Conspiracies seen everywhere

I HAVE always found it strange that people don’t believe in conspiracies. They occur all the time.

The word conspire means to “breathe together”.

Just open your newspaper and you will see articles of how [this happens].

In The Herald of October 19, there are allegations of Mosebenzi Zwane conspiring to help the Guptas obtain Optimum coal mine and of channelling money to fund the Gupta wedding (“I am not captured by Guptas, says Zwane”).

On the next page [it is reported that] three men were arrested for conspiring to fraudulently pass unroadworthy vehicles (“Roadworthy disc scam arrests”).

The big South African construction companies’ top management were found guilty of conspiring to fix inflated pricing for the soccer stadiums. It’s a con game.

A hypothetical example would be a business with various departments, where one department had an excess of funds available.

To obtain them, false accusations were levelled against the manager of that department to oust him and set up new management which could then siphon off the money to projects for other departments.

A classic example from history would be the October 1929 crash causing the Great Depression in the US.

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, admitted that the Fed actually caused the Great Depression, but, he said, “inadvertently”.

It was a con game, though, with the Fed pumping out credit and the press hyping the stock market.

As surely as night follows day a massive bubble was inflated.

The Fed then tightened the money supply, and investors big and small were ruined and bankrupted. The well connected then swooped in to buy up assets at bargain prices.

One can find similar examples throughout modern history.

It reminds me of what Mark Twain said, “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dogs”.