hectorlca
22nd November 2011, 02:26
Hello Everyone!
I recently met an open-minded skeptic. He was open to a lot of the ideas us "unconventional" folk believe in, yet he has en empirical mind. A lot of us believe in some mix of ideas that are empirically based and some ideas that are intuition based.
Many people aren't ready to start believing in those intuition based ideas, but there seems to be an opening. People are starting to be more open to possible narratives regarding how the world works.
I'm attaching an email I wrote to my friend today, giving my rationale for believing in a Global financial elite that controls the world. I tried to make it as logically sound as possible in hopes of appealing to that analytical side of him.
Anyway, a friend suggested I post this email here. I'm doing it to hopefully open up a discussion and perhaps maybe to give this community some talking points in how the world economy works and how power is structured.
Much love,
Hector.
------------------------------
Email
Dear xxxxxxx,
Thanks for the update on the list! I'd never heard of the light bulb conspiracy, but I'll do a search and run it through my 'logic filters'.
This idea of logic filters is something that I wanted to share with you but didn't have the time to really get into it. I have some time right now and I wanted to share with you some of my experiences that helped define my logic filters and led me to believe some conspiracy theories as almost certain fact. Some of these same logic filters actually allow me to grade conspiracy theories into a mental scale where the lowest degree I allow is "plausible"and the highest degree I allow is "fact".
Many conspiracy theories don't fit into this scale because they simply don't make sense to me. Therefore I shelve them until some development in science, Geopolitics or technology can bump them up into the scale, receiving at first a plausible grading.
I'm not ready to grade all the items on the list just now, but I'll probably get around to it. The task is complex because many of these are related to each other and sometimes their plausibility or likelihood of being true depend on other conspiracies being real. So, in a sense, believing in the more questionable stuff is like standing on a house of cards, except you don't know if the base is rock solid or very flimsy.
For now, I'd like to jot down one of the first insights that led me to believe that an elite group of people does control the world. However I'd like to preface my thought process by saying that I do not believe this elite is controlling the world with a malicious intent. I mean to say that they are not "out to get us", but rather that they are an extremely powerful group of people, acting in a self-interested fashion, in cooperation with other extremely powerful people. The end result is that we stand in the way of their end-goal, but their end-goal is not specifically to kill us or depopulate the planet just for the sake of genocide. These may simply be steps in a ladder that leads to some super-goal of ultimate power these people may be seeking. They're in the same rat race many of us are, seeking a better something, or seeking the next shot of their drug of choice...for them, power is the drug of choice. So, here we go.
I fear this is too long and convoluted...I hope this makes sense!
(you might recognize some of these concepts, but I'll still link to wikipedia in case you want to refresh)
Cash flow and Net Present Value:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value
The idea of a cash flow is pretty straightforward: Cash comes in, cash goes out. Your net cash flow is positive if you spend less than you take in and negative if you spend beyond your income.
The concept of cash flow applies the same way it does to a business project as it does to a person. Project analysis usually requires a Net Present Value excercise, where the projected future cash flows are discounted to their present value: If I project a cash flow for $100 1 year from today, and the inflation rate is 8%, then the present value of those $100 is $92. You can take the future cash flow projections to infinity (for this example we can think about cash projections for just the average length of productivity in a lifetime (around 55 years) and figure out a Net Present Value.
That last paragraph shows in very simplified terms, how the NPV for a human being can be calculated provided you have enough information about that person (whats his/her monthly income? how much is he spending out of that income? how much is he/she saving? what are his consumption tendencies? the list goes on and on...but be assured that a list of attributes can be designed and a person's Net Present Value can be calculated.
So, there's a first thought. Think about a shopping mall. Then think about the people that go there. Then see it from a business owner's perspective: You want to know how much he/she is worth, you want to know how much they're willing to spend, you want to know about their tastes and tendencies so you can market to them appropriately. It is a natural thing for a business owner to want to put a value-tag on each person.
"Ok, so what?" you might ask yourself.
