it's the Sun that's to blame
By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah
(Filed: 18/07/2004)
Telegraph.co.uk
Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.
A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.
Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.
advertisement"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."
Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.
Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.2 deg Celsius over the past 20 years and are widely believed to be responsible for new extremes in weather patterns. After pressure from environmentalists, politicians agreed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, promising to limit greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012. Britain ratified the protocol in 2002 and said it would cut emissions by 12.5 per cent from 1990 levels.
Globally, 1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide weather records were first collated in 1860.
Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have contributed to the warming of the planet in the past few decades but have questioned whether a brighter Sun is also responsible for rising temperatures.
To determine the Sun's role in global warming, Dr Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the Sun's surface known as sunspots, which are believed to intensify the Sun's energy output.
The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.
Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.
He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.
Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki's research. "While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant," he said.
"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor."
Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.
He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase.
This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the natural factors involved in climate change", he said.
Dr Gareth Jones, a climate researcher at the Met Office, said that Dr Solanki's findings were inconclusive because the study had not incorporated other potential climate change factors.
"The Sun's radiance may well have an impact on climate change but it needs to be looked at in conjunction with other factors such as greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols and volcano activity," he said. The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy-makers are not.
"Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Friday, February 17, 2006
Monetary Reform
TOWARDS IDEAL MONETARY
REFORM LEGISLATION
An Introduction to
Monetary Reform Principles
Why draft model reform legislation with little to no chance of enactment under the present circumstances? Nobel Laureate in Economics, Milton Friedman, offers two reasons:
...it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal.
Similarly, Pope John Paul II mentions another yardstick for measuring economic reform proposals:
[by] determining their conformity with or divergence from the lines of the Gospel teaching...
Friedman continues:
The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored.
Further, modern history is replete with instances in which the Hegelian dialectic has been applied to the political and economic orders to manipulate or soften-up governments to change in ways contrary to the public good. This method usually involves the artificial (i.e. coldly calculated) initiation of conflict of some kind after careful conditioning of the elements of the society who could either obstruct or implement the planned change; followed by a crisis (e.g. an economic or political anomaly such as the stock market crash of 1929 or the oil crises of 1974 and 1979); which is then "interpreted" by controlled mass media to direct the responses to the crisis into pre-planned avenues and away from correct responses such as careful analysis of the causes and criminal indictment of the perpetrators (Manipulation on the personal/psychological order follows a similar pattern of stress, emotion, counseling). Orwell noted this in 1984:
In governing the populace, unrest cannot be averted. Therefore, it must be channeled and cultivated.
The following quotation of David Rockefeller, then Chairman of Chase Manhattan bank, speaking at the June, 1991 Bilderberger meeting in Baden Baden, Germany (a meeting attended by then-Governor Bill Clinton) is illustrative of the media control mentioned above:
We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. He went on to explain: It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.
Two Interesting Pre-9/11 Statements:
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nation will accept the New World Order." -- David Rockefeller, Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (now J.P. Morgan Chase bank)
"The process of transformation.. is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." -- PNAC (Neo-con Project for a New American Century document)
In light of such scheming, it surely makes sense to attempt to anticipate the dangers involved and to prepare means of escaping them.
If man lets himself rush ahead without foreseeing in good time the emergence of new social problems, they will become too grave for a peaceful solution to be hoped for. -Pope Paul VI
Also, such a discussion can encourage the development of authentic reform movements based on the conclusions reached, which would otherwise have no focus or rallying point. Finally, though the mass media would blind us to the sufferings of the 3rd, and now 4th, world by ignoring it and redirecting our interests to sports and fantasy and our compassion to seals and snail darters, nevertheless we will always have the poor with us on this planet, those who suffer the ravages of extreme poverty while we dwell in relative plenty. The number of unemployed people has grown rapidly around the world and was estimated by the International Labor Organization to be over one billion by 1994. In fact, the present debt-based monetary system inevitably results in vast accumulations of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, which necessitates extreme poverty for vast numbers of mankind. In 1997, 441 billionaires owned as much of the world's wealth as the poorer one-half (50%) of mankind (2.4 billion people). Consistent with one's state-of-life, we must come to the aid of the increasing multitudes of our impoverished fellow men.
Let us all set to work, for at this time a grave duty is imposed upon the consciences of all; a duty for all, employers and employees, citizens and farmers, moralists, pastors and their flocks, to help resolutely in the solution of the economic problem that distresses us. Universal suffering puts it in the front rank and bestows upon it a character of sacredness.
These words of French Cardinal Verdier during the Great Monetary Contraction (a.k.a. the Great Depression) are fully apropos to the situation in over four-fifths of the world today, where extreme poverty is ubiquitous and deepening very rapidly. There children are born into a Great Depression which only worsens as they grow up in it.
[Consider] the reality of an innumerable multitude of people - children, adults and the elderly, in other words real and unique persons, who are suffering under the intolerable burden of poverty. There are many millions who are deprived of hope due to the fact that, in many parts of the world, their situation has worsened. Before these tragedies of total indigence and need, in which so many of our brothers and sisters are living, it is the Lord Jesus himself who comes to question us... (Cf. Mt.25:31-46) - Pope John Paul II
Even in the U.S. and Canada the middle class is rapidly being squeezed down into poverty as the poor increase in numbers daily, despite the employment of both spouses now, often holding second and even third jobs, being forced to warehouse their children in institutions.
The philosophers' ideal of secure, modest wealth widely diffused to all classes is being supplanted by the two extremes, both harmful to mans' spiritual development, of extreme wealth or extreme poverty. As Mahatma Gandhi noted: Materialism and morality have an inverse relationship - when one increases the other decreases.
We are very rapidly becoming a world composed exclusively of the very few, very rich, and the very many, very poor. The middle remaining cannot hold. Modern technology and mass media has vastly increased the ability of the super-rich to sustain this process to historically unprecedented orders of magnitude. However, some of the effects of this growing disparity in wealth even have the super-rich concerned enough to propose novel "solutions" such as National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 which defines a program aimed at reducing the populations of 13 nations targeted for their raw materials needed to maintain the ruling elite's lifestyle, including Brazil, India, Columbia, Mexico, Ethiopia and Egypt:
How much more efficient expenditures for population control might be than [expenditures for] raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power plants and factories ... (NSSM 200, April, 1974).
Reducing targeted populations to a bare subsistence level by withholding investments, in effect forces less expensive population control on them while reducing to a minimum the labor costs of producing raw materials. Interestingly, since the passage of NAFTA, despite the transfer of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs to Mexico, Mexican labor wages have fallen by nearly 50%.
There has also been afoot for some time the "debt-for-nature" scheme proposed at the 4th World Wilderness Conference held in Denver, Colorado in 1987 of forcing nations to transfer national parks and undeveloped areas (up to 30% of the world's wilderness - 12 billion acres) to a World Wilderness Trust or similar U.N. agencies (and thereby effectively losing sovereignty over part of their national territory) which would function as a collection agent for the IMF, the World Bank and private banks and would operate as follows:
1. Creditor banks transfer 3rd world debt to the World Conservation Bank (a new bank with a "soft" name) thereby relieving the debtor nations of their debt to the original banks;
2. at full book value (even though these loans now have market values as low as 6-25 cents on the dollar and cost the banks nothing to create due to fractional reserve banking - the legally required reserve ratio on such loans being typically 0%);
3. in return for such debt relief, the debtor nations would transfer to the World Wilderness Trust natural resource assets of equivalent value (World Heritage sites such as the Amazon basin or the gold-laden hills around Yellowstone will likely be included at some point);
4. the World Wilderness Trust will eventually allow development by the World Conservation Bank in order to pay the private banks full value for the transferred debts.
Obviously, this scheme, which is already being implemented in Bolivia, Costa Rica and Ecuador, simply interposes a new bank to act in the name of the international community (or the U.N.) as collection agent for the private banks and their jointly run banks (e.g. the IMF and the World Bank), thereby obscuring the stark reality of de facto foreclosure proceedings by private banks against whole national territories. This transforms a politically unpalatable worldwide land grab by private banks into a "conservation transfer" to a body that appears to be a neutral conservation agency of some kind. One of the remarkable features of such institutions is their immunity to popular influence and their hostility to democracy and human need. Widespread economic exploitation of these transferred territories by the private banks will be authorized by the new bank owners, absent the many inconveniences of national sovereignty, regulation and authentic environmental control.
Similar schemes propose every imaginable means, referred to as "substitutes for war", to exploit or eliminate the poor through coercive forms of demographic control including poverty, famine, forced abortions and sterilization, euthanasia and eugenics, the introduction of new diseases, environmental pollution, etc., and, of course, war itself. A goal of 300-500 million people worldwide (less than 10% of the current world population) is a common theme. Selected, smaller numbers are far easier to manipulate and control, besides, having reduced those on the bottom to unemployment, total desperation and utter destitution, they have no more material utility and being in unresigned and irreligious poverty are too susceptible to authentic "reactionary" alternatives or disturbance. Obviously, such "solutions" are morally repugnant and sound reform alternatives must be presented, which do not destabilize the entire financial system with the attendant risks of a generalized crisis.
What Christianity forbids is to seek solutions ... by the ways of hatred, by the murdering of defenseless people, by the methods of terrorism ... - Pope John Paul II
The granting of loan extensions, rescheduling, rate reductions or partial remission of debts, though helpful, are at best temporary stop-gap measures merely delaying the day of reckoning. Of course, a debt jubilee (total remission of debts) would entirely solve the problem for the present, but is more than unlikely as few creditors take a broad, selfless or charitable enough view to support such a solution.
Rather, too many creditor banks foist policies on their nations, which assume the shape of a ruthless war on the poorer nations, and on the poor in their nations, financing projects over-priced through the fraudulent complicity of corrupted politicians creating odious debts. For example: during the decade 1980-90 Latin American countries paid $418 billion in interest on original loans of $80 billion.
By the end of 1990, 3rd world debt had passed $1.3 trillion — over $200 for every living person on earth. This debt had increased by 30% in three years. Debtor nations had total arrears of $26 billion in interest. The Financial Review (October 4, 1990) pointed out that much of the debt was owed to private banks, and that:
...the swelling of arrears has drawn concern from the IMF, where some officials complain that banks are successfullypressing the IMF to become their debt-collection agency...
Nations endowed with power are creating new forms of relationships of inequality and oppression, perverting the use of modern technology and global organizations for this purpose, rather than seeking just revision of loan terms or fundamental reform.
Since most modern money is created by banks as bank loans with an equivalent debt, all nations trade from a position of indebtedness. As a result, nations attempt to export more than they import, deliberately seeking an imbalance of trade, trying to gain a surplus of foreign revenues to reduce their indebtedness. This has caused international trade and foreign relations, to descend from trade for mutual benefit, to thinly disguised economic warfare.
Ever mounting debt has pressured agriculture to become dominated by the production, processing and distribution of every-cheaper food with declining nutritional content, to the increasingly severe detriment of peoples' health and contrary to clear consumer preference. Large businesses with wasteful mass-production techniques and using large scale transport as a competitive marketing strategy are given an advantage in the intensely competitive financial conditions created by debt-finance. This has culminated in the current ascendancy of huge, bank dominated multinational corporations.
