, as the chain grew to 11,000 stores in the U.S. and over 17,000 worldwide. Starbucks wasn’t just a business success, nor was it just a change in America’s choice of hot beverage – it was a social revolution that signaled a departure from hanging out at bars to drink booze.
With the Starbucks revolution in mind, I’m chatting with a web designer on the telephone. He says he is doing design work for a man who has ownership in five pawn shops in the Bahamas which are doing a booming business in gold reclamation from jewelry. The pawn shops are generating $50,000 of income per month. More pawn shops are planned for the Bahamas and another pawn shop is soon to open in Greece.
I also learn my neighbor’s brother has left the U.S. for the Republic of Mali, a West African country that is now teeming with gold mining villages. He is supplying gold reclamation and refining equipment, along with medicines and food, to entire villages that now devote their whole economy to above-ground gold reclamation. Semi-refined gold bars are then purchased from village chieftains and shipped to Europe or the U.S. for final refining and sale to mints.
Gold now represents 80% of Mali’s exports. A story of how gold panning is sweeping the Sudan, another struggling African country, also recently made the front page of the Los Angeles Times.
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