2009
from
WhoseMoney Website
|
Paying the cost of your own
slavery
"Money has become by convention
a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name
'nomisma' - because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and
it is in our power to change it." - Aristotle |
Although money is an essential feature of modern life, very few of us
understand exactly how it is produced. Its existence is simply taken for
granted. Yet money, as Aristotle points out, isn’t something which
occurs naturally: it is a man-made convenience, and its creation is
authorized and controlled by man-made laws.
Even those who realize this tend to believe that the government is legally
obliged to issue us with an adequate supply of money, as a public service.
Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Bank of England (In
the strict sense, however, the Bank of England is not a government bank; it
is a private corporation owned and controlled by its stockholders)
issues only 3% of the total money supply, as notes and coins. The remaining
97% is created by commercial banks, in the form of loans to their customers.
In other words, increasing numbers of ordinary people are required to go
deep into debt, just to provide the country with its basic means of
exchange.
Monetary reformers are not against the concept of debt as a system of
deferred payment. People should be free to borrow and lend money, and in
this respect banks have a useful function to perform. What we oppose is
dependence on mass borrowing as almost the sole mechanism for creating the
country’s money stock.
Substituting pounds for dollars, our predicament is
essentially the same as that described by Robert Hemphill, Credit
Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta at the time of the Great
Depression:
“We are completely dependent upon the
commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in
circulation … If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are
prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent
money system…
“It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate
and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may
collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied
soon.”
Those defects are still unremedied.
We believe that a fundamental overhaul of the laws governing money creation
is long overdue. The essential need for reform can be summed up in one
sentence:
The bulk of the nation’s money supply should
be issued by a democratically accountable public authority, and spent
into circulation debt-free.
Write to your MP now...!
It's The System That Is The Problem
2009
from
WhoseMoney Website
|
The abolition of poverty in the
midst of plenty, important though that is,
is not the core of the problem.
It is conceivable that people
might be provided for as well-fed slaves…
It has to be realized that not
for thousands of years have the people of these islands been so
completely enslaved as they are at the present, and that the primary
characteristic of the slave is not bad treatment.
It is that he is without say in
his own policy.
Major C.H. Douglas |
This website has now been in existence for close on a year, and the articles
and comment posted should make it clear exactly where we stand, as far as
the need to pinpoint those responsible for our present dysfunctional
financial system is concerned. But perhaps it’s time to state our position
even more plainly.
All too often any discussion about money reform degenerates quickly from a
focus on the drawbacks of using debt as our means of exchange, and realistic
proposals for implementing a debt-free alternative, into a bitter
whodunnit scrap, with claims and counter- claims attempting to pin the
blame on one or other preferred villain of the piece.
The Venetians and the Dutch are favorite also-rans; but the principal
contenders for the title of profiteers from the present debt-based monetary
system are, without doubt, either “the British” (hot favorites among
patriotic Americans) or “the Jews”.
No impartial investigation into the origins of debt-based finance can fail
to note the importance of the Bank of England in its progress, or the
adverse reactions of spokesmen for the British establishment to the
fledgling American nation’s unconventional - and highly successful -
monetary initiatives.
As the 'Moneymasters'
documentary relates, persistent attacks were made by
international financiers based in Europe and, in particular, the City of
London, to scupper a debt-free means of exchange, both in the old colonies,
and in the newly-emerged United States; and it seems clear that the
prosperity of the British Empire was built on the ability to impose “free”
trade on subjugated nations, backed by debt finance and force of arms.
Recently a book called “The
Great Red Dragon” (published
in 1890 in America, by L.B. Woolfolk) was brought to our attention by a new
member.
Although some of its contents seem to us
questionable, we were intrigued by its account of how the East India
Company, with the aid of debt-finance provided by backers in the City of
London, succeeded over a period of time in reducing a prosperous land, well
able to live off its own resources, to the status of impecunious client
state, with whole sections of its populace suffering endemic deprivation (a
feat which has been repeated countless times, since then, by high finance
and its incestuously linked corporate associates in many third-world
countries).
However, one company, and its monetary facilitators in the City of London,
hardly amounts to “the British”, many of whom were living in gutters and
slums while merchants and money manipulators built huge fortunes and took
control of the economic life of the country, subjecting ordinary people’s
wages to the implacable logic of finance.
Even if we accept Woolfolk’s claim that
companies all over the world were subsequently founded, and are presently
controlled, by a strictly limited number of powerful plutocratic interests
with their roots in the City of London, this certainly can’t be blamed on
the vast mass of ordinary British people.