The developed nations have come to rely on private debt to provide their money. This typically involves massive and mounting housing debt via mortgages. Such mortgage debt prevents the majority of people from outright ownership of a home.
Many potentially prosperous 3rd world nations have had their development distorted by the global debt-based financial system. These nations have been entrapped into endemic debt of a wholly false and illegitimate nature, obligated to multinational banks such as the IMF and World Bank whose guiding principles and policies have been designed to support the export drives of the wealthy, developed nations, themselves forced by debt to maximize export revenues.
The terrible poverty this forces on debtor nations limits the development of their peoples, and their intellectual and cultural development is narrowed to the limited exigencies of their daily struggle for survival.
Absent authentic monetary reform, debtor nations unable to pay their debts will ultimately be left with five (5) options:
1. To increase exports in order to increase foreign exchange revenues.
Where this is possible, it transforms the citizens into de facto workers for foreign banks which siphon the national production out of the country, further impoverishing the people. Increased commodity production saturates markets and reduces prices, partially or wholly defeating the purpose. In any case this is rarely possible, as exports have usually been maximized already.
2. This necessitates submitting to the IMF-imposed rape of their national resources and the starvation of their people while surrendering their national sovereignty by degrees.
This is the option recently taken by the S.E. Asian nations (South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines). This is, of course, a closed loop back to debt. Of the $123 billion IMF S.E. Asian bailout, Chase Manhattan bank is in line to receive $32 billion; J.P. Morgan for $23 billion; Bank of America for $16 billion. This $71 billion will never reach S.E. Asia, as it is transferred from the U.S. Treasury, to the IMF, to the Wall Street banks. The IMF bailout saves their bad loans to these nations.
Courtesy of the U.S. government, some such foreign debt is being transferred ("monetized") to U.S. taxpayers for payment via increased taxes and inflation. Interestingly, Congressional leaders were told by the Clinton Administration that unless they agreed to fund the IMF bailout of banks which make loans to South Korea, there was danger of invasion of South Korea by North Korea — war blackmail.
3. Unilaterally to repudiate their foreign debts.
This action incurs the danger of being followed by trade strangulation (necessitating barter agreements in foreign trade, as was successfully conducted by the Axis powers and later by Rhodesia), and military invasion (e.g. witness the fate of these defaulter nations: Haiti, Somalia, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia [Bosnia et al.] invaded by U.S. and U.N. armed forces acting as unwitting, de facto mercenaries):
Tote dat bar! Lif dat bale!
Try to buck the system, and you land in jail!
It is no easy task to break free of debt, nor of the international banking system. National leaders would obviously have to weigh the consequences of debt repudiation to the specific situation of their nations with great care and sagacity.
4. To seek legal repudiation of their foreign debts, based on the doctrine of "odious debts".
This is an established international law principle permitting debt repudiation when a government incurs a debt without the informed consent of its people, and which is not used in the legitimate interest of the State.
Ironically, this doctrine was first used by the U.S. to repudiate Cuba's debts after the U.S. took Cuba from Spain. The jurist who coined the phrase "the doctrine of odious debts", held that debts incurred to subjugate a people or to colonize them should also be considered odious. This doctrine shifts responsibility to the lenders, neither to corrupt nor to utilize corrupted politicians and governments to initiate loans, and allows collection from the despots who wasted the funds — both desirable changes.
Of course, an independent, uncorrupted judiciary is a prerequisite to obtaining legal repudiation with this legal theory, which is extremely unlikely when corrupted politicians appoint politically subservient judges to the World Court who would hear such cases. A national legal repudiation on this ground would be a good start though, and could be at least legally valid, but might be a practical nullity, resulting in the same consequences as a unilateral repudiation without a recognized legal basis (#3., above).
5. To issue sufficient quantities of the national money specifically to retire the international debt.
Since most revenues obtained from foreign loans are shortly spent (often wasted), partly domestically and partly in foreign countries, the results are usually inflationary (in both the country of origin — usually the U.S., and in the recipient country), partially multiplied by private domestic (and foreign) banks through fractional reserve banking loans. Therefore, while issuing sufficient new money to retire foreign debt would work, it would also result in hyperinflation where the foreign debt is great in relation to the economy, particularly due to the subsequent multiplier effect of any high-powered money in a fractional reserve banking system. This ruinous negative effect has been felt by numerous nations which inflated to retire foreign debt.
Of course, the technical solution to avoiding such hyperinflation lies in the domestic prohibition of fractional reserve banking, coupled with simultaneous, proportionate foreign exchange regulation, which would require the banks to absorb the new money as increased reserves in a transition to full reserve banking.
This response amounts to legislated domestic monetary reform, which is, therefore, not an option "absent authentic monetary reform" (like the first four options above [i.e. 1-4]) but, rather, is authentic monetary reform.
In short, if nations find the first four options, above, unacceptable, then they will be forced to consider authentic monetary reform, which brings us back to the subject of this article in order to describe this type of reform.
Having set forth the rationale for drafting model monetary reform legislation, where does one begin? A careful study of the fundamentals of our economic system and of the reforms proposed by scholars is a logical starting point.
The draft legislation following was influenced by numerous sources including the writings and declarations on this subject of: President Abraham Lincoln; former Congressmen Charles A. Lindberg, Louis T. McFadden, Robert H. Hemphill, Wright Patman, Francis H. Shoemaker, Jerry Voorhis, Henry Gonzales and former Senator Elmer Thomas, all courageous supporters of banking and monetary reform legislation; Thomas A. Edison; Irving Fisher; Henry C. Simons and the old Chicago School of Economics; Nobel Laureate Frederick Soddy, M.A., F.R.S.; Gertrude M. Coogan; G.K. Chesterton and the Distributist school; Rev. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp.; Major C.H. Douglas and the Social Credit school; W. Cleon Skousen; Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II; the Pontifical Commission Justice and Peace; Nobel Laureate Prof. Milton Friedman; Murray N. Rothbard; E.F. Schumacker; Peter Cook; Theodore R. Thoren; Richard F. Warner; Charles and Russell Norburn; George Tolley and a host of others, as well as the historical experience of reform legislation in various nations including the U.S. during the Civil War; Britain during WWI; Sweden in the early 1930's; Portugal from 1931 to 1974 (when it had no national debt); Canada in the mid- 20th century; the Isle of Guernsey, and many others.
Certain economic reform principles emerge from the study of their proposals. The first and most important is made salient from the fact that there is grave danger to society, worldwide, which must be addressed, when a handful of men hold the power of life and death over national economies as is certainly the present case. As Pope Pius XI pointed out in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931):
. . . the power to create money and to expand or contract the money supply at will carries with it too great an opportunity of economic domination [and therefor ultimately of tyranny], to be left to private control without injury to the community at large.
Similarly Prof. Friedman:
The power to determine the quantity of money...is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power ... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.
Similarly Rev. Dennis Fahey, C.S.Sp.:
If a private group exercise the power to originate the exchange-medium and then manipulates the volume of it, that group becomes a power greater than the government itself. It becomes a super-government, paralyzing the efforts of the lawful government for the common good.
It is perfectly idle to talk about a democracy or a republic when the sovereign power is being exercised de facto by a small group of international bankers not committed to the long-term development of the country, who manipulate public opinion and politicians though their money and media control; the worst of whom seek to arrogate to themselves the exercise of absolute power. What are nations without justice but bands of robbers. - St. Augustine
And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. — Lord Acton
Congressman Lindbergh noted this nearly seventy years ago. These Money Changers, he said,
have become bold, aggressive, vindictive and merciless and command the people to support them.
Therefore the first monetary reform principle to emerge is that control over the monetary system must be taken back out of the private hands who have usurped the power of the State by deceit, bribery and intrigue for their selfish or ideological ends, and be resumed by the State. From this it flows that money creation by private persons must be prohibited, thus fractional reserve banking must be prohibited, and full reserve banking mandated by law.
Resolving this danger over the long-term demands that the monetary system be so arranged as to facilitate the production, distribution and exchange of material goods and services in view of supporting the virtuous life of all of the members of society. This requires a stabilized (i.e. not manipulated) price level, while avoiding the opposite end-of-the-spectrum problem of government favoritism in lending. This summarizes as follows:
Sound monetary reform requires the issuance of all money (legal tender) by the State, exclusively; in amounts calculated to stabilize the general price level; without debt obligation to private persons; with all lending to be performed by private legal persons, exclusively; while safeguarding the widespread ownership of private property.
Let us separate these principles (numeric), with their implicit corollaries (alphabetic):
Monetary Reform Principles
Act Sections
1.) Require the issuance of all
money (legal tender)
by the State, exclusively;
7.
Corollaries
a. this implies the prohibition of all
private money creation;
14.
b. this implies the prohibition of
fractional reserve banking;
14.
c. this implies the requirement of
full reserve banking;
9.
d. this implies withdrawal from
international banks with credit/
reserve-creating authority (such
as the IMF SDRs);
15.
2.) in amounts calculated to
stabilize the general price level;
6.
Corollaries
a. this implies avoiding inflation
and deflation, a condition for
steady and healthy economic
growth, as government policy;
6,7.
b. this implies the abandonment of
a single commodity standard (e.g.
gold) inasmuch as no commodity
is available on the same time as
all goods in general (besides the
problems of hoarding, manipulation
through export, etc.);
7.
c.this implies a fixed relationship
or rule between the quantity of
money and goods;
7.
d. this may imply a war-time ex-
ception to #3, below;
8.
e. this implies government policy
to stabilize excessive fluctuation
of exchange rates;
16.
3.) without debt obligation to
private persons;
5.
Corollaries
a. this implies paying off national
debts (not necessarily intra-
government debt);
5.
b. this implies requiring full reserve
banking;
4.
c. this implies the issuance of all
money (medium of exchange) by
the State;
7.
4.) with all lending to be performed
by private legal persons, exclusively;
Corollaries
a. this implies the prohibition of all
government lending (e.g. contrary
to communist and national
socialist legislation);
7.
b. this implies the prohibition of us-
urious rates of interest, which
defeat or prevent the beneficial
effects of lending and create
obstacles to secure ownership
of property;
14.
c. #1, supra., implies that #4
would be limited by the amount
of funds the lender had or
obtains to lend;
9.
5.) safeguarding the widespread
possession of private property.
Corollaries
a. this implies both the secure
(which implies permanent)
and modest possession of
private property by all
classes of people;
7, 14.
b. this implies a homestead exem-
ption from property taxation and
in bankruptcy;
7.
c. this implies that the power to create
money not be delegated to private
persons for their individual benefitby
the State since this results in vast
concentrations of property;
7, 14.
d. this implies that the right to
private property is subordinated
to the right to common use where
the danger of economic domination
of the community is too great to
leave it in private hands.
These principles are consistent with and are required by the increasingly higher principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, justice (i.e. legal, distributive and social) and equity.
