"rich" and "poor" are just holdovers from conquerer and conquered. Just because the mandate that one group acknowledge the other's right to create value by fiat (e.g. by stamping Caesar's face into a coin) is no longer delivered by guys with swords doesn't make it not a conspiracy by one group to keep another group in its place.
They got smarter about it in the late 70's. The rich don't even have to send guys anymore, they just send guns to the local thugs with an agreement that those thugs will, upon seizing power, hook the local economy into the US banking system.
The thugs get to keep the loans, but the debt gets transferred to the local community, which cements the "somebody who isn't you gets to create abstractions that you have to treat as money"-part of the deal.
The words that used to go with it are "progressive free-market policies", but I think Kamala Harris recently called it "anti-corruption" or something along those lines.
More like, "IRS". Taxation is the demand for the currency. Even if you conduct all trade with other people in seashells (or whatever), you'd still need to obtain dollars to pay your taxes.
