Der Geist des Geldes

Jean Ziegler:
We are standing at the edge of time.

Jean Ziegler:
Who's ruling the world? This is, of course, the oligarchy of the international financial capital.

Jean Ziegler:
A child that dies of starvation today is being murdered. There is no reason for dying. It is the world order that kills.

Roland Geitmann:
It has to bother anyone with religious feeling that the main part of mankind is not satisfied in their basic needs while economy is as successful as never before.

Jean Ziegler:
For 250 years, a little more, we in Europe and many people in the world have lived under republican constitutions, with the values of solidarity and social justice, the values of the enlightenment, the institutions of human rights, and so on. This type of society is in deadly peril today.

[reads from -then 'top secret', now public- document PPS23, 24th February 1948; written by George Kennan, Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff]

Narrator:
Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should cease to talk about vague and - for the Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

[first lines]

Harald Wozniewski:
Today we are living in a feudal system, which is based on law and legalized by it, so everything that's happening here is quite legal. Many people work for the benefit of few, very few.

Narrator:
To the church, charging interest is a punishable crime until the 18th century. He who profits from interest will be refused Christian burial. But money prevails even among Christians.

Narrator:
The calculation of interest is absurd. - If Josef would have opened a savings account with one Cent at 5 % interest upon the birth of Christ and if the economy had been inflation-free, Josef's descendants would have in the year 1604 a fortune worth a golden globe the weight of the whole world at today's gold-price.

Narrator:
In the last ten years there has been talk of an economic crisis, yet the number of billionaires worldwide has risen from 423 to 793.