Subsidiarity is the principle that states that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community (nor from a lower community to a higher order of community) what they can accomplish by their own enterprise or industry. Negatively put, it states that it is an injustice, a grave evil, and a disturbance of right order for a larger, higher organization or jurisdiction, to arrogate to itself functions (or ownership) which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower, local bodies. The notion of rational decentralization and the Distributist school derives from this principle. Subsidiarity is, therefore, that principle which dictates to common sense that each man select his own food, home, job and spouse and not be told which by some capitol (or capital) bureaucrat. It reflects the nature of man and of his unique personality which requires that men be not wholly subject to the will of others, but retain their liberty and freedom from oppression, economic imperialism, bureaucratic control and centralization which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.
Subsidiarity is also that principle which prohibits government lending since this, unlike money creation, can be efficiently performed privately, at the local level without danger to the common good. Needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them, who are also capable of perceiving deeper causes and needs due to their more personal contact.
Unlike subsidiarity, which required some necessary definition here, solidarity, justice and equity are at least commonly understood, if in a vague sense, and these are not on the same level as our consideration here, which is narrowly limited to considering practical monetary reform legislation.
Interestingly, on January 1, 1998, in his Angelus message, Pope John Paul II said,
The process of globalization under way in the world needs to be orientated in the direction of equity and solidarity...it is indispensable for everyone to strive for justice...
Following these basic principles of sound monetary reform, which are available to common sense enlightened by modest reflection in this area, non-experts are perfectly capable of judging reform proposals such as that following. Indeed, by use of a peculiar esoteric jargon and pure gibberish, central bankers and their economists have intimidated the public from considering this artificially arcane subject area leaving the field to their paid "experts".
Would such reform make monetary policy a plaything for politicians, ending the independence of the Central Bankers? Yes, and so it should be! Quoting Prof. Friedman again: This is an argument for, not against, eliminating the central bank's independence. The economic order is properly subject to the political, not the reverse as is the case presently.
Elected officials with political accountability should run the country, not bankers busily betraying their nation's autonomy and sovereignty. Further, capital is a mere instrument, a means of production at the service of man and his labor, not the reverse. It should be subject to him, not he to it. This is simply to express the obvious primacy of man over things.
This draft Act has gone through numerous technical revisions based on suggestions from numerous sources, and more are invited. In particular, we are grateful for suggestions received from Prof. Milton Friedman. The principles contained herein are equally applicable to Canadian (or other national) draft monetary reform legislation, though the particulars would vary considerably.
Points of controversy in details will doubtless include the following:
1. Whether to abolish or fundamentally reform the existing Federal Reserve System;
2. Whether to require banks to have their reserves in the form of cash, government securities, or Treasury deposits;
3. Whether the State, or private persons, ought to purchase the bank liabilities the banks must liquidate in order to transition to full reserve banking;
4. Whether future monetary growth should be partially discretionary (i.e. but based on a known rule) with some national Monetary Authority, or non-discretionary and based on a fixed rate of growth, and if the latter, at what fixed rate (but having any definite and unambiguous rule is more important than which rule is settled upon);
5. Whether bank reserves ought to earn interest or not, and if so, how much;
6. Whether prior bank profits ought to be disgorged, and if so, whether via a nationalization and re-privatization of banks or by confiscation or tax-surcharge.
The endnotes of the draft Act following, briefly address these points. We regard the choice of such options regarding these points as non-essential to sound monetary reform.
Novel reform proposals, such as: computerized barter systems based on market pricing; the creation of new forms of private monies; using bearer certificates tied to inflation-indexed and non-indexed bonds, or futures widely indexed to result in a relatively constant stable price; localized or municipal currencies, now in use in fifty-two U.S. communities (e.g. the "Bread" [ Berkeley Region Exchange And Development] labor certificates), which were issued in c. 400 local communities during the Great Depression; the widespread establishment of State-owned banks (e.g. the very successful State-ownedBank of North Dakota); and discounted private organization debit cards; are not considered here as they seem presently too speculative, localized or costly to replace national currency and demand deposits. But that may change before we know it, and these proposals all merit further discussion and refinement.
Other non-monetary reforms, such as: increased utilization of credit unions; a new Homesteading Act, instead of allowing idle farmland and abandoned urban buildings to remain so; single parent's cooperatives to assist them and their children to achieve self-sufficiency; tax incentives for micro-mass transit such as community vans; micro-lending; tax reduction including abolition of property and land taxes; and many other worthy ideas have been put forth, which certainly would help society cope with the problems created by the present corrupt banking system, but these go beyond our topic here.
The fundamental, basic economic reform needed — the abolition and recriminalization of usury, is closely related to our topic, but beyond its specific scope. Let it suffice here to state that it is usury, defined as: the charging of interest on a loan which is not productive, which is the root cause of the evils of fractional reserve banking and the debt finance system, which are merely "refinements" of it, as is compound interest and money manipulation in general. Usury is not merely the charging of an excessive or unlawful rate of interest. Unless addressed, usury inevitably leads to these other evils, which are our focus here, and to the decay of justice and civilization.
Regarding a gold standard: there is no unanimity as to what type of gold standard to consider. However, except for a true gold standard - in which either gold coin or gold deposit certificates circulate as money - the others are easily manipulated. But even a true gold standard can be manipulated in a variety of ways, as history demonstrates, and has only this appeal: that it would certainly be better than the current state of affairs in that it is one step more difficult to manipulate its quantity than a purely fiat currency.
However, even a true gold standard has numerous problems (including its relative inelasticity in relation to GNP, GDP or similar yardsticks, resulting in, at least in the short-term, inflation and/or deflation) and would not be preferable to true reform as set forth in the draft Act following, for a number of reasons which we cannot discuss in detail here.
In any case, without the simultaneous abolition of fractional reserve banking (and the retirement of the national debt), adoption of a true gold standard would simply be changing the form of high-powered money from Federal Reserve Notes to gold - a largely meaningless change. Whereas, with the adoption of full reserve banking, including a fixed rate of monetary growth, any commodity standard (e.g. gold) becomes problematic and a potential obstacle to authentic reform. For these reasons, the political support for it is very slight, and was even in the exigencies of the Great Contraction. This seems unlikely to change.
Concerning implementation: the fundamental causes of the world debt crisis are not economic, but philosophical, theological and moral. We cannot expect economic justice in a society that murders innocent children in the womb and idolizes money. So authentic reform cannot be reduced to a technical or drafting problem, which is, however, our specific focus here. Nothing serious or deep is accomplished exclusively by changing techniques, laws or governments.
It is obvious that no change of system or machinery can avert those causes of social malaise which consist in the egotism, greed, or quarrelsomeness of human nature. What it can do is to create an environment in which those are not the qualities encouraged. It cannot secure that men live up to their principles. What it can do is to establish their social order upon principles to which, if they please, they can live up or not live down. It cannot control their actions. It can offer them an end on which to fix their minds and, as their minds are, so in the long run, and with exceptions, their practical activity will be. — R.H. Tawney
The well being of families, the security of the nation, the happiness of humanity — these can be conceived only in terms of the ordered use by individual persons of their God-given virtues and the objects to which these correspond. There is no such thing (save in metaphor) as a sinful (or "holy") nation or system; there are only nations and systems composed of individual persons either in revolt against nature, right reason, justice and good, or who by reason of their personal virtue are in harmony and union with nature, right reason, justice and God, radiating their personal virtue into the national or systemic life.
So the reform of society and of systems must begin with the reformation of the individual morals of the individual persons who comprise society. Hopefully, this will be initiated before our remaining freedoms, which are indirectly tied to our economic independence (including our national economic independence and sovereignty) are so far gone as to be irretrievable and injustice degenerates into irremediable conflicts.
No leader in public economy, no power of organization will ever be able to bring social conditions to a peaceful solution, unless first there triumphs moral laws based on God and conscience.—Pope Leo XIII
Institutional reform follows on individual reform, which experience teaches is often predicated on trial or crisis. Crises bring to the surface deeper disorders not otherwise discovered. A better world cannot be built in the midst of crisis, but it is precisely in time of crisis that the anvil is hot for shaping the kind of world peace may provide. Of course, the international bankers know this too, and plan to create and use crises for their own ends, as mentioned above.
Nevertheless, is very unlikely reform will advance in the U.S. until economic crisis deepens and touches larger numbers of our citizens, either suddenly, in a major upheaval (i.e. a severe economic depression or war) or by gradually spreading impoverishment due to continually increasing inflation/taxation/and interest on debt. The false sense of economic and social security to which our citizens presently cling will be increasingly tested and shaken, either way.
As Aristotle noted in his Politics:
For war compels men to be just and temperate, whereas the enjoyment of good fortune and the leisure that comes with peace tend to make them insolent. Those then who seem to be the best-off and to be in the possession of every good, have special need of justice and temperance.
So realistic opportunity for authentic reform may present itself in the context of an economic/political crisis in which increasing numbers of our citizens, hitherto untouched, personally experience the harsh consequences of the lack of justice and charity in the present economic system, since the changes needed are ultimately of the heart and are therefore personal.
Let us glimpse our future, through the eyes of a Brazilian viewing their present:
The third world war has already started. It is a silent war. Not, for that reason, any less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying, there are children. It is a war over the Third World debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam.
Despite their country's fabulous national wealth, 40% of the Brazilian population go hungry whilst seven million children work as slaves or prostitutes.
The relentless activity and ceaseless agitation against justice and right order financed by the Money Changers need not unduly discourage us. This apparent vitality masks the restless spirit injustice generates, which seeks to salve the conflicted conscience by resolving, consciously and subconsciously, to justify its actions externally, in a torrent of words and works. Inner conflict thus leads to outer conflicts, where increasingly aggressive (even murderous) forms of coercion are employed against the outer world, and ultimately against themselves (e.g. neurosis, alcoholism, suicide) to bend the truth of justice to their denial of it.
In short, injustice ultimately creates internal conflict in the individuals (and groups) so acting, as well as in their collective efforts, as they attempt to repress those portions of their own consciousness and of their own groups (and others), which condemn their injustice. This repression requires increasingly greater efforts to maintain (as each act of repression increases the injustice, necessitating even more repression), thus diverting their energy to destructive ends and away from the creativity necessary to maintain their position and power. In fact, so draining is this effort that most people are not capable of the deception, the tight-rope walking, the consistent criminality and repression required to maintain a great evil conspiracy.
In contrast, a conscience at peace naturally tends towards an unworried, calm approach to life, yet this is a sign of strength and integrity, not weakness. Of course, complacency, the opposite extreme, is to be avoided. It is therefore necessary to work simultaneously for the conversion of hearts and for the reform of systems, with the emphasis much on the former. As Pope John Paul II put it:
We are all called, indeed obliged, to face the tremendous challenge ... because the present danger threatens everyone: a world economic crisis, a war without frontiers ... every individual is called upon to play his or her part in this peaceful campaign, a campaign to be conducted by peaceful means, in order to secure development in peace.