Monopolies, Market Share and Consumption
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080911192442AAh34gR
When I was running a business (it was a subscription based service) I realized at one point that my end goal was to get as wide of a subscriber base as I could (increase the share of the market I owned) and try to get people to buy the most expensive plan I offered (securing the biggest possible cash flow from that person). All business try to do this. It doesn't matter if it's retail or food...you're looking for repeat, loyal customers...those repeat customers are providing a stream of cash to your business and you want that stream of cash to be as big as possible.
Now we're getting an idea of how a person's income starts being divided into cash flows that go to pay for the lifestyle you want to lead. This is essential to understanding that very few people actually own their lifestyle, most of us rent our lifestyle.
When a company is the first to enter in its industry, or a group of big companies acts in a de-facto united tune, it can reap tremendous benefits because it has a large portion of the market share. A monopoly can abuse that position to hold on the largest amount of market share possible. It will block entry to the markets to eliminate competition and it will attempt to secure the largest amount of future market share as well. A thorough study of monopolies is beyond the scope of this piece, but suffice it to say, monopolies derive their power from the use of unjust barriers to entry.
So far, we have a picture of how monopolies control the market and how they are trying their absolute best to tap into the largest amount of cash flow they can get from us. Look at the major industries and how they're a part of our lives:
Food, medicine, energy, communications, entertainment and housing are all monopolies or oligopolies. One other effect of monopolies is that the point where they are most profitable is not the optimal level of production. Monopolies are price makers: They make higher profits margins on relatively lower quantities sold, and this results in artificial scarcity. If you add all these industries up, you can account for most if not all of people's cash flow. This results in the centralization of wealth, which is the root of the inequality we see in the world.
The Finance Monopoly: The Global Elite
I hope that I've been able to paint an understandable picture of how the mechanism for the centralization of wealth happens. There is one ultimate monopoly. I'm calling it a monopoly even though it operates under a multitude of firms that could even then be seen as an oligopoly. For this monopoly to exist, debt must exist. Debt is the mechanism by which the Finance monopoly enriches itself. I'm not saying that there is no need for credit in the world we live in. If Banks operated responsibly credit would fulfill it's purpose: create possibilities for investment and fuel healthy economic growth. However, we took a wrong turn somewhere, and at that specific moment is where I feel we lost our sovereignty. That turning point happened once Banks started profiting more than the productive activities they were supposed to finance. Think about this. You take out a loan to start a local grocery shop. You expect your business to grow and you expect to make more than enough to pay your loan back. This requires that your profit be more than the interest rate the bank is charging you. This is all ok, and you might even make it so that you can pay your loan off...until walmart checks in and drives you out of the market.
Futures in the Financial Market
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080911192442AAh34gR
So what does walmart have anything to do with global finance? The answer lies in Futures.
Futures are pieces of paper that are traded on the belief that at some point in the future, the goods to back up that piece of paper will exist.
Barrels of oil that haven't been pumped out are being sold and bought, crops that haven't been harvested already belong to someone. Commodities, raw materials and energy are no longer just being bought and sold in physical marketplaces. This creates an obvious problem: Things are no longer bought and sold in win-win situations (which is the pre-requisite for trade), instead, people with access to massive amounts of money can speculate and bet on futures. When you aggregate these trades and transactions you realize that the price you pay for a head of lettuce in the supermarket does not necessarily correspond to the cost of producing that lettuce, but in reality, the speculation on the futures market has already stacked additional costs on that lettuce. Why? Because a year ago, that lettuce, while still imaginary, traded hands multiple times, adding a financial cost to the lettuce. Each transaction generated a profit for the trader, but not the producer.
After that, it only takes a little bit of imagination... is there an elite at the top of major banks and investment firms? Absolutely yes. Are they out to make a profit? Absolutely yes.
Does their profit harm us? I believe so.
If you and I have a $ NPV figure floating above our heads, the Finance monopoly will unknowingly (perhaps) try to extract the totality of that NPV through debt. It doesn't matter if that debt is in the New York Stock Exchange or in our credit cards. When debt is more profitable than productivity, the world doesn't work to be productive, it works to pay off debt. And that is where I believe we are today.
