‘Money, Power and Profit’
The latest installment of Robert Kiyosaki’s “Money, Power, and Profit” titled “The Cartel” is quite a read.
It devastatingly walks through the problems with the two separate cartels that Visa and Mastercard have formed to set and charge credit card swipe fees. Just a few of the points raised in the article include:
- “There’s a cartel in America. It’s not in Mexico. It’s not selling drugs. It’s on Wall Street. And it’s robbing you blind every single day.”
- Visa and Mastercard “are getting away with the biggest, most brazen heist in American history.”
- “It’s called the ‘swipe fee.’ And it’s a cancer on our economy.”
- “It’s a scam. It’s a shakedown. And it’s killing Main Street.”
- “This game is rigged. Small business owners have to compete. They have to fight for every customer. They have to offer better products, better service, better prices. If they don’t, they die. That’s the free market. That’s capitalism. But Visa and Mastercard? They don’t have to compete.”
- “The fees are baked into the price of everything you buy. You are paying the cartel tax every time you swipe your card.”
- “It’s a perfect system. For the cartel. They take no risk. They produce nothing. They simply sit at the tollbooth and collect their tribute from every transaction in the economy. And the system is designed to punish the little guy. Small businesses pay higher rates than big corporations. Why? There’s no good reason. The cost to process the transaction is the same. It’s pure price gouging.
And here is what Kiyosaki says about the solution:
- “But for once, there’s a simple, commonsense solution on the table. It’s called the Credit Card Competition Act.”
- “It simply says that small businesses should have a choice. It would require the big banks to allow for more than one network on their cards.”
- “What would happen then? Competition. The different networks would have to compete for the business. They would have to lower their fees. They would have to offer better service. The cartel would be broken. The tollbooth would be smashed.”
- “And the savings? They would go back to the small business owners. They could use that money to hire more people. To raise wages. To lower prices. The money would flow back to Main Street, where it belongs. Not to Wall Street.”
- “It’s time to make the credit card companies compete, too.”
COMPETITION IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE
IT'S TIME TO PASS THE CREDIT CARD COMPETITION ACT