Our part of this development in peace may begin with a prudent, clear-eyed objectivity to determine what actions are appropriate to the real situation before us. This cannot be achieved except by an attitude of 'silent contemplation' of reality, during which the egocentric interests of man are, at least temporarily, silenced. In that silence, the knowledge of truth may be transformed into decisions corresponding to reality. However, it is the province of true religion to define this for those so drawn and to reveal distinctly religious responses to this crisis.
REFORM LEGISLATION
An Introduction to
Monetary Reform Principles
Why draft model reform legislation with little to no chance of enactment under the present circumstances? Nobel Laureate in Economics, Milton Friedman, offers two reasons:
...it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal.
Similarly, Pope John Paul II mentions another yardstick for measuring economic reform proposals:
[by] determining their conformity with or divergence from the lines of the Gospel teaching...
Friedman continues:
The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored.
Further, modern history is replete with instances in which the Hegelian dialectic has been applied to the political and economic orders to manipulate or soften-up governments to change in ways contrary to the public good. This method usually involves the artificial (i.e. coldly calculated) initiation of conflict of some kind after careful conditioning of the elements of the society who could either obstruct or implement the planned change; followed by a crisis (e.g. an economic or political anomaly such as the stock market crash of 1929 or the oil crises of 1974 and 1979); which is then "interpreted" by controlled mass media to direct the responses to the crisis into pre-planned avenues and away from correct responses such as careful analysis of the causes and criminal indictment of the perpetrators (Manipulation on the personal/psychological order follows a similar pattern of stress, emotion, counseling). Orwell noted this in 1984:
In governing the populace, unrest cannot be averted. Therefore, it must be channeled and cultivated.
The following quotation of David Rockefeller, then Chairman of Chase Manhattan bank, speaking at the June, 1991 Bilderberger meeting in Baden Baden, Germany (a meeting attended by then-Governor Bill Clinton) is illustrative of the media control mentioned above:
We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. He went on to explain: It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.
Two Interesting Pre-9/11 Statements:
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nation will accept the New World Order." -- David Rockefeller, Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (now J.P. Morgan Chase bank)
"The process of transformation.. is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." -- PNAC (Neo-con Project for a New American Century document)
In light of such scheming, it surely makes sense to attempt to anticipate the dangers involved and to prepare means of escaping them.
If man lets himself rush ahead without foreseeing in good time the emergence of new social problems, they will become too grave for a peaceful solution to be hoped for. -Pope Paul VI
Also, such a discussion can encourage the development of authentic reform movements based on the conclusions reached, which would otherwise have no focus or rallying point. Finally, though the mass media would blind us to the sufferings of the 3rd, and now 4th, world by ignoring it and redirecting our interests to sports and fantasy and our compassion to seals and snail darters, nevertheless we will always have the poor with us on this planet, those who suffer the ravages of extreme poverty while we dwell in relative plenty. The number of unemployed people has grown rapidly around the world and was estimated by the International Labor Organization to be over one billion by 1994. In fact, the present debt-based monetary system inevitably results in vast accumulations of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, which necessitates extreme poverty for vast numbers of mankind. In 1997, 441 billionaires owned as much of the world's wealth as the poorer one-half (50%) of mankind (2.4 billion people). Consistent with one's state-of-life, we must come to the aid of the increasing multitudes of our impoverished fellow men.
Let us all set to work, for at this time a grave duty is imposed upon the consciences of all; a duty for all, employers and employees, citizens and farmers, moralists, pastors and their flocks, to help resolutely in the solution of the economic problem that distresses us. Universal suffering puts it in the front rank and bestows upon it a character of sacredness.
These words of French Cardinal Verdier during the Great Monetary Contraction (a.k.a. the Great Depression) are fully apropos to the situation in over four-fifths of the world today, where extreme poverty is ubiquitous and deepening very rapidly. There children are born into a Great Depression which only worsens as they grow up in it.
[Consider] the reality of an innumerable multitude of people - children, adults and the elderly, in other words real and unique persons, who are suffering under the intolerable burden of poverty. There are many millions who are deprived of hope due to the fact that, in many parts of the world, their situation has worsened. Before these tragedies of total indigence and need, in which so many of our brothers and sisters are living, it is the Lord Jesus himself who comes to question us... (Cf. Mt.25:31-46) - Pope John Paul II
Even in the U.S. and Canada the middle class is rapidly being squeezed down into poverty as the poor increase in numbers daily, despite the employment of both spouses now, often holding second and even third jobs, being forced to warehouse their children in institutions.
The philosophers' ideal of secure, modest wealth widely diffused to all classes is being supplanted by the two extremes, both harmful to mans' spiritual development, of extreme wealth or extreme poverty. As Mahatma Gandhi noted: Materialism and morality have an inverse relationship - when one increases the other decreases.
We are very rapidly becoming a world composed exclusively of the very few, very rich, and the very many, very poor. The middle remaining cannot hold. Modern technology and mass media has vastly increased the ability of the super-rich to sustain this process to historically unprecedented orders of magnitude. However, some of the effects of this growing disparity in wealth even have the super-rich concerned enough to propose novel "solutions" such as National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 which defines a program aimed at reducing the populations of 13 nations targeted for their raw materials needed to maintain the ruling elite's lifestyle, including Brazil, India, Columbia, Mexico, Ethiopia and Egypt:
How much more efficient expenditures for population control might be than [expenditures for] raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power plants and factories ... (NSSM 200, April, 1974).
Reducing targeted populations to a bare subsistence level by withholding investments, in effect forces less expensive population control on them while reducing to a minimum the labor costs of producing raw materials. Interestingly, since the passage of NAFTA, despite the transfer of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs to Mexico, Mexican labor wages have fallen by nearly 50%.
There has also been afoot for some time the "debt-for-nature" scheme proposed at the 4th World Wilderness Conference held in Denver, Colorado in 1987 of forcing nations to transfer national parks and undeveloped areas (up to 30% of the world's wilderness - 12 billion acres) to a World Wilderness Trust or similar U.N. agencies (and thereby effectively losing sovereignty over part of their national territory) which would function as a collection agent for the IMF, the World Bank and private banks and would operate as follows:
1. Creditor banks transfer 3rd world debt to the World Conservation Bank (a new bank with a "soft" name) thereby relieving the debtor nations of their debt to the original banks;
2. at full book value (even though these loans now have market values as low as 6-25 cents on the dollar and cost the banks nothing to create due to fractional reserve banking - the legally required reserve ratio on such loans being typically 0%);
3. in return for such debt relief, the debtor nations would transfer to the World Wilderness Trust natural resource assets of equivalent value (World Heritage sites such as the Amazon basin or the gold-laden hills around Yellowstone will likely be included at some point);
4. the World Wilderness Trust will eventually allow development by the World Conservation Bank in order to pay the private banks full value for the transferred debts.
Obviously, this scheme, which is already being implemented in Bolivia, Costa Rica and Ecuador, simply interposes a new bank to act in the name of the international community (or the U.N.) as collection agent for the private banks and their jointly run banks (e.g. the IMF and the World Bank), thereby obscuring the stark reality of de facto foreclosure proceedings by private banks against whole national territories. This transforms a politically unpalatable worldwide land grab by private banks into a "conservation transfer" to a body that appears to be a neutral conservation agency of some kind. One of the remarkable features of such institutions is their immunity to popular influence and their hostility to democracy and human need. Widespread economic exploitation of these transferred territories by the private banks will be authorized by the new bank owners, absent the many inconveniences of national sovereignty, regulation and authentic environmental control.
Similar schemes propose every imaginable means, referred to as "substitutes for war", to exploit or eliminate the poor through coercive forms of demographic control including poverty, famine, forced abortions and sterilization, euthanasia and eugenics, the introduction of new diseases, environmental pollution, etc., and, of course, war itself. A goal of 300-500 million people worldwide (less than 10% of the current world population) is a common theme. Selected, smaller numbers are far easier to manipulate and control, besides, having reduced those on the bottom to unemployment, total desperation and utter destitution, they have no more material utility and being in unresigned and irreligious poverty are too susceptible to authentic "reactionary" alternatives or disturbance. Obviously, such "solutions" are morally repugnant and sound reform alternatives must be presented, which do not destabilize the entire financial system with the attendant risks of a generalized crisis.
What Christianity forbids is to seek solutions ... by the ways of hatred, by the murdering of defenseless people, by the methods of terrorism ... - Pope John Paul II
The granting of loan extensions, rescheduling, rate reductions or partial remission of debts, though helpful, are at best temporary stop-gap measures merely delaying the day of reckoning. Of course, a debt jubilee (total remission of debts) would entirely solve the problem for the present, but is more than unlikely as few creditors take a broad, selfless or charitable enough view to support such a solution.
Rather, too many creditor banks foist policies on their nations, which assume the shape of a ruthless war on the poorer nations, and on the poor in their nations, financing projects over-priced through the fraudulent complicity of corrupted politicians creating odious debts. For example: during the decade 1980-90 Latin American countries paid $418 billion in interest on original loans of $80 billion.
By the end of 1990, 3rd world debt had passed $1.3 trillion — over $200 for every living person on earth. This debt had increased by 30% in three years. Debtor nations had total arrears of $26 billion in interest. The Financial Review (October 4, 1990) pointed out that much of the debt was owed to private banks, and that:
...the swelling of arrears has drawn concern from the IMF, where some officials complain that banks are successfullypressing the IMF to become their debt-collection agency...
Nations endowed with power are creating new forms of relationships of inequality and oppression, perverting the use of modern technology and global organizations for this purpose, rather than seeking just revision of loan terms or fundamental reform.
Since most modern money is created by banks as bank loans with an equivalent debt, all nations trade from a position of indebtedness. As a result, nations attempt to export more than they import, deliberately seeking an imbalance of trade, trying to gain a surplus of foreign revenues to reduce their indebtedness. This has caused international trade and foreign relations, to descend from trade for mutual benefit, to thinly disguised economic warfare.
Ever mounting debt has pressured agriculture to become dominated by the production, processing and distribution of every-cheaper food with declining nutritional content, to the increasingly severe detriment of peoples' health and contrary to clear consumer preference. Large businesses with wasteful mass-production techniques and using large scale transport as a competitive marketing strategy are given an advantage in the intensely competitive financial conditions created by debt-finance. This has culminated in the current ascendancy of huge, bank dominated multinational corporations.
The developed nations have come to rely on private debt to provide their money. This typically involves massive and mounting housing debt via mortgages. Such mortgage debt prevents the majority of people from outright ownership of a home.
Many potentially prosperous 3rd world nations have had their development distorted by the global debt-based financial system. These nations have been entrapped into endemic debt of a wholly false and illegitimate nature, obligated to multinational banks such as the IMF and World Bank whose guiding principles and policies have been designed to support the export drives of the wealthy, developed nations, themselves forced by debt to maximize export revenues.
The terrible poverty this forces on debtor nations limits the development of their peoples, and their intellectual and cultural development is narrowed to the limited exigencies of their daily struggle for survival.
