Regardless of whether you borrowed or earned/saved it, if you possess a king's ransom personal supply of spendable money, you can pay people to do whatever you want them to do. You can hire rocket scientists to build your own private spaceship, for example. And you can buy anything in the world that is offered "for sale". Which, nowadays, is pretty much everything.
If you have access to bank-issued credit money, you can buy up all of your competitors and gain a monopoly in your industry. Then you can cut your costs, raise your prices, jack up your profits, and pay the banker back with interest. You can buy "the free market", and operate it as your private corporate fiefdom.
Pretty much every person and pretty much every thing can be bought, for the right price. In any event, there is always "some" person who will do whatever you want done, for the right price.
Not literally everybody can be bought for money, or can be paid or bribed or blackmailed to do things they would rather not do. But most people have a price, and many people's price is surprisingly cheap. Murder can be bought for a few hundred dollars: even less in some markets. High profile murders cost more. Gatekeepers of all kinds will "look the other way", for payments ranging from cheap to expensive, depending on the risk to the gatekeeper and the payoff of the act that is done while the gatekeeper is not looking.
What would you be prepared to do, if somebody offered you the opportunity to acquire a quick $10k? $100k? $1million? $10 million? $100 million?
Think of the things you can do with that money, choose any charity, give to the poor. We've noted your motives, we've noted your feelings. It isn't blood money, it's a fee, nothing more. Sorry, those lyrics from Jesus Christ Superstar popped into my head, talking Judas into accepting 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus. 30 pieces of silver was quite a bit of money, but Judas was not motivated by the desire to get rich in money. Hence the bribers pointing out all the good works of charity that can be done if you have money to give or spend.
Most people never get to find out what their price is, because most people are never in positions where they can get a huge amount of money for doing bad things. Wall St bankers were willing to destroy the financial world: some for personal windfalls of mere hundreds of thousands of dollars; others for personal fortunes of million, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And they all got to keep the money. They are now personally "rich". Who cares if the bank that we're managing collapses into bankruptcy? We're thin and gorgeous and rich. We don't need no steenkeen job working for a bank.
Money offered in payment for doing bad things is a universal corrupter of human morality. Few people cannot be bought at "some" price. This dangerous class of moral idealists -- who cannot be bought at any price -- rarely ascend into circles of power and wealth, because acquiring and holding great power and great wealth almost invariably requires doing bad things.
Power and wealth are the prizes that are won in highly competitive sports, and there are no enforceable rules at the highest levels of play. So it's a no holds barred free for all. The Art of War. Stealthy financial and legalistic deceptions and manipulations are commonplace means of gaining advantage. Mass murder and subjugation and plunder of nations becomes "conquest". Some players go so far as to drop actual exploding nuclear bombs on other players, to assure their "win".
Unlike militaristic civilizations that reward their best warriors, conquerors, plunderers with "honors", capitalist civilization rewards its best performers with "money"; and with money-earning economic "assets". Possessing a wealth of money and money-profitable assets is conclusive proof of your virtuous performance within capitalist civilization. Being poor demonstrates your failure as a capitalist human being. Being a morally decent and socially valuable human being, plus five bucks, gets you a cup of coffee.
A capitalist is not a "consumer" who spends his income buying rice to eat and buying kerosene to boil the water to cook his rice. Capitalists accumulate capital by saving their money earnings, not by spending their money-income buying stuff from "the economy". Money that capitalists earn out of the economy is not recirculated back into the economy as capitalist "spending". If you spend your capital, you're no longer a capitalist. Now you will have to "work" to earn money.
Nor is the banker a "charity" who will forgive the people's debts. The banker is a capitalist who demands payment of the economy's money debts, and he demands payment "in money".
Banks today are corporations, subject to financial accounting protocols that are enforced by members of the global banking cartel called the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. The BIS and the land the BIS occupies is its own state, like the Vatican, not subject to Swiss government authority or taxation.
The cartel is dominated by the world's current Great Power -- the US, and the US dollar. If you violate the rules and/or challenge the dollar's dominance, cartel members will bankrupt your banks, destroy your currency, and shut off your SWIFT codes so you can't participate in the international money payments system. You will lose access to US dollars, which despite inroads by BRICS who are settling some import/export payments in their own currencies, is still overwhelmingly the currency in which nations pay each other for imports of essential goods like oil and food and raw materials for their industries.
Today the US$ is used as an imperialist weapon of mass economic disruption, to "encourage" suffering nationals to oust their government and put in place a US$-friendly replacement. Ask Iran and Russia and Venezuela about financial warfare. It is very real, even though cause and effect is not so overtly "visible" as dropping bombs and watching them blow up your competitors' economic infrastructure and citizens.
Invisibility is one of the benefits of financial warfare over its military counterpart. A nation whose money and economy are under attack will suffer heavy financial and economic losses, but the citizens of the target nation will almost always blame their own government for the nation's woes. The people will elect, or install by coup d'etat, a government who is "friendly" (i.e. subservient) to the attacking (capitalist/US$) empire. The capitalists will stop attacking, and the people will believe it was the bad (socialist) policies of the ousted government that were "causing" the nation's problems.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
