MORAL SHIFTS

Let's talk about the morality of cheating for a moment.  Youngsters are taught at home, and then in school in the early grades, that cheating is wrong, that to bring answers to school for a test , hidden in a pocket or written on the palm of a hand, or getting them from another student, or any other type of cheating, that it is always wrong.  Even if the whole class cheats, that doesn't make it right.  Each student who cheats is doing something wrong; the fact that everyone has cheated does not absolve anyone of guilt.  Even withholding the knowledge of others cheating is frowned upon .

There are crooks who work alone, and crooks who work together in large groups, but each person involved, even if only the driver of a car where the others commit a crime by robbing a Seven-Eleven store, is part and parcel of that crime. Friends or relatives helping to conceal evidence of a crime are involved in a criminal act.

Organized Crime, which we often think of as the Mafia, participants in shake-down rackets, drug smuggling, people making regular runs to another state to evade the tax on whiskey and cigarettes, groups that plan to hi-jack trucks, and any type of crime you can name, the size of the group or the minor roles of those participating in one way or another, means that they're all culpable to some extent and punished accordingly.

AMERICA'S MORAL SHIFT, ENGINEERED BY VISA, MASTERCARD, ETC.

Beginning in 1991, Americans in every sector of this nation, of every religion, of every hue, of every belief, have experienced a slow but strong moral shift and thereby changed their value system.  They have allowed themselves to be used, to become a part of a scheme which involves a form of bribery and extortion, that cheats and defrauds others, for benefits often so meager to some that it is difficult to comprehend the reason for their participation in it.

American Express, Visa, MasterCard, etc., and the major banks opened a pathway that enabled people to cheat merchants with each transaction made on plastic, to take unwarranted discounts or to make undue gains, and although everyone succumbed it did not make it morally right.  As to the legality of the scheme, that is always open to challenge, no matter how craftily they succeed in packaging the program. 

Do you think, for example, that Citibank, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, is a paragon of virtue? 

Well, Elliot Spitzer, then Attorney General of New York, brought them up short a charge of wrong-doing, one that led them to agree to a penalty of $300 million.  Doesn't that sound like they were doing something wrong to you, that millions of people must have suffered some losses from their wrongdoing, and that they might be doing other things wrong as well, still?  Isn't that a possibility in your mind?   Or Bank of America, another multi-national institution that was caught and heavily fined by the State of New York and Attorney General Elliot Spitzer.

BRIBERY:

 Congress, at one time in a sudden, but short period of moral conscience, passed a law making it illegal to participate in the almost universal manner of doing business in or with mid-eastern and far-eastern nations, the use of the bribery in order to gain contracts. That businessmen were only trying to compete for business in the accepted manner in Third World countries did not sit well with them, it aroused their moral outrage, and they sat in judgment of them and passed a law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.  Why aren't they just as opposed to America's banks and Credit Card Cartel using the same tactics?

Congress seems to have made it abundantly clear that their intent was to outlaw and punish those who participate in any form of bribery, within or without the nation  That either giving or accepting a bribe is wrong, here, in the United States, or in a foreign country was now considered adequately addressed, yet congressional aides are piling up the Thank You Points with Citibank as well as awards from other bankcards with Visa and MasterCard logos on them. 

In spite of it some members of Congress were quietly doing business as usual, yep, accepting bribes. Ask the former congressmen who are now in jail  (Cunningham, R, SD, Ca.) for accepting bribes, and ask the businessmen who are now in prison for offering bribes to those very same congressmen.

CORRUPTION: Bribes, or corrupt practices, can come in many different forms, either in cash, services, secret bank accounts, vacations in exotic places, free flights, meals, clothing, a payment in some form to acknowledge an action taken that benefited someone and they, in appreciation find some way to make the other party more comfortable. 

In Egypt during WWII, for example, just about every time one dealt with an official, there was some small gift handed over, it's the way they did (and do) business.  A single pack of cigarettes could bribe a guard or watchman to look the other way, a carton or two of cigarettes was sufficient  to bribe higher officials because it was easily marketed and brought them good prices. A pack of cigarettes cost us six cents each then, and a carton was sixty cents. It was endemic then and from all that I hear today, it is still the easiest way to do business in the eastern countries.

This, today, is the very system introduced in the United States when Visa, MasterCard, Citibank, Bank of America, etc., all worked out a plan to introduce Air Miles to this country, heralded by the Business Sections of the news media as innovative, is nothing more, nothing less, than that ancient mid-eastern practice known as baksheesh.  It's just two a few pennies reward to the two elderly sisters who buy a $3.75 Birthday card for their niece and one says to the other, "Oh Muriel, put it on your Citibank card and get those points!"