I recently met an open-minded skeptic. He was open to a lot of the ideas us "unconventional" folk believe in, yet he has en empirical mind. A lot of us believe in some mix of ideas that are empirically based and some ideas that are intuition based.
Many people aren't ready to start believing in those intuition based ideas, but there seems to be an opening. People are starting to be more open to possible narratives regarding how the world works.
I'm attaching an email I wrote to my friend today, giving my rationale for believing in a Global financial elite that controls the world. I tried to make it as logically sound as possible in hopes of appealing to that analytical side of him.
Anyway, a friend suggested I post this email here. I'm doing it to hopefully open up a discussion and perhaps maybe to give this community some talking points in how the world economy works and how power is structured.
Much love,
Hector.
------------------------------
Dear xxxxxxx,
Thanks for the update on the list! I'd never heard of the light bulb conspiracy, but I'll do a search and run it through my 'logic filters'.
This idea of logic filters is something that I wanted to share with you but didn't have the time to really get into it. I have some time right now and I wanted to share with you some of my experiences that helped define my logic filters and led me to believe some conspiracy theories as almost certain fact. Some of these same logic filters actually allow me to grade conspiracy theories into a mental scale where the lowest degree I allow is "plausible"and the highest degree I allow is "fact".
Many conspiracy theories don't fit into this scale because they simply don't make sense to me. Therefore I shelve them until some development in science, Geopolitics or technology can bump them up into the scale, receiving at first a plausible grading.
I'm not ready to grade all the items on the list just now, but I'll probably get around to it. The task is complex because many of these are related to each other and sometimes their plausibility or likelihood of being true depend on other conspiracies being real. So, in a sense, believing in the more questionable stuff is like standing on a house of cards, except you don't know if the base is rock solid or very flimsy.
For now, I'd like to jot down one of the first insights that led me to believe that an elite group of people does control the world. However I'd like to preface my thought process by saying that I do not believe this elite is controlling the world with a malicious intent. I mean to say that they are not "out to get us", but rather that they are an extremely powerful group of people, acting in a self-interested fashion, in cooperation with other extremely powerful people. The end result is that we stand in the way of their end-goal, but their end-goal is not specifically to kill us or depopulate the planet just for the sake of genocide. These may simply be steps in a ladder that leads to some super-goal of ultimate power these people may be seeking. They're in the same rat race many of us are, seeking a better something, or seeking the next shot of their drug of choice...for them, power is the drug of choice. So, here we go.
I fear this is too long and convoluted...I hope this makes sense!
(you might recognize some of these concepts, but I'll still link to wikipedia in case you want to refresh)
Cash flow and Net Present Value:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value
The idea of a cash flow is pretty straightforward: Cash comes in, cash goes out. Your net cash flow is positive if you spend less than you take in and negative if you spend beyond your income.
The concept of cash flow applies the same way it does to a business project as it does to a person. Project analysis usually requires a Net Present Value excercise, where the projected future cash flows are discounted to their present value: If I project a cash flow for $100 1 year from today, and the inflation rate is 8%, then the present value of those $100 is $92. You can take the future cash flow projections to infinity (for this example we can think about cash projections for just the average length of productivity in a lifetime (around 55 years) and figure out a Net Present Value.
That last paragraph shows in very simplified terms, how the NPV for a human being can be calculated provided you have enough information about that person (whats his/her monthly income? how much is he spending out of that income? how much is he/she saving? what are his consumption tendencies? the list goes on and on...but be assured that a list of attributes can be designed and a person's Net Present Value can be calculated.
So, there's a first thought. Think about a shopping mall. Then think about the people that go there. Then see it from a business owner's perspective: You want to know how much he/she is worth, you want to know how much they're willing to spend, you want to know about their tastes and tendencies so you can market to them appropriately. It is a natural thing for a business owner to want to put a value-tag on each person.
"Ok, so what?" you might ask yourself.
