"usury changes things. with interest money is no longer a simple and stable commodity that just happens to have been chosen as the medium of exchange. projected through time it multiplies, and this without any toil on the part of the usurer. a man can borrow money, buy a loom, sell his wool at a higher price. change his station in life. another man can borrow money, buy the first man's wool, ship it abroad, and sell it at an even higher price. he moves up the social scale. or, if he is unlucky or foolish, he is ruined. meanwhile the usurer, the banker, grows richer and richer. we can't even know how rich, because money can be moved an hidden, and gains on financial transactions are hard to trace. it's pointless to count his sheep and cattle or to measure how much land he owns. who will make him pay his tithe? and who will make him pay his taxes? who will persuade him to pay some attention to his soul when life has become so interesting? things are getting out of hand."
from " medici money: banking, metaphysics, and art in fifteenth cenntury florence" by tim parks
whoa! so many ways to go with this...a full bore assault on using religion as a vehicle to scare the sinners into opening their purses to the princes of the church ( or the swaggarts of tv evangelism ) and ease their earthly burdens through an upward redistribution of wealth ( and creating said cleric aristocracy)...financial speculation...selling short...bubbles...esoteric derivatives...credit default swaps...hedge funds...insider trading..currency manipulation ( or treason in the sick twisted utterly profane mind of the yahoo governor of texas...rick perry has to be close to the bottom of the political sump...the shit is thick down there)...how can one think of shady financial dealings with out dragging the whores into the discussion? plutocracy disguised as republicanism that calls itself democracy ...the dissembling reaches down even to the most general of labels...reality is somewhere else...waiting to kick humanity in its collective nuts...i can almost understand the messianic who lust for the end of days...sometimes people are just too fucking stupid to live..i really need a CULTURE...i am so weary of things being quantified and qualified by their monetary worth and knowing that the whole house of cards will collapse in chaos because it is an entire society based on an abstraction...the medium of exchange has traded places with the goods or services it is meant to represent and become the ultimate good...what is gold but shiny lead? insane...how do you eat that? there is no such thing as a post-agricultural society...we may be in for the real post-industrial....post-wal mart even...grow your own may take on new meaning as petrochemical agricultural inputs become exorbitantly priced or unavailable and food prices spiral upward ( have a look at index mundi or just stroll the supermarket aisles and think back a bit)...shadowstats puts the outside date for hyperinflation of the u s dollar at 2014...the next election ( not that it matters ) could be the last...the interest level keep rising.
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