Freedom of Speech!!! I’ll give you Freedom of Speech!
The most important things are the ones that are permanently suppressed so that you never think about them at all.
In 1992, for example, a restaurant owner in Toronto defied the flagrantly-criminal provision in his American Express licence agreement, better known as the Keep-your-bleeping-mouth-shut Rule, by educating his customers to the fact and amount of the concealed-credit-charges they were paying to Amex and Visa and Mastercard, etc., and the concealed-price-discounts that he was required to give his card-users in order to help the card-issuers to conceal and deny those charges to the card-users, as described under the following excerpt from “Conspiracy Theory my butt”:
The Toronto restaurant owner had put display cards on his tables revealing the various / different price discounts that he had to give to Visa, MC, and Amex, etc. card-users (from the Toronto Star):
American Express is making an example of a local restauranteur who displays the charge card’s rates, [by revoking its agency status or licence to accept Amex Cards], …..the charge card firm counters that it will take action against any restaurant that accepts American Express but directly or indirectly discourages customers from using it….. Fabian Siebert, proprietor of Marcel’s Bistro and president of the Toronto Culinary Purchasers Society, chastised American Express for its actions against La Bodega: “They’re just picking on one (restaurant) to make an example in hopes everyone else will just shut up,” Siebert said….. American Express spokesperson Ivan Shaffer said the company was simply protecting the rights of its card members…..Amex’s administrative fees are higher because the firm doesn’t make any money through interest charges [!!!] as does credit companies like Visa, Shaffer added….. [All card-issuers including Amex are required to treat the fees internally as interest charges received from card-users and not merchants. If the card-user does not pay, then the card-issuer never receives the “Merchant” fee, and that reality of the credit business cannot be avoided by a label.] (Toronto Star, January 15, 1992)
Either Mr. Shaffer has no clue about what his employer actually does for a living – or else he is a professional and / or pathological liar. Inquiring minds want to know.
While I was in the process of reading House of Cards [the American Express Story] in 1993 I asked a good friend who was the general manager of a chain of computer stores in Edmonton whether his stores accepted American Express and it was as if I had hit some kind of nerve. He immediately blurted out: “Those #$%&@’s want 6%!!! I don’t even make 6% on #$%^& computer hardware!!!” What he meant of course was that he could not afford to give a 6% price discount to customers who wished to pay with short-term revolving credit from American Express.
Typically a business owner has to give a concealed-price-discount of 3% for Mastercard, 4% for Visa, and 5% for American Express, so that Visa, Mastercard and American Express can conceal and collect a corresponding concealed-credit-charge from their respective card-users as a rake-off from their full-payment at the end of the grace-period.
Amex’s longtime fixed “Merchant Discount” price-discount-and-concealed-credit-charge rate of 5% translates to an effective or real interest rate of 144% per annum as received by Amex at the end of a 21-day grace-period.
Returning to 2020, that low-background-noise that you are hearing now is the bankers quietly celebrating because during the Coronavirus crisis the global rake-off taken by all so-called payment-card-processors broke through the USD-equivalent of $3 billion a day ($3,000,000,000) level or a mind-boggling $1 trillion per year ($1,000,000,000,000)!!!
And about 10% of that, or $300 million a day, or $100 billion a year ($100,000,000,000), is a direct rake-off from the VAT and other broadly-defined government sales-taxes that are run through these “free-loan” systems. Give me a bleeping break!
When confronted with the flagrantly-illegal-and-criminal sales-tax rake-off in 1991 the official spokesperson for the government tax Agency admitted the fact of it, but then dismissed it out of hand with:
Customs and Excise [Revenue Canada] is not concerned about profits that may be made by credit card companies on the GST [federal sales tax], he said. *** “We cannot tell anyone how to invoice their customers [!!!]. (Edmonton Journal – Credit card companies reap GST profit, bookkeeper says)
And this highly-organised and concealed racketeering business has quietly been going on unhindered for 60 years!
It has been growing exponentially, but do you regardless have any idea how much real-wealth-creation is suppressed over a 60-year period with a current-rate of $1 trillion a year being skimmed by parasitic-financial-information-processors whose concept of Freedom of Speech is:
Keep your bleeping mouths shut about the concealed-credit-charges – Or else!!!
It looks like racketeering, because it is racketeering!