Monopolies, Market Share and Consumption
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080911192442AAh34gR
When I was running a business (it was a subscription based service) I realized at one point that my end goal was to get as wide of a subscriber base as I could (increase the share of the market I owned) and try to get people to buy the most expensive plan I offered (securing the biggest possible cash flow from that person). All business try to do this. It doesn't matter if it's retail or food...you're looking for repeat, loyal customers...those repeat customers are providing a stream of cash to your business and you want that stream of cash to be as big as possible.
Now we're getting an idea of how a person's income starts being divided into cash flows that go to pay for the lifestyle you want to lead. This is essential to understanding that very few people actually own their lifestyle, most of us rent our lifestyle.
When a company is the first to enter in its industry, or a group of big companies acts in a de-facto united tune, it can reap tremendous benefits because it has a large portion of the market share. A monopoly can abuse that position to hold on the largest amount of market share possible. It will block entry to the markets to eliminate competition and it will attempt to secure the largest amount of future market share as well. A thorough study of monopolies is beyond the scope of this piece, but suffice it to say, monopolies derive their power from the use of unjust barriers to entry.
So far, we have a picture of how monopolies control the market and how they are trying their absolute best to tap into the largest amount of cash flow they can get from us. Look at the major industries and how they're a part of our lives:
Food, medicine, energy, communications, entertainment and housing are all monopolies or oligopolies. One other effect of monopolies is that the point where they are most profitable is not the optimal level of production. Monopolies are price makers: They make higher profits margins on relatively lower quantities sold, and this results in artificial scarcity. If you add all these industries up, you can account for most if not all of people's cash flow. This results in the centralization of wealth, which is the root of the inequality we see in the world.
The Finance Monopoly: The Global Elite
I hope that I've been able to paint an understandable picture of how the mechanism for the centralization of wealth happens. There is one ultimate monopoly. I'm calling it a monopoly even though it operates under a multitude of firms that could even then be seen as an oligopoly. For this monopoly to exist, debt must exist. Debt is the mechanism by which the Finance monopoly enriches itself. I'm not saying that there is no need for credit in the world we live in. If Banks operated responsibly credit would fulfill it's purpose: create possibilities for investment and fuel healthy economic growth. However, we took a wrong turn somewhere, and at that specific moment is where I feel we lost our sovereignty. That turning point happened once Banks started profiting more than the productive activities they were supposed to finance. Think about this. You take out a loan to start a local grocery shop. You expect your business to grow and you expect to make more than enough to pay your loan back. This requires that your profit be more than the interest rate the bank is charging you. This is all ok, and you might even make it so that you can pay your loan off...until walmart checks in and drives you out of the market.
Futures in the Financial Market
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080911192442AAh34gR
So what does walmart have anything to do with global finance? The answer lies in Futures.
Futures are pieces of paper that are traded on the belief that at some point in the future, the goods to back up that piece of paper will exist.
Barrels of oil that haven't been pumped out are being sold and bought, crops that haven't been harvested already belong to someone. Commodities, raw materials and energy are no longer just being bought and sold in physical marketplaces. This creates an obvious problem: Things are no longer bought and sold in win-win situations (which is the pre-requisite for trade), instead, people with access to massive amounts of money can speculate and bet on futures. When you aggregate these trades and transactions you realize that the price you pay for a head of lettuce in the supermarket does not necessarily correspond to the cost of producing that lettuce, but in reality, the speculation on the futures market has already stacked additional costs on that lettuce. Why? Because a year ago, that lettuce, while still imaginary, traded hands multiple times, adding a financial cost to the lettuce. Each transaction generated a profit for the trader, but not the producer.
After that, it only takes a little bit of imagination... is there an elite at the top of major banks and investment firms? Absolutely yes. Are they out to make a profit? Absolutely yes.
Does their profit harm us? I believe so.
If you and I have a $ NPV figure floating above our heads, the Finance monopoly will unknowingly (perhaps) try to extract the totality of that NPV through debt. It doesn't matter if that debt is in the New York Stock Exchange or in our credit cards. When debt is more profitable than productivity, the world doesn't work to be productive, it works to pay off debt. And that is where I believe we are today.