Every time anyone else exchanges money, it reinforces the belief. All money, whether ones and zeroes, fiat paper currency or rai stones serve merely as place-holders with no (or very little) intrinsic value. It’s function is to allow trade to be offset in time and space, thereby expanding the ambit of potential transactions. Unfortunately, as soon as money is invented, so is debt, and interest, AKA usury. Worse, financial markets create a way to place bets on trade and usury outcomes. However, even though money isn’t physical goods, neither is it imaginary. It’s belief yes, but so is language and law and reputation and other social data. Information, though non-material, is real.
Since we live in a world where survival entails participating in the monetary economy, we all shore up the belief in those ones and zeroes with every transaction we make. If you can stop buying or selling things, stop working, stop renting, stop paying taxes…and enough people did that, then it would vanish like faeries. But there’s physical costs to doing do…starvation, homelessness, prison. And getting enough people to do that would require another system to take its place. Communism was an attempt to do just that. It failed miserably. Hermits attain some limited independence, but there’s not enough human-habitable room on Earth for enough people to become hermits for the money to vanish. Beggars attain less independence, but still rely on the largess of the money-based economy. I’m not saying it’s a happy fact, but there is no escape.
I pray we haven’t reached the point where the only justice is vigilante justice, because it’s almost never just. Remember those guys take their marching orders from Limbaugh. They’re more likely to off some history professor because he said something mean about Jesus.
I certainly don’t know, buy I guess it’s possible there is a separate leak closer to home? It could also be to releease closer to the U.S. political conventions, waiting to not affect voting and avoid accusations of foreign meddling with voter decisions; once that’s done hit 'em with both barrels as it were? I guess it will become clear in time.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the existence and activities of these people is a good thing; I’m always just amazed at how little coordinated action they engage in, despite their ample supplies of rage and ammo, and am curious if this is something that data would change, or if they are just fundamentally unsystematic. I’d very much prefer if they weren’t around to speculate about at all; but since they are it has always been a surprise to me how rarely they lash out at what would seem like more logical targets. You get the occasional workplace shooting of a manager or direct supervisor, or someone else just above them on the totem pole; but that’s really about it.
I get the impression a lot of world leaders don’t have much faith in the stability of their own countries, or even the world.
And you know, I can’t say I blame them. Every day the world looks more f@#ked. Maybe it has to do with the kind of personality of someone who attains power, or maybe it’s just human nature. If I found myself as finance minister of an unstable African republic, and saw the corruption all around me, would I have the guts to expose it and risk my own life, or would I hide money away for the inevitable crash? I like to think I would do the right thing, but how can I know until I’m there.
The irony is that if those millions/billions being secreted away were used for the benefit of their country, it might not be so unstable economically or politically.
(Probably not working for non-Germans. “Oh, How Beautiful Panama Is” is a famous children book by Janosch and is currently often cited in Panama Paper articles)
The weirdest part of this for me is Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan has been the mouth piece of the Communist government for ages, I wonder if they know that while he was spouting “too much freedom is bad” and “Chinese people need to be controlled” and pretending not to know who Ai Weiwei was… that he was also hiding money in off shore banks?
“Non-poor” is a phrase that’s still out in the woods looking for the car keys and the gas tank. “Wealth beyond reason that’s been stolen and laundered” is just a bit closer to the mark. Generally speaking, I don’t think playing the cello is the fastest path to billion dollar bank accounts:
"Please, I'm so far from all this. See, even my cello is second-hand," Roldugin told The New York Times in 2014. "I'm not a businessman, I don't have millions."