While fixing a large measure of blame firmly on “the British”, Woolfolk goes
further, and identifies these powerful interests in the City as “Jewish”.
Here he treads upon dangerous ground. It is quite acceptable to name and
shame “the British” (as long as attention is not drawn to the preponderance
of Scots among the empire-building traders).
Nobody considers it “racist” to accuse “the
English”, in particular, of even the most heinous crimes. But to single out
“the Jews” in this way is considered offensive - in many countries,
criminally so...
As far as we are concerned, discrimination as to which nations may or may
not be accused of collective responsibility without the accuser being liable
to prosecution is grossly unfair; and lumbering entire nations or races with
responsibility for the wrongdoing of a minority in their midst is plain
silly. To equate the international banking system with “the Jews” is as
wrong-headed as identifying the East India Company and the City of
London with “the British”.
Yes, the big banking fraternity includes many very rich people of Jewish
origin. It also includes many very rich people who are neither Jewish by
birth, nor Zionists by profession, and who have no connection whatever with
the
State of Israel.
What we are up against here is not a particular race or nation: it is a
transnational oligarchy who have no loyalty to any particular race or
nation, and who regard the world as their oyster, from which pearls of new
wealth may be endlessly extracted, with the help of other people’s ill-paid
labour, and a little skilled financial and political manipulation.
It is those at the top of this incestuous alliance of “free”-trading
corporations, big finance and governments, not the malign self-seeking of
any particular race or nation, which threatens to enslave ordinary people
throughout the world.
With each new monopolistic takeover, each
successive cycle of debt-induced boom and bust, leaving a trail of
bankruptcies in its wake, wealth, and the power wealth brings, are being
concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, and the gulf between the
staggeringly rich and the rest of humanity grows wider and deeper.
If anyone needs to be targeted, it's specific individuals, or whatever race
or nation, who see fit to exploit their fellow human beings for their own
advantage, by manipulation of the present financial system.
It seems to us mistaken to focus on proving the responsibility of particular
races or nations for our present sorry financial state, rather than
targeting the system itself, and the mechanisms by which small numbers
of individuals obtain control over billions.
Arguing about whether the British or the Jews or
the Masons or
the Jesuits are the villains of the piece
doesn’t just give many people the impression that money reformers are a lot
of crazy conspiracy theorists, chasing all kinds of different quarries into
the tangled undergrowth of myth and legend; it wastes valuable time and
energy which might otherwise be used to make people aware of the
consequences to themselves and their families of using debt as our means of
exchange.
Instead of seeking to fix the collective
blame, we should be doing everything we can to ensure that this most
important of all issues is placed at the centre of the popular political
agenda.
We believe that the vast majority of British people, together with the vast
majority of Jewish people, just like everybody else, suffer, rather than
gain, from the present dysfunctional monetary system.
So what about books like “The
Great Red Dragon”?
Well, in our opinion people should not be prevented from reading books which
investigate various theories on the origins and practice of debt-based
finance. Everybody should be free to explore all the available facts, and
all the possible implications to be drawn from those facts, and to reach
their own conclusions. To put some books or ideas off-limits is what used to
be known, in less politically correct times, as censorship.
But remember: the enormously influential push for money reform between the
two World Wars lost support when it became associated with anti-Jewish
sentiment. Even the penetrating analysis of the financial system by C.H.
Douglas was marked down as beyond the pale, and fell into postwar oblivion,
because of a focus, in some of his writings, on Jewish involvement in the
banking system.
As far as we are concerned, Douglas’s ideas on social credit, stripped of
the racial allusions - which, in any case, occupy only a small space in his
works - offer a valuable signpost for today’s money reformers.
As Frances Hutchinson says, in an article
in
Sustainable Economics,
"Would the study of social credit really
lead impressionable people into setting up Nazi-style death camps?"
The suggestion is, of course, completely
ridiculous.
So we’d like to ask our readers, when they talk about money reform to their
families and friends and workmates, to focus on the very obvious problems
inherent in the system itself, and the mechanisms by which they are
perpetuated.
The fact that using debt as our means of
exchange makes it impossible to deliver a steady flow of goods and services
to the population of the world is quite enough to damn it.
Your aim, like ours, should be to spread an intelligent awareness of
the issues involved among the wider population, so that pressure for reform
from the grass roots pushes proposals for a switch to publicly-created,
debt-free money to the top of the political agenda, undermining the position
of those who profit from, and therefore seek to perpetuate, the present
system.