Money And Truth
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Money influences everything in our world today. It can even purchase truth. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom dive into money and truth and how the rich and powerful alter truths, decision-making, economies, criminal justice systems, political systems, and businesses with the use of money. Learn about the unsettling truth in our world of how people create truth that allows people in power to excuse the wrong they’ve done and manipulate the masses to believe a lie disguised as truth. Bill and Tom also touch on people or groups in power purchasing the truth by broadcasting influence and how this affects the masses.
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Bill, I don’t want to say I’m excited because I have some apprehensions about the subject. I’m motivated to talk with you about money and truth. That seems that we could have many episodes in the future related to this. Let’s at least begin a conversation about money and truth.
This is a tough one, Tom. There’s that apprehension inside me because since you start pointing it out, the people with money don’t like that you’re pointing out that that’s the way that money is going and that money is influencing truth. Powerful people with money can influence truth, decision-making, economies, criminal justice systems, political systems and even businesses. The truth and decision-making can be influenced by money and it’s unsettling. The more you got, the more influence you get and it’s everywhere.
It’s a little hard to have the courage to stand up to money when people want money. Let’s take this one out for spinning and talk about how language and decision-making can get influence around this. This is the truth that shows how language is used to influence it. In the news, we have Jeffrey Epstein. His influence on truth regarding his money was to dodge federal charges and admit to state charges to not have any justice at all. Money influenced justice.
It certainly does appear that way. Most people would agree that he got a sweetheart of a deal in being punished or having consequences for a conviction. He was a sex offender. At least he had to do that. He was serving time in jail but he got to leave every weekday to go to an office to work. That took down one of Donald Trump’s cabinet secretaries because he was involved in arranging that deal. The money he has and the influence of that money impacted his truth for him in a better way, much out of proportion with a person that does not have money.
That leaves the victims of the crime, probably some attorneys are already on this, are they going to do a class-action lawsuit and go after that prosecutor? Are they going to go after him or not? Can they do that? Are they willing to do that? Do they have the money and influence to do that? How will that be funded in order to do that? What things are in place that, “I’m sorry but you can’t go after the prosecutor who botched it, who broke the law by not informing them of the deal?” They kept them in the dark until after. They’re not supposed to do that. That’s the victim’s rights. Does the victim have rights? Money says no. Money says the victims didn’t have at that point. The money purchased truth and justice in that case.
It’s sad. Now that Jeffrey Epstein is dead, we see some of the victims starting to sue his estate and go after his money. That’s maybe the best way that at this point that they can seek truth and justice by having Jeffrey Epstein pay for it posthumously.
If there’s a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that’s put in place around things like this, many will not have as much influence. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission would put the person on the stand in front of those victims. Those victims get to talk to that person that did the things they did. This is what Truth and Reconciliation going to look like. There’s restoration money but the Truth and Reconciliation is where you do something worse, “This is how your actions/influence ruins/affected my life, my family’s life and my community.” One of the biggest transitions that South Africa went through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and hearing was to have the person that did the crime stand in front of the victim and the victim gets to say, “This is what your decision did to my family. It took my son’s life. It affected this thing. As another human being on the planet, this is how you affected me by following orders blindly, by not standing up to injustice.”
Regrettably, the victims in Jeffrey Epstein’s case won’t have the opportunity to do that to get themselves some personal reconciliation. They may achieve some financial reconciliation but those people’s lives are forever impacted in ways we can’t even imagine and it is sad. When you mentioned about the victims being able to speak to their perpetrator, we saw that happen with the USA Gymnastics victims of Dr. Larry Nassar. I was impressed by how the judge handled that case and allowed hundreds of victims to speak their peace. This is not a money purchasing truth thing in terms of directly in that case. Although, USA Gymnastics had money that silenced or kept those charges and accusations from coming to light for years. Maybe there was a purchasing of truth there to a degree in a defensive way.
This is the remedy of money purchasing truth. It is open reconciliation and having the legal course to affect truth through respect and restoration of truth that’s outside of the influence of money. We may have noticed that money influences the criminal justice system. That’s one of the biggest challenges.
If you have money, you can buy a much better defense and have justice not impact you as much as it would others. It’s clear and we’ve seen that for decades, even in my memory. Especially when one of the Kennedy family gets in trouble with the law in some way, they have the money to hire the best attorneys and create their truth to excuse what happened. Usually, they get off without harsh consequences.
