James,
If there is one simple conceptual fallacy empowering the corporate pillaging of the earth's resources, it is that people think of money as a commodity, rather than a contract.
This is a brief synopsis, similar to my entry, but from a more recent effort;
"Since money is a notational form of value and can enable one access to many of our basic needs and desires, there is a very strong attraction towards acquiring it on the part of the vast number of people. Given it is a simple fact that it is much easier to make promises, than fulfill them, the impulse to create more notional value than the economy can sustain is overwhelming. So there is this tendency to treat money as a commodity that can be manufactured, rather than the contract which it is and has to be honored. This creates the effect of treating money as a form which is divorced from its context. In financial terms, this is called a bubble.
There is a much larger problem developing in humanity's relation with the planet though, as we continue to expand and get ever more efficient at using up ultimately finite resources. Currently the financial system only magnifies this problem. As it pulls ever more monetary value out of society, society must in turn pull value out of the environment. Now the banking system appears to be reaching limits of how much value it can continue to extract. As ever more of the other forces in society feel threatened by it and its system requires the production of ever more debt to support the vast leverage currently built into the system by the increasingly thoughtless desire for infinite wealth, it looks likely to suffer another massive heart attack and one for which the prior methods of resuscitation will not be used.
Rather than allow civilization to crumble, possibly there is a way to better construct our system of exchange. If people simply understood that money is not actual value, but a bookkeeping entry, where one persons asset is another's debt and those running it will necessarily extract their income off the top and there are no magical fairies waiting to make all promises good, then possibly people will be more reluctant to extract value from their social relations and environmental resources, in order to entrust it to this system. Then social relations and the environment will be more clearly viewed as the fundamental stores of value that enable a truly healthy society and environment. It would also make for a smaller, healthier and more stable monetary system, that would be focused on the efficient transfer of value around the economy, as the integrated economic circulatory system it is supposed to be."
Regards,
John M