Absent authentic monetary reform, debtor nations unable to pay their debts will ultimately be left with five (5) options:
1. To increase exports in order to increase foreign exchange revenues.
Where this is possible, it transforms the citizens into de facto workers for foreign banks which siphon the national production out of the country, further impoverishing the people. Increased commodity production saturates markets and reduces prices, partially or wholly defeating the purpose. In any case this is rarely possible, as exports have usually been maximized already.
2. This necessitates submitting to the IMF-imposed rape of their national resources and the starvation of their people while surrendering their national sovereignty by degrees.
This is the option recently taken by the S.E. Asian nations (South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines). This is, of course, a closed loop back to debt. Of the $123 billion IMF S.E. Asian bailout, Chase Manhattan bank is in line to receive $32 billion; J.P. Morgan for $23 billion; Bank of America for $16 billion. This $71 billion will never reach S.E. Asia, as it is transferred from the U.S. Treasury, to the IMF, to the Wall Street banks. The IMF bailout saves their bad loans to these nations.
Courtesy of the U.S. government, some such foreign debt is being transferred ("monetized") to U.S. taxpayers for payment via increased taxes and inflation. Interestingly, Congressional leaders were told by the Clinton Administration that unless they agreed to fund the IMF bailout of banks which make loans to South Korea, there was danger of invasion of South Korea by North Korea — war blackmail.
3. Unilaterally to repudiate their foreign debts.
This action incurs the danger of being followed by trade strangulation (necessitating barter agreements in foreign trade, as was successfully conducted by the Axis powers and later by Rhodesia), and military invasion (e.g. witness the fate of these defaulter nations: Haiti, Somalia, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia [Bosnia et al.] invaded by U.S. and U.N. armed forces acting as unwitting, de facto mercenaries):
Tote dat bar! Lif dat bale!
Try to buck the system, and you land in jail!
It is no easy task to break free of debt, nor of the international banking system. National leaders would obviously have to weigh the consequences of debt repudiation to the specific situation of their nations with great care and sagacity.
4. To seek legal repudiation of their foreign debts, based on the doctrine of "odious debts".
This is an established international law principle permitting debt repudiation when a government incurs a debt without the informed consent of its people, and which is not used in the legitimate interest of the State.
Ironically, this doctrine was first used by the U.S. to repudiate Cuba's debts after the U.S. took Cuba from Spain. The jurist who coined the phrase "the doctrine of odious debts", held that debts incurred to subjugate a people or to colonize them should also be considered odious. This doctrine shifts responsibility to the lenders, neither to corrupt nor to utilize corrupted politicians and governments to initiate loans, and allows collection from the despots who wasted the funds — both desirable changes.
Of course, an independent, uncorrupted judiciary is a prerequisite to obtaining legal repudiation with this legal theory, which is extremely unlikely when corrupted politicians appoint politically subservient judges to the World Court who would hear such cases. A national legal repudiation on this ground would be a good start though, and could be at least legally valid, but might be a practical nullity, resulting in the same consequences as a unilateral repudiation without a recognized legal basis (#3., above).
5. To issue sufficient quantities of the national money specifically to retire the international debt.
Since most revenues obtained from foreign loans are shortly spent (often wasted), partly domestically and partly in foreign countries, the results are usually inflationary (in both the country of origin — usually the U.S., and in the recipient country), partially multiplied by private domestic (and foreign) banks through fractional reserve banking loans. Therefore, while issuing sufficient new money to retire foreign debt would work, it would also result in hyperinflation where the foreign debt is great in relation to the economy, particularly due to the subsequent multiplier effect of any high-powered money in a fractional reserve banking system. This ruinous negative effect has been felt by numerous nations which inflated to retire foreign debt.
Of course, the technical solution to avoiding such hyperinflation lies in the domestic prohibition of fractional reserve banking, coupled with simultaneous, proportionate foreign exchange regulation, which would require the banks to absorb the new money as increased reserves in a transition to full reserve banking.
This response amounts to legislated domestic monetary reform, which is, therefore, not an option "absent authentic monetary reform" (like the first four options above [i.e. 1-4]) but, rather, is authentic monetary reform.
In short, if nations find the first four options, above, unacceptable, then they will be forced to consider authentic monetary reform, which brings us back to the subject of this article in order to describe this type of reform.
Having set forth the rationale for drafting model monetary reform legislation, where does one begin? A careful study of the fundamentals of our economic system and of the reforms proposed by scholars is a logical starting point.
The draft legislation following was influenced by numerous sources including the writings and declarations on this subject of: President Abraham Lincoln; former Congressmen Charles A. Lindberg, Louis T. McFadden, Robert H. Hemphill, Wright Patman, Francis H. Shoemaker, Jerry Voorhis, Henry Gonzales and former Senator Elmer Thomas, all courageous supporters of banking and monetary reform legislation; Thomas A. Edison; Irving Fisher; Henry C. Simons and the old Chicago School of Economics; Nobel Laureate Frederick Soddy, M.A., F.R.S.; Gertrude M. Coogan; G.K. Chesterton and the Distributist school; Rev. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp.; Major C.H. Douglas and the Social Credit school; W. Cleon Skousen; Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II; the Pontifical Commission Justice and Peace; Nobel Laureate Prof. Milton Friedman; Murray N. Rothbard; E.F. Schumacker; Peter Cook; Theodore R. Thoren; Richard F. Warner; Charles and Russell Norburn; George Tolley and a host of others, as well as the historical experience of reform legislation in various nations including the U.S. during the Civil War; Britain during WWI; Sweden in the early 1930's; Portugal from 1931 to 1974 (when it had no national debt); Canada in the mid- 20th century; the Isle of Guernsey, and many others.
Certain economic reform principles emerge from the study of their proposals. The first and most important is made salient from the fact that there is grave danger to society, worldwide, which must be addressed, when a handful of men hold the power of life and death over national economies as is certainly the present case. As Pope Pius XI pointed out in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931):
. . . the power to create money and to expand or contract the money supply at will carries with it too great an opportunity of economic domination [and therefor ultimately of tyranny], to be left to private control without injury to the community at large.
Similarly Prof. Friedman:
The power to determine the quantity of money...is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power ... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.
Similarly Rev. Dennis Fahey, C.S.Sp.:
If a private group exercise the power to originate the exchange-medium and then manipulates the volume of it, that group becomes a power greater than the government itself. It becomes a super-government, paralyzing the efforts of the lawful government for the common good.
It is perfectly idle to talk about a democracy or a republic when the sovereign power is being exercised de facto by a small group of international bankers not committed to the long-term development of the country, who manipulate public opinion and politicians though their money and media control; the worst of whom seek to arrogate to themselves the exercise of absolute power. What are nations without justice but bands of robbers. - St. Augustine
And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. — Lord Acton
Congressman Lindbergh noted this nearly seventy years ago. These Money Changers, he said,
have become bold, aggressive, vindictive and merciless and command the people to support them.
Therefore the first monetary reform principle to emerge is that control over the monetary system must be taken back out of the private hands who have usurped the power of the State by deceit, bribery and intrigue for their selfish or ideological ends, and be resumed by the State. From this it flows that money creation by private persons must be prohibited, thus fractional reserve banking must be prohibited, and full reserve banking mandated by law.
Resolving this danger over the long-term demands that the monetary system be so arranged as to facilitate the production, distribution and exchange of material goods and services in view of supporting the virtuous life of all of the members of society. This requires a stabilized (i.e. not manipulated) price level, while avoiding the opposite end-of-the-spectrum problem of government favoritism in lending. This summarizes as follows:
Sound monetary reform requires the issuance of all money (legal tender) by the State, exclusively; in amounts calculated to stabilize the general price level; without debt obligation to private persons; with all lending to be performed by private legal persons, exclusively; while safeguarding the widespread ownership of private property.
Let us separate these principles (numeric), with their implicit corollaries (alphabetic):
Monetary Reform Principles
Act Sections
1.) Require the issuance of all
money (legal tender)
by the State, exclusively;
7.
Corollaries
a. this implies the prohibition of all
private money creation;
14.
b. this implies the prohibition of
fractional reserve banking;
14.
c. this implies the requirement of
full reserve banking;
9.
d. this implies withdrawal from
international banks with credit/
reserve-creating authority (such
as the IMF SDRs);
15.
2.) in amounts calculated to
stabilize the general price level;
6.
Corollaries
a. this implies avoiding inflation
and deflation, a condition for
steady and healthy economic
growth, as government policy;
6,7.
b. this implies the abandonment of
a single commodity standard (e.g.
gold) inasmuch as no commodity
is available on the same time as
all goods in general (besides the
problems of hoarding, manipulation
through export, etc.);
7.
c.this implies a fixed relationship
or rule between the quantity of
money and goods;
7.
d. this may imply a war-time ex-
ception to #3, below;
8.
e. this implies government policy
to stabilize excessive fluctuation
of exchange rates;
16.
3.) without debt obligation to
private persons;
5.
Corollaries
a. this implies paying off national
debts (not necessarily intra-
government debt);
5.
b. this implies requiring full reserve
banking;
4.
c. this implies the issuance of all
money (medium of exchange) by
the State;
7.
4.) with all lending to be performed
by private legal persons, exclusively;
Corollaries
a. this implies the prohibition of all
government lending (e.g. contrary
to communist and national
socialist legislation);
7.
b. this implies the prohibition of us-
urious rates of interest, which
defeat or prevent the beneficial
effects of lending and create
obstacles to secure ownership
of property;
14.
c. #1, supra., implies that #4
would be limited by the amount
of funds the lender had or
obtains to lend;
9.
5.) safeguarding the widespread
possession of private property.
Corollaries
a. this implies both the secure
(which implies permanent)
and modest possession of
private property by all
classes of people;
7, 14.
b. this implies a homestead exem-
ption from property taxation and
in bankruptcy;
7.
c. this implies that the power to create
money not be delegated to private
persons for their individual benefitby
the State since this results in vast
concentrations of property;
7, 14.
d. this implies that the right to
private property is subordinated
to the right to common use where
the danger of economic domination
of the community is too great to
leave it in private hands.
These principles are consistent with and are required by the increasingly higher principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, justice (i.e. legal, distributive and social) and equity.
Subsidiarity is the principle that states that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community (nor from a lower community to a higher order of community) what they can accomplish by their own enterprise or industry. Negatively put, it states that it is an injustice, a grave evil, and a disturbance of right order for a larger, higher organization or jurisdiction, to arrogate to itself functions (or ownership) which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower, local bodies. The notion of rational decentralization and the Distributist school derives from this principle. Subsidiarity is, therefore, that principle which dictates to common sense that each man select his own food, home, job and spouse and not be told which by some capitol (or capital) bureaucrat. It reflects the nature of man and of his unique personality which requires that men be not wholly subject to the will of others, but retain their liberty and freedom from oppression, economic imperialism, bureaucratic control and centralization which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.
Subsidiarity is also that principle which prohibits government lending since this, unlike money creation, can be efficiently performed privately, at the local level without danger to the common good. Needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them, who are also capable of perceiving deeper causes and needs due to their more personal contact.