It allows proportionalization. I want to make a smaller perception or impact on this or I want to make a bigger impact. I want to make something bigger than what it is or I want to make something smaller than what it is. If I say, “I want transparency. I want the government to stand up. I want to make sure no stone is unturned,” then I’m going to spend 1.5 years on the Benghazi tragedy.
There were mistakes made all over but 1.5 years on Benghazi, that’s called amplification. I’m going to use money and certain systems to amplify something that I want to make look as suspicious all the way at the top. I want to stack the Secretary of State in a room for 11 or 18 hours or whatever she was and grill her to get one talking point or one sound bite. Once they get the sound bite, they run the sound bite.
That worked in their case. They succeeded at that.
Does Donald Trump create those sound bites? It creates many sound bites that it just amplifies and it’s like throwing crackers at seagulls.
That’s a mental picture. I’ve done that on a boat.
They’ll go for them. It’s not particularly great for the seagull. Some of them don’t do well at the end of that experience like human beings. They don’t do well at going after every tweet that President Donald Trump thinks. George Bush had his arm of influence to deal with those things. We’re taking a look at Jeffrey Epstein and looking at the justice system. If you take a bunch of entrepreneurs, risk-takers and you look for a risk-taker to make something work in an environment, it doesn’t have its economy.
We take a look at certain cities in certain areas of the city that might be an area of color. If you take an entrepreneur, you stick them there and they take a look at the resources that are available and they’re being resourceful with the resources they have available. Nobody’s coming in there to set up a factory in South Central, Los Angeles or the thing about Baltimore. There are troubles because they’ve got to create an economy of their own. The economy doesn’t want to come to them so they become resourceful, an entrepreneur figures out how to do it.
That’s even if the entrepreneurial endeavor is on the wrong side of the justice system or the law.
One of my favorite moments as a presenter and as a person that teaches this stuff about how entrepreneurial and the risk-taking mind needs to take risks, was a leadership conference I was speaking at. There’s a probation officer who was helping 35-year-old to 40-year-old men who had been in jail. They got put there at 20, 21 or 18. They were in jail because they got convicted of a drug crime and were in jail for twenty years or so and they’re getting out. This probation officer had six of them standing on stage and their leadership was entrepreneurial.
I happened to be the next speaker after that group of six incarcerated men of color. As I spoke after them, one of the activities I do is hold up the entrepreneurial card and what your personality style is. What is your leadership style? We were all in the audience and I knew what they were going to hold up. All of them were holding up the entrepreneurial card. One of the guys that were sitting there, The LA Times called him the Ray Kroc of cocaine distribution. Ray Kroc is the founder of McDonald’s.
This guy who’s sitting in jail as a twenty-year-old was like, “Who’s Ray Kroc?” He got the book, Ray Kroc’s autobiography and started reading it in jail while he’s there. He goes, “I’m this guy. That’s who I am. I’m him. These are the things I put together. I did it with cocaine.” The LA Times called him Ray Kroc and The New York Times called him Sam Walton of narcotics for Southern California. “Who’s Sam Walton?” He’s sitting in jail and he’s reading a newspaper about himself. Here’s where the story gets funny. I’m watching him having this entrepreneurial card up. I was done with my talk and all of them were there.
I walked off the stage to one side and he came running up to me like a light jog. He comes up and he’s holding his card and he goes, “I’m this entrepreneurial guy.” I go, “You’re an entrepreneurial guy that’s a man of color. That’s all you are. You happen to be using the wrong product but you are resourceful with what your environment had to offer. You’re brought up in it.” I go, “Please, I know you’ve been out for a little bit. Tell me what you are up to now.” He goes, “I was able to start a trucking company and I have ten trucks already.” He’s building it in the environment and going to build it on the legal side of the fence.
That does show you that the truth and money relationship is quite something. Bill, I also was thinking as you’re talking about this relationship and we started to talk in more of our political world. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision said, “Money equals free speech.” That seems to be related to this as well.
I know that we’re going to have difficulty in getting publicly funded elections because that will get rid of all the influence. You get more dice at the table, the more money you have because you’re purchasing another dice.
All of these Super PACs, even if the rules say you can’t donate all that money to the campaign itself. You can give all you want to a Super PAC and they’re all over the media that are trying to purchase their truth.
