Around 2014, I started watching Documentary films about Corporations, Governments, Food and Health systems, Energy Industry and the most impacting, Climate Change. Various Topics. But interesting and depressing at the same time. Then in 2015, during my visit to Sadhana forest, Pondy, I was introduced to ‘Films For Action‘.
After watching hours and hours of films,
- I was so depressed that we, as a Civilization, created many mindless artificial structures and systems that increase Violence, Poverty, War.
- The things I saw and understood were all super complex and hard for my super tiny, incapable brain to grab properly.
I would call Zeitgeist as the Mother of all Documentaries that I ever saw. Links to the movie:
- Part 1: The Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbIu8Zeqp0
- Part 2: Addendum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gKX9TWRyfs
- Part 3: Moving Forward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlPs10GSJjQ
Very informative. eye opening. But be warned, this is one of the THE MOST DRY Documentary, I had ever seen!
Social Activity must never be a Sentimental charitable relief, but it must be a means to find a way of fundamental deficiencies in our economic and cultural life. – Adolf Hitler
Even more depressing was that,
- I didn’t understand these things well enough, so I couldn’t explain this to all my fellow friends, who cared and spent their time trying to resolve the social issues around them.
- Even those people, who always speak about learning, understanding and questioning the Status Quo, never visit the subject of understanding these Global systems, as the subject tends to be very very dry.
More than all, as an Individual, I could do ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about it. There was no other option than to force myself to live a life, as if I haven’t seen all these documentary films, as if I absolutely have NO Idea about Mega Corporations, High level corruption in Governments, Threat to our Food systems, etc., etc.,
The only good thing was, I was blessed with a very small circle of friends, who saw more than what I saw, who understood better about all those things that I understood little, with whom I could engage in hopeless, but wishful conversations on changing these systems.
Economic Perspective:
We have something called Free market / Competition in various systems, at least in Theory:
- In political systems, good political parties making actual social contributions are supposed to gain the authority and power. And if they deviate or change in the future, they will be replaced by some other better political party.
- In Markets, companies that offer good service will prevail, while Companies that offer bad service will fail.
That’s how systems in Free market are supposed to work. Incentivizing good options and penalizing bad options. But what is the reality? The systems are rigged and unfair. But there are also certain systems/Corporations who are above these basic Free market philosophies.
To my very limited knowledge, they are VISA, Master, Western Union, NSA, etc., They don’t have, they can’t have any competition even by the Theory of current systems. These companies which offer cross border wire transfers, International remittances to the whole world can never have any Competition by any law of any country. THIS IS ABSOLUTE POWER.
As the famous quote goes,
POWER CORRUPTS and ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY
The implications of their monopoly are many.
Couple among them are:
- Just because they setup cross border Wire transfers some 150 years back, they now eat up a share of money in every cross border transaction happening all over the world.
- In other terms, from our Indian Perspective, every middle class person, who works as a car driver, construction worker or any low-level job in Foreign countries, pays a price to these monopolies for every transaction they do from there to India.
- Is it because these transfers cost the service provider some price? Hell NO.
- It’s just because they hold Monopoly in this sector and there is none to question them.
- Banking/Finance services have reached to 2 to 3 billion of the total world population of 7.4 billion. But, do you think it will ever reach the remaining people? No. Because it is not the intent of those monopolies to serve the people. Their intent is only to make a profit and you can’t make much profit by extending Finance services to 3rd world nations.
- Many Bill gates, Steve Jobs, Elon musk in 3rd world nations with supernatural abilities to change the world spend their lives chasing food and shelter.
- Setting up a Startup to implement their Crazy world-changing ideas, getting investments for those ideas remain a distant fantasy for them. Actually, they won’t even get loans to pursue their educational dreams, while someone in another part of the world, someone belonging to a different economy class can get crores of loans, lose it irresponsibly and just walk away, not paying back, with NO PENALTY.
Actual incidents:
- Wikileaks and many other Whistle blowers have shown us again and again how good our Judicial systems are when treating white-collar criminals.
- We have seen news about HSBC doing money laundering walk away just by paying fine and NO ONE GETS ARRESTED. Source 1 Source 2
- We have seen Wikileaks publishing about Money laundering by Banks in Iceland. But arrests are made only after HUGE public outcry. Source 1
- Even in India, we have seen the Cobra leaks incident, catching 3 major banks in India (including ICICI), violating Anti Money Laundering rules, to transfer some big blank money for their super rich customers. But after getting caught, those banks are not closed, no one gets arrested. They just paid a couple of crores and fine, boom, everything is back to normal once again.
Looking at all these news, I am not sure what to conclude, whether white collar criminals use Banks or they own the Banks?!
Now just imagine the state of a Poor farmer who got a couple of lakhs loans and unable to Payback? He will be forced to commit suicide by this rigged, unfair systems, which only serves 1 class of People. There should be a definite penalty for defaulters, whoever they maybe. But it should be for all the classes of people and organizations and Death(Suicide) should never be the penalty.
Ok. So what?
What could an Individual do?
Absolutely nothing.
That is what I thought till 4 months back, Until I learned more about a orderly, `never seen before` peaceful silent revolution that is brewing for the past 8 years.
More about that exciting Revolution in next post, in 2018 🙂
PS: Thanks to Beulah Sharon for her support in compiling this post.