Unlike subsidiarity, which required some necessary definition here, solidarity, justice and equity are at least commonly understood, if in a vague sense, and these are not on the same level as our consideration here, which is narrowly limited to considering practical monetary reform legislation.
Interestingly, on January 1, 1998, in his Angelus message, Pope John Paul II said,
The process of globalization under way in the world needs to be orientated in the direction of equity and solidarity...it is indispensable for everyone to strive for justice...
Following these basic principles of sound monetary reform, which are available to common sense enlightened by modest reflection in this area, non-experts are perfectly capable of judging reform proposals such as that following. Indeed, by use of a peculiar esoteric jargon and pure gibberish, central bankers and their economists have intimidated the public from considering this artificially arcane subject area leaving the field to their paid "experts".
Would such reform make monetary policy a plaything for politicians, ending the independence of the Central Bankers? Yes, and so it should be! Quoting Prof. Friedman again: This is an argument for, not against, eliminating the central bank's independence. The economic order is properly subject to the political, not the reverse as is the case presently.
Elected officials with political accountability should run the country, not bankers busily betraying their nation's autonomy and sovereignty. Further, capital is a mere instrument, a means of production at the service of man and his labor, not the reverse. It should be subject to him, not he to it. This is simply to express the obvious primacy of man over things.
This draft Act has gone through numerous technical revisions based on suggestions from numerous sources, and more are invited. In particular, we are grateful for suggestions received from Prof. Milton Friedman. The principles contained herein are equally applicable to Canadian (or other national) draft monetary reform legislation, though the particulars would vary considerably.
Points of controversy in details will doubtless include the following:
1. Whether to abolish or fundamentally reform the existing Federal Reserve System;
2. Whether to require banks to have their reserves in the form of cash, government securities, or Treasury deposits;
3. Whether the State, or private persons, ought to purchase the bank liabilities the banks must liquidate in order to transition to full reserve banking;
4. Whether future monetary growth should be partially discretionary (i.e. but based on a known rule) with some national Monetary Authority, or non-discretionary and based on a fixed rate of growth, and if the latter, at what fixed rate (but having any definite and unambiguous rule is more important than which rule is settled upon);
5. Whether bank reserves ought to earn interest or not, and if so, how much;
6. Whether prior bank profits ought to be disgorged, and if so, whether via a nationalization and re-privatization of banks or by confiscation or tax-surcharge.
The endnotes of the draft Act following, briefly address these points. We regard the choice of such options regarding these points as non-essential to sound monetary reform.
Novel reform proposals, such as: computerized barter systems based on market pricing; the creation of new forms of private monies; using bearer certificates tied to inflation-indexed and non-indexed bonds, or futures widely indexed to result in a relatively constant stable price; localized or municipal currencies, now in use in fifty-two U.S. communities (e.g. the "Bread" [ Berkeley Region Exchange And Development] labor certificates), which were issued in c. 400 local communities during the Great Depression; the widespread establishment of State-owned banks (e.g. the very successful State-ownedBank of North Dakota); and discounted private organization debit cards; are not considered here as they seem presently too speculative, localized or costly to replace national currency and demand deposits. But that may change before we know it, and these proposals all merit further discussion and refinement.
Other non-monetary reforms, such as: increased utilization of credit unions; a new Homesteading Act, instead of allowing idle farmland and abandoned urban buildings to remain so; single parent's cooperatives to assist them and their children to achieve self-sufficiency; tax incentives for micro-mass transit such as community vans; micro-lending; tax reduction including abolition of property and land taxes; and many other worthy ideas have been put forth, which certainly would help society cope with the problems created by the present corrupt banking system, but these go beyond our topic here.
The fundamental, basic economic reform needed — the abolition and recriminalization of usury, is closely related to our topic, but beyond its specific scope. Let it suffice here to state that it is usury, defined as: the charging of interest on a loan which is not productive, which is the root cause of the evils of fractional reserve banking and the debt finance system, which are merely "refinements" of it, as is compound interest and money manipulation in general. Usury is not merely the charging of an excessive or unlawful rate of interest. Unless addressed, usury inevitably leads to these other evils, which are our focus here, and to the decay of justice and civilization.
Regarding a gold standard: there is no unanimity as to what type of gold standard to consider. However, except for a true gold standard - in which either gold coin or gold deposit certificates circulate as money - the others are easily manipulated. But even a true gold standard can be manipulated in a variety of ways, as history demonstrates, and has only this appeal: that it would certainly be better than the current state of affairs in that it is one step more difficult to manipulate its quantity than a purely fiat currency.
However, even a true gold standard has numerous problems (including its relative inelasticity in relation to GNP, GDP or similar yardsticks, resulting in, at least in the short-term, inflation and/or deflation) and would not be preferable to true reform as set forth in the draft Act following, for a number of reasons which we cannot discuss in detail here.
In any case, without the simultaneous abolition of fractional reserve banking (and the retirement of the national debt), adoption of a true gold standard would simply be changing the form of high-powered money from Federal Reserve Notes to gold - a largely meaningless change. Whereas, with the adoption of full reserve banking, including a fixed rate of monetary growth, any commodity standard (e.g. gold) becomes problematic and a potential obstacle to authentic reform. For these reasons, the political support for it is very slight, and was even in the exigencies of the Great Contraction. This seems unlikely to change.
Concerning implementation: the fundamental causes of the world debt crisis are not economic, but philosophical, theological and moral. We cannot expect economic justice in a society that murders innocent children in the womb and idolizes money. So authentic reform cannot be reduced to a technical or drafting problem, which is, however, our specific focus here. Nothing serious or deep is accomplished exclusively by changing techniques, laws or governments.
It is obvious that no change of system or machinery can avert those causes of social malaise which consist in the egotism, greed, or quarrelsomeness of human nature. What it can do is to create an environment in which those are not the qualities encouraged. It cannot secure that men live up to their principles. What it can do is to establish their social order upon principles to which, if they please, they can live up or not live down. It cannot control their actions. It can offer them an end on which to fix their minds and, as their minds are, so in the long run, and with exceptions, their practical activity will be. — R.H. Tawney
The well being of families, the security of the nation, the happiness of humanity — these can be conceived only in terms of the ordered use by individual persons of their God-given virtues and the objects to which these correspond. There is no such thing (save in metaphor) as a sinful (or "holy") nation or system; there are only nations and systems composed of individual persons either in revolt against nature, right reason, justice and good, or who by reason of their personal virtue are in harmony and union with nature, right reason, justice and God, radiating their personal virtue into the national or systemic life.
So the reform of society and of systems must begin with the reformation of the individual morals of the individual persons who comprise society. Hopefully, this will be initiated before our remaining freedoms, which are indirectly tied to our economic independence (including our national economic independence and sovereignty) are so far gone as to be irretrievable and injustice degenerates into irremediable conflicts.
No leader in public economy, no power of organization will ever be able to bring social conditions to a peaceful solution, unless first there triumphs moral laws based on God and conscience.—Pope Leo XIII
Institutional reform follows on individual reform, which experience teaches is often predicated on trial or crisis. Crises bring to the surface deeper disorders not otherwise discovered. A better world cannot be built in the midst of crisis, but it is precisely in time of crisis that the anvil is hot for shaping the kind of world peace may provide. Of course, the international bankers know this too, and plan to create and use crises for their own ends, as mentioned above.
Nevertheless, is very unlikely reform will advance in the U.S. until economic crisis deepens and touches larger numbers of our citizens, either suddenly, in a major upheaval (i.e. a severe economic depression or war) or by gradually spreading impoverishment due to continually increasing inflation/taxation/and interest on debt. The false sense of economic and social security to which our citizens presently cling will be increasingly tested and shaken, either way.
As Aristotle noted in his Politics:
For war compels men to be just and temperate, whereas the enjoyment of good fortune and the leisure that comes with peace tend to make them insolent. Those then who seem to be the best-off and to be in the possession of every good, have special need of justice and temperance.
So realistic opportunity for authentic reform may present itself in the context of an economic/political crisis in which increasing numbers of our citizens, hitherto untouched, personally experience the harsh consequences of the lack of justice and charity in the present economic system, since the changes needed are ultimately of the heart and are therefore personal.
Let us glimpse our future, through the eyes of a Brazilian viewing their present:
The third world war has already started. It is a silent war. Not, for that reason, any less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying, there are children. It is a war over the Third World debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam.
Despite their country's fabulous national wealth, 40% of the Brazilian population go hungry whilst seven million children work as slaves or prostitutes.
The relentless activity and ceaseless agitation against justice and right order financed by the Money Changers need not unduly discourage us. This apparent vitality masks the restless spirit injustice generates, which seeks to salve the conflicted conscience by resolving, consciously and subconsciously, to justify its actions externally, in a torrent of words and works. Inner conflict thus leads to outer conflicts, where increasingly aggressive (even murderous) forms of coercion are employed against the outer world, and ultimately against themselves (e.g. neurosis, alcoholism, suicide) to bend the truth of justice to their denial of it.
In short, injustice ultimately creates internal conflict in the individuals (and groups) so acting, as well as in their collective efforts, as they attempt to repress those portions of their own consciousness and of their own groups (and others), which condemn their injustice. This repression requires increasingly greater efforts to maintain (as each act of repression increases the injustice, necessitating even more repression), thus diverting their energy to destructive ends and away from the creativity necessary to maintain their position and power. In fact, so draining is this effort that most people are not capable of the deception, the tight-rope walking, the consistent criminality and repression required to maintain a great evil conspiracy.
In contrast, a conscience at peace naturally tends towards an unworried, calm approach to life, yet this is a sign of strength and integrity, not weakness. Of course, complacency, the opposite extreme, is to be avoided. It is therefore necessary to work simultaneously for the conversion of hearts and for the reform of systems, with the emphasis much on the former. As Pope John Paul II put it:
We are all called, indeed obliged, to face the tremendous challenge ... because the present danger threatens everyone: a world economic crisis, a war without frontiers ... every individual is called upon to play his or her part in this peaceful campaign, a campaign to be conducted by peaceful means, in order to secure development in peace.
Our part of this development in peace may begin with a prudent, clear-eyed objectivity to determine what actions are appropriate to the real situation before us. This cannot be achieved except by an attitude of 'silent contemplation' of reality, during which the egocentric interests of man are, at least temporarily, silenced. In that silence, the knowledge of truth may be transformed into decisions corresponding to reality. However, it is the province of true religion to define this for those so drawn and to reveal distinctly religious responses to this crisis.
The Impact of Inequality:
How to Make Sick Societies Healthier
by Richard G Wilkinson
355pp, Routledge, £19.99
Does inequality really matter? The poor have what their grandparents would think unimaginable luxuries - TVs, telephones and washing machines. So why should it matter to them if in some unseen stratosphere the gated kleptocrats on company boards award themselves staggering sums of money? Does anyone really mind the gap?