The Citizen United thing is purchasing truth. They’re going to purchase truth by broadcasting influence. How do you broadcast influence? You take the money and you do three things which are brand, market and sell. Brand it, make it look nice and clean, “This is what our pack looks like. Let’s get a good logo. What are we going to call ourselves? United Americans for Democracy. What am I going to promote? What am I going to market then? My version of that. How am I going to sell it? I’m going to increase dopamine. How am I going to do that? Give them a reward, create anticipation of what it’s going to be like and create some certainty to get funding to move in my direction.”
The online donors and online funding, GoFundMe campaigns are doing that. “There’s almost this much time for this campaign. This is what it’s going to be. This is what the donation is going to be.” You get the opportunity to raise money online by doing the GoFundMe campaign. What are the candidates have to do is, “I need new independent voices and another new donor.” Why does a millionaire or a billionaire need your dollar vote? Because the democratic process is, “Do you want me to have my voice spoken?” If you see that I’m advocating for you, then I’m coming. I’m going to advocate that for you.” I’m thinking of Tom Sawyer’s which is the last thing that I saw.
All of the Democrat candidates are doing that because the way that the Democratic National Committee has set up the rules for getting on the debate stage, you have to demonstrate that you have a certain number of donors. It’s interesting how they’ve done that. They’ve made it so that it’s not about the amount of money. They make up their own rules in this regard. It’s not about money purchasing truth at this stage. It gets different when you get later in the race, where it’s certainly in the general election, but you have to have a minimum number of donors to get on the debate stage. The further we get in the debate season, the more donors you have to have. It’s how they’re trying to weed out from this 22 person field and there’s a few that have dropped out but not many yet.
The best part about it is at least getting the small person’s voice in the mix like, “I like that guy. I want to put $1 in his direction. I want to keep his voice in for a little bit longer. I don’t want his voice to leave soon,” because if the voice leaves too soon, then it’s a little problematic. Why is the voice leaving? Bernie Sanders went through that with Hillary Clinton. Why did his voice leave? Because the powers-that-be did not support his voice.
You can chalk that up the super delegates in the 2016 primary race.
They’re carrying more influence but are they carrying a message that’s going to make a big difference? The Democrats have a lot of negative messages to bring up forward. Notice how successful negative messages were when the Republicans are playing the negative message. Truth has a lot to do with how the brain is receiving and processing truth. The front part of our brain and the logical part of our brain thinks it runs the show. The creative part of the brain says, “This is our best option. This is my logic center from a metaphor standpoint. This is my future-oriented brain. I am voting for something.” Meanwhile, what’s getting hijacked is the emotional part of the brain and the habit part of the brain that needs to hear a repeated message, “No collusion, and emotion.” What’s the emotion? “I’m passionate about no collusion but it’s not true.”
The brain is hearing the message spoken passionately. The brain is hearing that this person is such an advocate that it’s not real. The listener believes the emotion over habit. It’s not the logical truth. It’s certainly not what’s best. That’s called a future-oriented narrative. Here’s what’s best. If we are using and applying what was best practice, as a human species, we would be scouring the world for, “Who does this better than we do?” Let’s take that. Let’s use our version of that or if we can’t get to our version economically, let’s steer the ship in that direction. We are not steering the ship in the direction of best practices.
No, definitely not. If it didn’t happen here first, it’s suspect.
The biggest drain on businesses in America is the functioning-processing and dealing with medical insurance for their employees. They don’t want to do it. They’ve never wanted to do it. They have just been forced to do it. If they had their choice, they would not want to do it. Businesses do not want to supply medical insurance for their employees. They would want someone else to do it. It’s labor-intensive and it’s cost. You got to take time to do it. They don’t want to do it. Who wants to read those? “No, take care of my employees for me, please. Let them not think about their health care in my work time. Don’t put them through those paces.”
Businesses have their entire departments of employees. They have to hire and carry as overhead to implement and deal with this Human Resources, not to bash the HR departments. They have a lot of important jobs to do. Taking care of their workers is important but if you did have a National Health Care System, they’re probably a lot more efficient not to have as many employees.
Morale, skill assessment, and training, they would focus more on training because that would be important. They’re stuck in the doldrums of figuring out what plan is best, what’s most financially viable and what can they get away with.
Each has to reinvent the wheel of what this is within a company and it’s a little different in every company talk about a time suck.
Notice how money and truth keep coming back to the center of this piece. There are money and truth piece in politics. We see it in Citizens United that truth is being purchased by the person within the groups that have the most donors. Is money more on the left than on the right? We debate that. Is the proportionality of that and the promotion of that or what the person is standing for? Is the demonization of that different? It’s different. We’re standing in the right and they’re standing wrong. Those billionaire people are wrong and bad. What they’re fighting for is something most people would like. There’s an important thing.
