OpEdNews - Article: Money - and Why We Must Learn to Do Without
I truly don’t know what to think of this. Lizards — discuss.
OpEdNews - Article: Money - and Why We Must Learn to Do Without
Of course I mean money as a concept of a quantity of value that can be manipulated in all kinds of clever ways. You can borrow money from a bank to build a house or start a business, and then pay off the loan in small increments with an added interest. Islam forbids charging interest, so Muslims call it rent; they don’t get a loan, but they rent money from a bank.. Money used to be a symbol for gold. The United States actually owned big chunks of gold, worth as much as how many dollars we printed. When we went off the so-called gold standard we made money worth whatever we want to make it. I’m not at all sure who decides what a dollar is worth. But in the last several decades money is flowing upward to the very very rich who now use that to buy politicians to insure that they will get more.
In America 400 individuals, probably mostly men, own more wealth than the bottom 180 million of us. ‘Wealth’ today means money. “Own’ means that that wealth belongs to those 400 persons only, they can do with it what they want. With that much wealth doing nothing makes it grow. But money is like a drug, people get addicted to it, they want always more. And one of our two parties sees to it that the rich pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, for instance.
We all know by now that wealth also buys people, politicians. And those politicians get a bit of that enormous wealth for which they do what the 400 want. They make laws to syphon a little more out of “the economy’ up to the very very rich. According to a talk I just heard by Gar Alperowitz our economy is not broke at all, it is the largest in history, even now. If we all shared equally it would come to $192,000 for every family of four. But of course it is not shared equally. Very few families of four own, or earn, that much as we all know.