And the Hallmark shop owner winces when he hears those words again, and Muriel spends a couple of minutes searching her purse for her card, making those behind her wait.

If those Hallmark store owners around this nation could get Citibank's CEO  Sanford Weill out behind the barn or in the back alley for a few minutes . . . 

FOREIGN CORRUPT PRACTICES ACT OF 1977.:

Food stores, for example, were almost exclusively cash and carry until the advent of Air Miles in 1992, in the early years of the subversion of America by the Credit Card Cartel.  Von's, Albertson's and other super-markets all around the country have now found it almost compulsory to join in the scramble and become involved in this national disgrace or lose business to competitors.  While it seemed voluntary, it really wasn't.  They were forced to act or possibly lose their customer base, so the scheme worked out just as planned by the Cartel and multi-national banks.  It was to avoid losing business that they jumped on the bandwagon and began accepting plastic for groceries. Plastic holds the power, plastic is the Mafia and Visa's Pascarella seems to be the new Godfather.

Like dominos standing in rows, an inch apart, as one fell, so did the next and next, on down the line, until they remained in a continuous row of fallen black pieces.  When every store offers the same program with the same rewards, there is no special benefit to any of them; they simply all suffer the same indignity of having their profits raided by the hegemony of large banking institutions and the oligarchs of the Credit Card Cartel. 

Just as the nations of Europe paid tribute to the Barbary Coast pirates in the 18th century, so too do American businesses pay tribute to the Charge/Credit Card Cartel, to American Ex-cess, Visa, to MasterCard, to Discover Card, and to the banking industry.

ARE YOU POSSIBLY A CROOK? 

It does not matter what your occupation, from tycoon to a car washer, from a wealthy woman who is a business executive to a simple housewife, if you make use of your credit or charge cards in order to accumulate points towards Awards, you are participating in an Act of Extortion, or Corruption, accepting a bribe offered by a third party to perform an act which is detrimental to the well-being of another party. 

Missionaries, priests, ministers, aides to congressional members, lawyers, doctors, accountants, car salesmen, carpenters, business owners, CEOs of major corporations, their wives and children, police officers, members of the ADF and FBI, bank presidents to bank tellers, scientists, no matter what their line or occupation, as long as they hold plastic cards from banking institutions in their pockets or purses and they accumulate Air Miles, the are participants in a treacherous act conjured  by a coalition of banks, credit card licensors and air lines. It was they who devised a system that would mislead and corrupt ordinary citizens and get them to participate in a plan that would systematically defraud retailers with whom they did business.

No matter how clever nor how convoluted the scheme is, when you break it down into its elements it is undeniably the simple but highly effective use of a bribe, an act of Bribery.  It is defined both in the dictionary or by law, but the law has a much stricter interpretation.  It has permeated the very heart and soul of almost every business/financial transaction in the country, and so it is time for the law to broaden the interpretation or what constitutes a bribe. Courts accept such changes when the prosecutors present compelling evidence that these changes are necessary in order to right a wrong.  Never was a wrong so pervasive and so wrongful.

From the mordida* in Mexico with its millions of willing and unwilling participants, to the baksheesh** in the mid-east with hundreds of millions all working within the system and thusly perpetuating it, this new form of bribery has now become entrenched in the American financial world.   The Silence of the Lambs as they are bled by their once-trusted banks is all pervasive. 

No one wants to upset the apple-cart because as they get cheated, so they too cheat others and this convoluted thinking is now firmly entrenched in the business system in the U.S., begun by Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, MBNA, Visa, etc..  If they're (reason many) going to pay for someone else's Awards, then they, too, will carry plastic and in turn make others pay for their Awards.  And thus, year after year, the Credit Card Cartel's profits continue to grow, as they, like lamprey eels, suck tiny drops of blood from each sale..

*Mordida, the bite.  A small amount added, the bribe.  Or instead of a ticket for a traffic offense, real or imagined, the officer asks for or accepts a small amount of money.  I've had it happen to me in three different cities in Mexico, but it is rampant all over that country, as anyone born in Mexico will tell you.  It is all over Cemtral and South America as well.

**Baksheesh, a small gift, a bribe, in the mid-east everyone has their hand out for a small token of your appreciation, in every government office, etc.

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