The money and politics get a little unsettling when it translates to real-time votes in real-time cities in real-time influence. It takes place over Congress, senators and these things. The idea here is if I’m going to be a business and I’m dependent upon a vote to make my business work, I wonder how I could get more votes, so when my funding comes up in Congress, that Congressperson has to vote for me? I wonder, how I can do that? Tom, let’s suppose you and I are going to have a plane business. The Congress has got to vote on a military plane.
Who’s going to make it for them?
If I don’t want to make my plane all in one district. I want to make my plane in a bunch of different districts. How about if I make the wing in one part of Wisconsin, I make the engine in a different part of Seattle and make the different parts in different districts? There’s X number of jobs, 1,000, 2,500, 3,000 jobs putting this plane wing together and then I’m going to truck that wing to the final place where the whole plane gets assembled. To get all the votes to pay for that plane, I want to make the plane in all these different areas, then I can get the votes. When the bill comes up for the military spending on that plane, they are not going to vote against it because they’re going to lose jobs.
Meanwhile, we may have made the plane twice as expensive as it would have been had you built it in one district, but I’m sure there are all those issues.
If I make the entire plane and if I ship all the raw materials to one spot and make it, I’m not going to get the votes for the plane because those different congress people and senators are not going to be in that space. That’s an American business. Has this happened? It’s happening that votes and business are distributed in various states to get different votes. How about for foreign governments? Let’s suppose that I’m a rich Chinese person, rich foreign Russian or an oligarch. If I take a whole bunch of money and I want to influence American politics, I got to get their votes. I want to throw a bunch of money at a part of the country that’s depressed and hasn’t seen strong economic growth in. No one wants to go there but I would get some votes if I could do that. Why don’t I go to Western Kentucky and give $200 million to build an aluminum plant there? Why don’t I do that? That might stall a vote from Mitch McConnell. That might have Mitch McConnell not bring a vote to the Senate floor because $200 million is now in his state.
Do you mean to prevent Mitch McConnell from preventing that foreign investment or influence in the US because it benefits him?
If we're able to mourn the mistakes we make and face the losses called human life, we could come up from the other side of it.
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Yeah, he might not bring a bill to the Senate floor about election tampering from Russians. He might not do that, theoretically speaking. Not that this isn’t happening. Truth can influence and can be had. Now that they finally got the factory or they’re in the process of getting this factory, there’s the potential for bringing jobs in that environment that the manufacturing has gone away. Now, I have money to bring it back and have that influence in that state in Western Kentucky where the economy went south. I’m bringing all this money.
Look at what Mitch McConnell did. He’s able to bring economic growth to our state. One of the things that we need to do as a country is we’ve got to slow down with the thought by any means necessary. It’s like when Mercedes comes in to put the largest Mercedes manufacturing plant in South Carolina, Donald Trump rallies against Mercedes or BMW. They have the largest one in the state. He is doing that partly from just seeding the message against an influencer. Does that take Germany down in the eyes of Americans? Yes, but if you don’t talk about Russians in the same way then that’s benefit.
There are a lot of chess pieces moving here and money, our language influencers, and politics influence us. Money influences the voice and the voice influences money. What we’re doing is gently creating some awareness about that process. What are we going to stand for? Which way do we want it to do it? Are we going to put civics back into the classroom? Are we going to take civics all the way through? Are we just going to completely drop it from our entire instructional system? Why are we not teaching that? Because it puts power and it teaches people that the way democracy is run is that you individually have the power of your vote. If you don’t talk about voting ever in the instructional system, the people aren’t going to think voting is even important. They’re going to go to helplessness around it. You’ve got to do something about what are we standing for, what are we fighting for and what that influence is for.
What you’re pointing out is this is a complicated web of a system that we have here in the US, which was built on sound principles and is well-intentioned. This is why this is potentially one of many different episodes related to money and truth and how money we can purchase truth. More of the problems associated with the fact that money can purchase truth easily and it can be disheartening for sure. I like the idea that through all these episodes, you’re helping me. You’re helping all of our readers to understand language better and how it’s used in ways to purchase truth. Citizens United equated money with speech, which is language. This all ties together. I hope truth is not easily purchased from our readers. That’s my hope.