That is a reasonable question and it niggles away at those on the left, too. Equality has gone out of fashion. Social justice under Labour means heaving the poorest over the poverty threshold and lifting the life chances of children from lower social classes. Tony Blair said early on that he was not bothered about wealth, only about abolishing poverty. Talk of inequality sounds like the old politics of envy. Equality of opportunity, yes, but equality for its own sake, why?
Here is the answer. Richard Wilkinson is a professor of social epidemiology, an expert in public health. From that vantage point he sees the world in terms of its physical and psychological wellbeing, surveying great sweeps of health statistics through sociological eyes. He has assembled a mountain of irrefutable evidence from all over the world showing the damage done by extreme inequality. However rich a country is, it will still be more dysfunctional, violent, sick and sad if the gap between social classes grows too wide. Poorer countries with fairer wealth distribution are healthier and happier than richer, more unequal nations.
This book is timely since the NHS annual report has just found that Labour has missed two key goals, both symptoms of inequality. Infant mortality and life expectancy figures are both moving in the wrong direction. If Labour is perplexed as to the reason why, Wilkinson can suggest plenty of answers here. Life expectancy in rich nations correlates precisely with levels of equality. So Greece, with half the GDP per head, has longer life expectancy than the US, the richest and most unequal country with the lowest life expectancy in the developed world. The people of Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh. When you take out the violence and drugs, two-thirds of the reason is heart disease. Is that bad diet? No, says Wilkinson, it is mainly stress, the stress of living at the bottom of the pecking order, on the lowest rung, the stress of disrespect and lack of esteem. Bad nutrition does less harm than depression.
The book blisters with research like this: tests found that subordinate, low-status monkeys had high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, which leads to arteriosclerosis. When the high-status monkeys were all put together and low-status monkeys put in another enclosure, all the pecking orders changed. When some previous high-rankers became subordinate they developed all the same physical symptoms, including a five-fold increase in arteriosclerosis within less than two years. Meanwhile, some of the low-rankers who suddenly found themselves dominant, had sharply dropped levels of stress hormone.
People, says Wilkinson, are the same. Social status and respect matter beyond anything, and the psychological damage done by being at the bottom is crippling. A survey of Whitehall civil servants found junior ranks were three times more likely to die in a year than seniors, with a fine sliding gradation from top to bottom according to status. If one office was found to be killing three times more than another next door, it would be evacuated instantly. Yet social environment may matter almost as much as asbestos.
Homicide rates (and other crimes) track a country's level of inequality, not its overall wealth. The fairest countries have the highest levels of trust and social capital. The American states that have the more equal income distribution also have most social trust: New Hampshire, the most equal, is least likely to agree that "most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance".
Wilkinson's message is that social environment can be more toxic than any pollutant. Low status and lack of control over one's life is a destroyer of human health and happiness. The wealth gap causes few to vote or participate in anything in a world of fear, conflict and hostility.
It is not primarily five-a-day fruit and veg or obesity that need targeting, but social injustice itself. Infant mortality is mainly a result of low-birth weight babies, something the government has tried hard to improve. Wilkinson shows that these days small premature babies are not caused by bad diet: even poor nutrition by British standards will rarely harm a foetus. It is stress in pregnancy that does it, high cortisol levels which affect the foetus for life - and poorer mothers are more depressed, with less social support. Psyche matters more than vitamins, all through life. An orphanage in hungry post-war Germany found children on the same diet were found to have grown most under the kindest matron and least under the unkindest matron.
Poverty in rich nations is not a number or the absence of a particular necessity. A poor vicar may bring up children well on lentils and respect. But for most people respect is measured in money. Low pay tells people that their labour and they themselves are worth little. Poverty is not, as the government imagines, a line to pull people over but it is a position on a line. If it tilts too sharply upwards, the pain of those at the bottom can be measured in hard statistics.
This book is evidence for what common sense already knows. Children on free school meals, with no holidays to talk about, unable to afford the school trips, who never invite anyone back to a shabby home, painfully understand their place in the hierarchy from their first day at school. Adults know the same, noses pressed up against the window of lifestyle shows on TV. This is a book that puts the numbers to a psychological truth: inequality is the real enemy.
· Polly Toynbee's Hard Work is published by Bloomsbury.
by Richard G Wilkinson
355pp, Routledge, £19.99
Does inequality really matter? The poor have what their grandparents would think unimaginable luxuries - TVs, telephones and washing machines. So why should it matter to them if in some unseen stratosphere the gated kleptocrats on company boards award themselves staggering sums of money? Does anyone really mind the gap?
That is a reasonable question and it niggles away at those on the left, too. Equality has gone out of fashion. Social justice under Labour means heaving the poorest over the poverty threshold and lifting the life chances of children from lower social classes. Tony Blair said early on that he was not bothered about wealth, only about abolishing poverty. Talk of inequality sounds like the old politics of envy. Equality of opportunity, yes, but equality for its own sake, why?
Here is the answer. Richard Wilkinson is a professor of social epidemiology, an expert in public health. From that vantage point he sees the world in terms of its physical and psychological wellbeing, surveying great sweeps of health statistics through sociological eyes. He has assembled a mountain of irrefutable evidence from all over the world showing the damage done by extreme inequality. However rich a country is, it will still be more dysfunctional, violent, sick and sad if the gap between social classes grows too wide. Poorer countries with fairer wealth distribution are healthier and happier than richer, more unequal nations.
This book is timely since the NHS annual report has just found that Labour has missed two key goals, both symptoms of inequality. Infant mortality and life expectancy figures are both moving in the wrong direction. If Labour is perplexed as to the reason why, Wilkinson can suggest plenty of answers here. Life expectancy in rich nations correlates precisely with levels of equality. So Greece, with half the GDP per head, has longer life expectancy than the US, the richest and most unequal country with the lowest life expectancy in the developed world. The people of Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh. When you take out the violence and drugs, two-thirds of the reason is heart disease. Is that bad diet? No, says Wilkinson, it is mainly stress, the stress of living at the bottom of the pecking order, on the lowest rung, the stress of disrespect and lack of esteem. Bad nutrition does less harm than depression.
The book blisters with research like this: tests found that subordinate, low-status monkeys had high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, which leads to arteriosclerosis. When the high-status monkeys were all put together and low-status monkeys put in another enclosure, all the pecking orders changed. When some previous high-rankers became subordinate they developed all the same physical symptoms, including a five-fold increase in arteriosclerosis within less than two years. Meanwhile, some of the low-rankers who suddenly found themselves dominant, had sharply dropped levels of stress hormone.
People, says Wilkinson, are the same. Social status and respect matter beyond anything, and the psychological damage done by being at the bottom is crippling. A survey of Whitehall civil servants found junior ranks were three times more likely to die in a year than seniors, with a fine sliding gradation from top to bottom according to status. If one office was found to be killing three times more than another next door, it would be evacuated instantly. Yet social environment may matter almost as much as asbestos.
Homicide rates (and other crimes) track a country's level of inequality, not its overall wealth. The fairest countries have the highest levels of trust and social capital. The American states that have the more equal income distribution also have most social trust: New Hampshire, the most equal, is least likely to agree that "most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance".
Wilkinson's message is that social environment can be more toxic than any pollutant. Low status and lack of control over one's life is a destroyer of human health and happiness. The wealth gap causes few to vote or participate in anything in a world of fear, conflict and hostility.
It is not primarily five-a-day fruit and veg or obesity that need targeting, but social injustice itself. Infant mortality is mainly a result of low-birth weight babies, something the government has tried hard to improve. Wilkinson shows that these days small premature babies are not caused by bad diet: even poor nutrition by British standards will rarely harm a foetus. It is stress in pregnancy that does it, high cortisol levels which affect the foetus for life - and poorer mothers are more depressed, with less social support. Psyche matters more than vitamins, all through life. An orphanage in hungry post-war Germany found children on the same diet were found to have grown most under the kindest matron and least under the unkindest matron.
Poverty in rich nations is not a number or the absence of a particular necessity. A poor vicar may bring up children well on lentils and respect. But for most people respect is measured in money. Low pay tells people that their labour and they themselves are worth little. Poverty is not, as the government imagines, a line to pull people over but it is a position on a line. If it tilts too sharply upwards, the pain of those at the bottom can be measured in hard statistics.
This book is evidence for what common sense already knows. Children on free school meals, with no holidays to talk about, unable to afford the school trips, who never invite anyone back to a shabby home, painfully understand their place in the hierarchy from their first day at school. Adults know the same, noses pressed up against the window of lifestyle shows on TV. This is a book that puts the numbers to a psychological truth: inequality is the real enemy.
· Polly Toynbee's Hard Work is published by Bloomsbury.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
New Venezuelan Education Model
Chavez Promises New Venezuelan Education Model to Combat Imperialist Values
By Sarah Wagner
Caracas, Venezuela, May 16, 2005—During his weekly television program, Aló Presidente, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez announced yesterday the initiation of a new stage in Venezuelan education, based on “coexisting, knowing, and doing” and called upon the Venezuelan youth to reject "imperialistic anti-values" cultivated during previous governments and to "rescue the authentic Christian values, lost by the capitalist model."
Chávez affirmed that his government considers education to be a "vital aspect" of the Bolivarian political program and is committed to improving the education system’s quality and transforming its traditional paradigm through the construction of “Simoncitos,” as the Bolivarian preschools are known, as well as Bolivarian schools, high schools, universities and technical schools.
Chávez blamed the capitalist and imperialist media campaigns for filling the people with poison, teaching them to overvalue money and leading them to believe that the poor "are worthless." In order to change these parameters, the Venezuelan President asserted, values such as unity, brotherhood and solidarity, must be placed above competition and individualism. "We are all a team, going along eliminating little by little the values or the anti-values that capitalism has planted in us from childhood…"
The May 15th Aló Presidente was broadcast from the Bolivarian high school Llano Alto in the northwestern state of Barinas moments after inaugurating the high school. Aristóbulo Istúriz, the Minister of Education, who attended the inauguration along with the governor of Barinas, stated that although there are currently only 26 Bolivarian high schools in Venezuela, by September there will be 307 up and running and by the beginning of 2007, all Venezuelan high schools will be Bolivarian. Each Bolivarian high school costs approximately 1,800 million bolívares ($837,000) to build.
According to Istúriz, the Bolivarian high schools are focused on transforming adolescents from being individualistic to being socially aware; from being competitive to cooperative; and from being consumers to being creative. Additionally, the Bolivarian education system does not only teach traditionally subjects but also focuses on developing a sense of pride in the students for their own region and culture.
According to María Eugenia Dávila, a student in a Bolivarian high school, "there is really a great difference between a Bolivarian high school and a "normal" Venezuelan high school…The Bolivarian high school gives you a big change. The community has been the representative in all of the high school, it has been the protagonist and they have helped us in all of the activities."
Carlos Ojeda, who is now sings in the choir, participates in theater and plays football in his Bolivarian high school, opportunities that "we never had the possibility to do before," concurred with Dávila, noting that "the community is there hand-in-hand with the Bolivarian high school."
