This 6-pillar curriculum teaches the basic literacy we need to be personally and financially successful and to do so in a manner in which together we evolve a culture that supports the emergence of an advanced human civilization.
The host of the Plain Meaning channel on YouTube, Jerry, describes his documentary-style channel as being “about power—how it’s built, how it’s justified, and how it’s exercised.” In the episode titled “Why Are You Paying Just to Pay?” his focus is on the powerful train tracks meticulously put in place over decades to corral the American public into ever-more-disadvantageous digital payment systems.
In a little over an hour, Jerry breaks down concepts like “clearing,” “the float” (described as “a kind of financial no man’s land”), and “settlement,” explaining how each stage of this intentionally slowed-down payment process generates profitable fees for private entities while punishing the public with higher prices. The video also offers an excellent discussion of usury—“a sin equivalent to theft” that was “considered a moral and legal wrong for most of recorded human history”—and explains how a 1978 Supreme Court decision (Marquette National Bank of Menneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp.) essentially gutted protections against it.
As for the key players, Jerry evokes the implicit public-private partnership that characterizes the financial sector (Clinton’s presidency was a particular boon for financialization). Other neat tricks include the benefits that accrue to credit card companies through their branding as “technology companies” that merely “move information,” and the comparable rebranding of behemoths like Citicorp from “repositories of capital” to “processors of transactions.”
Catherine likes to quote Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, who once said, “Information about money is probably worth more than the money.” In a similar vein, discussing “payment aggregators” like PayPal, Venmo, Square, and Stripe (some of the newer kids on the technology block), Jerry says:
“The real transformation happened when these companies realized that the data flowing through their systems was more valuable than the transactions themselves.”
We also learn that the American public was onto the encroaching digital control grid as long ago as the 1970s, when they submitted 60,000 letters (one year after bar codes first entered into widespread use) to the National Commission on Electronic Fund Transfers. The letters showed that people:
“[U]nderstood something essential about what was being built—that a system where every transaction leaves a permanent, searchable, monetizable record is a surveillance system, whatever else it might be called.”
Although this video does not explicitly discuss programmable money, the inexorable, step-by-step layering of laws, court decisions, regulations, and behind-closed-doors deliberations that it traces seems to have been steadily marching toward that goal. Jerry does note that payment aggregators can “freeze or terminate accounts” at a moment’s notice, generally without redress or appeal.
Though perhaps not quite as elegant as presentations by John Titus or Richard Werner, this video offers similar fare in the sense that it makes an intentionally opaque and “complexified” financial system more understandable to the layperson. And we can only applaud Jerry’s closing remark: “As for me, I think I’m sticking with cash.”
