"The Plymouth Mail robbery, or what the press dubbed "The Great Plymouth Mail Truck Robbery" was, at the time of its occurrence, the largest cash heist of all time. On August 14, 1962, two gunmen stopped a U.S. Mail truck that was delivering $1.5 million in small bills from Cape Cod to the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, Massachusetts. The hijacking occurred on Route 3 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The two robbers, dressed as police officers and brandishing submachine guns, tied up the driver of the truck and the guard and drove the truck themselves to places unknown, where the money was dropped off in several places. The truck and its two tied-up occupants were abandoned in Randolph, Massachusettsalongside Route 128."
"In accordance with his statement of resignation the previous evening, Richard M. Nixon officially ends his term as the 37th president of the United States at noon. Before departing with his family in a helicopter from the White House lawn, he smiled farewell and enigmatically raised his arms in a victory or peace salute. The helicopter door was then closed, and the Nixon family began their journey home to San Clemente, California. Richard Nixon was the first U.S. president to resign from office."
"Minutes later, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States in the East Room of the White House. After taking the oath of office, President Ford spoke to the nation in a television address, declaring, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”
"Ford, the first president who came to the office through appointment rather than election, had replaced Spiro Agnew as vice president only eight months before. In a political scandal independent of the Nixon administration’s wrongdoings in the Watergate affair, Agnew had been forced to resign in disgrace after he was charged with income tax evasion and political corruption. In September 1974, Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office, explaining that he wanted to end the national divisions created by the Watergate scandal."
"Over the coming year, trading in the U.S. stock market is likely to be driven by issues over corporate earnings, Federal Reserve policy, and geopolitical issues like trade."
"Over the coming decades, however, the biggest driver of the global economy could be an issue that investors are no doubt well aware of, but which may represent a massive threat that will be extremely difficult to address."
"Jeremy Grantham, the co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO, sees climate change—and the resultant impact it will have on the global environment, particularly with respect to agriculture—as the biggest issue that humanity will face over the long term. And while he said this issue offered some potential investment opportunities, particularly as green-energy technology improves by leaps and bounds, he also said that capitalism itself was one of the biggest hurdles the species faced in addressing it."
“Fossil fuels will either run out, destroy the planet, or both. The only way out is the complete de-carbonization of the economy,” he said at Morningstar’s annual investment conference, in a presentation entitled “the Race of our Lives.”
“Capitalism and mainstream economics can’t deal with these problems. Given how corporations are driven to maximize profits, it’s nearly impossible for them to give up profits in order to address this” and focus on sustainability.
“Capitalism has a problem with the very long term because of the tyranny of the discount rate,” he added. “Grandchildren have no value.”
Also, today in 1971, the New York Times started publishing the Pentagon Papers.
"In June of 1963, Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thích Quang Duc burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. He was attempting to show that to fight all forms of oppression on equal terms, Buddhism too, needed to have its martyrs. John F. Kennedy said in reference to a photograph of Duc on fire: “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”. Photographer Malcolm Browne captured the scene in Saigon for the Associated Press, and the stark black and white image quickly became an iconic visual of the turbulent 1960s."
"Robert F. Kennedy was killed 50 years ago on June 6—the third in a trio of high-profile assassinations during that decade, the bloody coda to an era of political violence. Today, in our divided, uncivil time, it’s worth remembering that Americans survived the horrors of the 1960s and early ’70s, which began with the murder of Robert’s older brother, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. But 1968 was something of a watershed: “The year that shattered America,” as Smithsonian has called it, demolished the hippie fever dream of the ’60s with an explosive cocktail of escalating war, racially charged riots, police brutality and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and then RFK."
"There was no 24-hour news cycle back then. Social media was not spreading hate or forging divisive bubbles. The president wasn’t fanning flames with regular tweets, covert Russian hackers weren’t propagating fake news, and books proclaiming the end of democracy hadn’t become a lucrative sideline for publishers—all of which exacerbates our current turmoil, which can feel intractable."