That’s my hope too. For example, if a big food company in Utah is processing food and they run this town. This food company is dumping pollution in the river, it smells and it’s causing health problems for people down the river, in the ecosystem and all kinds of problems. The mayor and the government go to the food company says, “You got to clean this thing up. You can’t put it.” The food company looks at the government agency and says, “If you make us clean this, we are going to move our factory.”
I can see that happening.
I can experience this happening too. All of a sudden, the economy and the people that would work there, that threat of the jobs leaving that economy in that small city means nobody’s going to come back. Who’s going to take over this empty building? The economy that’s built around that is going to have some troubles to it. If the government was in the place of working collaboratively with the environment, it would look at these different cities where people are and have a better future-oriented narrative that, “If this factory shuts down and if they move, what are we going to do to restore this place? What are we going to do to bring it back to life? What are we going to do to keep it alive?” If we don’t do that well and if nobody cares about that northern manufacturing city, then Flint, Michigan is done. Who’s going to want to restore that and spend the money that’s needed to replace all the pipes and put the water infrastructure back in place? What was that all infrastructure, housing and water put in place for?
General Motors, to have the factory in the people there and went there until the businesses in the bottom line that says, “We move it to this other country and we’ll get the labor here. Their environmental constraints are not as hard as ours in the United States. They don’t mind the people working there, the health issues and taking care of.” That country has a healthcare system that we don’t have to pay for. I wonder why those jobs are moving there. The government is paying for the healthcare system and the businesses don’t have to pay for it. This bigger view of truth and how the money and the relationship between the criminal justice system in politics. Do we want crime and violence to go down? That end the war on drugs.
You have this private industry of this unique thing in the United States. It’s a privatized prison industry that won’t have as much revenue because there aren’t as many people incarcerated for marijuana, drug possession or dealing or different things that have been illegal. That’s a whole other issue. There are probably more issues around the truth being purchased there in our system.
The problem with drugs is a mental health problem. It is not a criminal problem. How do we know this? We’ve got tons of measurable evidence. Drugs are not a failing of mental fortitude and of a person’s will. It is a mental health crisis because a mentally healthy person will only use the prescription long enough until their body heals itself, “Why am I using that stuff?” For a person that has an underlying mental health issue, they’re going to go back there and they’re going to use it to medicate the pain. Not the pain that it was originally a problem, but the other pain. The pain of their childhood, traumatic event, they were abandoned by their father. Anyways, truth and money. You and I have had a fun time. I don’t know about you but I’m starting to get a little tired running into the wall of this. The best part about this is if we go after this with empathy and compassion, if we’re able to mourn the mistakes that we make, if we’re able to face the losses called human life, let’s go to reconciliation. We could come up from the other side of it.
The candidates that do that best are the one that’s going to make a big difference here.
I don’t want to get lost in despair with all of the problems. We do have a lot of issues that we work on, that’s undeniable, but there is hope and there is a path to seeing things differently. I like approaching it with compassion.
We’ve got to do that. What do you do with apartheid? You approach it with empathy and compassion. These are people that took orders and all those different things. The ones that are stuck in that belief structure, you want to get them out of society because whether it’s Jeffrey Epstein or any of these other characters that don’t have the ability to stop damaging others. He was a person that could not stop damaging others. He needed to be away from society. There are ways to get that. It’s going to reduce our prison population to about 1/3 of what it is, but at least it’ll be manageable. It will create another entire system over here for the people that are in between these people that need to be locked up and these other people that need greater mental health issues. We need to breathe energy into that economy because the mental health economy is there. The question is how are we going to spend on it?
How we’re going to get it to pay and get it to work better?
How do we move some of that money that’s paying to incarcerate people and instead, pay to get the people the support that they need to be productive and happy humans?
More to come on all of this. Tom, the next time, our readers will enjoy being able to peel one of these things away. Let’s start peaking at what the path is forward to be able to mourn, what would be something that the victims could do and what this could do regarding things in the criminal justice system. What are the things that the victims can do from politics? What are the things that voters can do to influence where they want to go? What are the things that politicians can speak about so that they don’t get stuck in a rut? Many of them are getting stuck at 1%, 2% or 3%. Why? Because they don’t know how to differentiate. Talking about differentiation and truth would be helpful for us.
That will be great. It’ll give us a bit of where the light is at the end of the tunnel and where is the path forward.
This is a dark episode. At the same time, there is a light at the end of this. We can get there by starting to set that intention to move forward.
Bill, I look forward to that. Thanks.
More to come. Thanks, Tom.
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