Both Chávez and Isturiz cautioned that in order to transform the entire educational system, additional investment in Simoncitos, technical schools and universities is necessary.
After affirming that the transformation of the educational system was not only "Istúriz's responsibility, not only the responsibility of the government, but also of everyone, of the citizens," Chávez asked Istúriz to design evaluation committees composed of community members to discuss progress and projects. "The very own students, along with their professors, can form their cooperatives to operate the resources and develop their planes," he affirmed.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1621
By Sarah Wagner
Caracas, Venezuela, May 16, 2005—During his weekly television program, Aló Presidente, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez announced yesterday the initiation of a new stage in Venezuelan education, based on “coexisting, knowing, and doing” and called upon the Venezuelan youth to reject "imperialistic anti-values" cultivated during previous governments and to "rescue the authentic Christian values, lost by the capitalist model."
Chávez affirmed that his government considers education to be a "vital aspect" of the Bolivarian political program and is committed to improving the education system’s quality and transforming its traditional paradigm through the construction of “Simoncitos,” as the Bolivarian preschools are known, as well as Bolivarian schools, high schools, universities and technical schools.
Chávez blamed the capitalist and imperialist media campaigns for filling the people with poison, teaching them to overvalue money and leading them to believe that the poor "are worthless." In order to change these parameters, the Venezuelan President asserted, values such as unity, brotherhood and solidarity, must be placed above competition and individualism. "We are all a team, going along eliminating little by little the values or the anti-values that capitalism has planted in us from childhood…"
The May 15th Aló Presidente was broadcast from the Bolivarian high school Llano Alto in the northwestern state of Barinas moments after inaugurating the high school. Aristóbulo Istúriz, the Minister of Education, who attended the inauguration along with the governor of Barinas, stated that although there are currently only 26 Bolivarian high schools in Venezuela, by September there will be 307 up and running and by the beginning of 2007, all Venezuelan high schools will be Bolivarian. Each Bolivarian high school costs approximately 1,800 million bolívares ($837,000) to build.
According to Istúriz, the Bolivarian high schools are focused on transforming adolescents from being individualistic to being socially aware; from being competitive to cooperative; and from being consumers to being creative. Additionally, the Bolivarian education system does not only teach traditionally subjects but also focuses on developing a sense of pride in the students for their own region and culture.
According to María Eugenia Dávila, a student in a Bolivarian high school, "there is really a great difference between a Bolivarian high school and a "normal" Venezuelan high school…The Bolivarian high school gives you a big change. The community has been the representative in all of the high school, it has been the protagonist and they have helped us in all of the activities."
Carlos Ojeda, who is now sings in the choir, participates in theater and plays football in his Bolivarian high school, opportunities that "we never had the possibility to do before," concurred with Dávila, noting that "the community is there hand-in-hand with the Bolivarian high school."
Both Chávez and Isturiz cautioned that in order to transform the entire educational system, additional investment in Simoncitos, technical schools and universities is necessary.
After affirming that the transformation of the educational system was not only "Istúriz's responsibility, not only the responsibility of the government, but also of everyone, of the citizens," Chávez asked Istúriz to design evaluation committees composed of community members to discuss progress and projects. "The very own students, along with their professors, can form their cooperatives to operate the resources and develop their planes," he affirmed.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1621
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Chavez Influence Growing
Populist Advances Economic Reforms Across Latin America
SECOND IN A SERIES ON LATIN AMERICA
By Christopher Bollyn
The economic reforms and nationalist policies being advanced by Hugo Chavez, the populist president of Venezuela, are liberating Latin American nations from the suffocating grip of the international financial oligarchy.
The wide-ranging reforms promoted by Chavez are being financed by the immense oil wealth of Venezuela, the world’s fifth-largest exporter of oil. The year 2006 brought increased state control of Venezuela’s oil production.
Venezuela, with the largest proven oil reserves outside of the Middle East, produces more than 3 million barrels of oil per day. On Jan. 1, Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez announced that 32 privately operated oil fields had come under state control with the start of 2006.
In 2001, Venezuela passed a law requiring oil production to be carried out by companies in which the government held the majority share. The deadline for the oil companies to convert their operations to joint ventures in which the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) has the controlling stake expired at midnight on Dec. 31, 2005.
The oil fields that came under state control on New Year’s Day produce about 500,000 of Venezuela’s declared production of 3.2 million barrels a day. The Venezuelan state could own as much as 90 percent in some of the new ventures, depending on how much the private companies had invested in the field.
The soaring price of crude oil has allowed Chavez to support other nations and economic reforms across the region. From Argentina, for example, Venezuela purchased more than $1 billion in bonds in 2005 and may buy as much as $2 billion more.
“Venezuela has been supporting Argentina in freeing it from International Monetary Fund debt, and we will continue, as much as we can, to help Argentina end its dependence on the IMF,” Chavez said.
The Venezuelan investment allowed Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner to completely pay off its $9.8 billion debt to the IMF on Jan. 3.
“With this payment, we are interring a significant part of an ignominious past,” Kirchner said.
Many Argentines believe that the IMF was responsible for the disastrous economic policies that caused the financial crisis of 2001 and then abandoned the country to recover on its own.
BANK OF THE SOUTH
Chavez has proposed the creation of a new multilateral bank to free the region from IMF influence and the increasing “dollarization” of the region. He called on Brazil and Argentina to contribute some of their international reserves to help fund the new regional bank.
During a recent speech in Brazil, Chavez called for the creation of the “Bank of the South” to “allow us to manage all this money for our own interests,” he said. “Venezuela would bring a part of its reserves; Brazil would bring a part of its reserves, Argentina, too, and other countries.”
Chavez said South American countries should disinvest from rich countries that “manipulate, lend and make a lot of money off our resources.”
Venezuela’s central bank, for example, sold $10 billion of U.S. bonds and other U.S. assets in the first half of 2005.
“How stupid we’ve been,” said Chavez. The Bolivian president-elect, Evo Morales, met Chavez in Caracas as he began a seven-nation world tour. Morales said he and the Venezuelan president were united in a “fight against neo-liberalism and imperialism.”
Morales and Chavez represent a growing number of Latin American leaders who are opposed to U.S. attempts to impose a “free trade” agreement on the region.
Morales, a Socialist, is the first Bolivian politician to be elected with an absolute majority having won 54 percent of the vote. Morales is also the first Indian to come to power in Bolivia where 85 percent of the population is indigenous.
During the trip, Morales discussed his plans to nationalize Bolivia’s vast natural gas holdings, the second largest in South America. “Hydrocarbons and their nationalization—we’re going to talk about that,” Chavez said as he met Morales at Caracas’s international airport.
If the United States “wants bilateral diplomatic and commercial relations, it will have them, but without submission, without subordination, without conditions and without blackmail,” Morales said in Cuba.
On his return from Cuba, Morales held a private meeting with U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee. Representatives declined to give details.
“We join in the task of Fidel [Castro] in Cuba and Hugo in Venezuela to respond to the needs of the national majorities,” Morales said in Caracas the following day, Jan. 3. “The time of the people has arrived. This is the new millennium of the people.”
“We are going to change Bolivia. We are going to change Latin America,” he said. Chavez referred to the three nationalist presidents as “an axis of good.”
Chavez offered to provide Bolivia with diesel fuel, trade benefits and financial assistance for the social reforms Morales has proposed. Venezuela provides some 200,000 barrels a day of subsidized oil to Cuba and 12 other nations in Central America and the Caribbean Basin.
Chavez said Venezuela would supply 150,000 barrels of diesel fuel monthly to Bolivia. “I won’t accept you paying us a cent, you are going to pay us in agricultural products,” Chavez said.
Venezuela will also donate $30 million to Morales’s government following his Jan. 22 inauguration, Chavez said. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad welcomed a proposal from Chavez to develop three-way cooperation between Tehran, Caracas and La Paz on energy.
Chavez proposed cooperation in the field of oil and gas and asked Iran to supply Bolivia with the technical assistance required to help the Morales government nationalize its oil and gas industry. Morales said he intends to nationalize Bolivia’s vast natural gas holdings but not touch foreign oil and gas companies.
“I don’t want to prejudice anybody. I don’t want to expropriate or confiscate any wealth,” Morales said on a recent trip to Santa Cruz, the center of Bolivia’s gas production. “I want to learn from the businessmen.”
(Issue #3, January 16, 2006)
Link: http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/chavez_influence_growing.html
SECOND IN A SERIES ON LATIN AMERICA
By Christopher Bollyn
The economic reforms and nationalist policies being advanced by Hugo Chavez, the populist president of Venezuela, are liberating Latin American nations from the suffocating grip of the international financial oligarchy.
The wide-ranging reforms promoted by Chavez are being financed by the immense oil wealth of Venezuela, the world’s fifth-largest exporter of oil. The year 2006 brought increased state control of Venezuela’s oil production.
Venezuela, with the largest proven oil reserves outside of the Middle East, produces more than 3 million barrels of oil per day. On Jan. 1, Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez announced that 32 privately operated oil fields had come under state control with the start of 2006.
In 2001, Venezuela passed a law requiring oil production to be carried out by companies in which the government held the majority share. The deadline for the oil companies to convert their operations to joint ventures in which the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) has the controlling stake expired at midnight on Dec. 31, 2005.
The oil fields that came under state control on New Year’s Day produce about 500,000 of Venezuela’s declared production of 3.2 million barrels a day. The Venezuelan state could own as much as 90 percent in some of the new ventures, depending on how much the private companies had invested in the field.
The soaring price of crude oil has allowed Chavez to support other nations and economic reforms across the region. From Argentina, for example, Venezuela purchased more than $1 billion in bonds in 2005 and may buy as much as $2 billion more.
“Venezuela has been supporting Argentina in freeing it from International Monetary Fund debt, and we will continue, as much as we can, to help Argentina end its dependence on the IMF,” Chavez said.
The Venezuelan investment allowed Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner to completely pay off its $9.8 billion debt to the IMF on Jan. 3.
“With this payment, we are interring a significant part of an ignominious past,” Kirchner said.
Many Argentines believe that the IMF was responsible for the disastrous economic policies that caused the financial crisis of 2001 and then abandoned the country to recover on its own.
BANK OF THE SOUTH
Chavez has proposed the creation of a new multilateral bank to free the region from IMF influence and the increasing “dollarization” of the region. He called on Brazil and Argentina to contribute some of their international reserves to help fund the new regional bank.
During a recent speech in Brazil, Chavez called for the creation of the “Bank of the South” to “allow us to manage all this money for our own interests,” he said. “Venezuela would bring a part of its reserves; Brazil would bring a part of its reserves, Argentina, too, and other countries.”
Chavez said South American countries should disinvest from rich countries that “manipulate, lend and make a lot of money off our resources.”
Venezuela’s central bank, for example, sold $10 billion of U.S. bonds and other U.S. assets in the first half of 2005.
“How stupid we’ve been,” said Chavez. The Bolivian president-elect, Evo Morales, met Chavez in Caracas as he began a seven-nation world tour. Morales said he and the Venezuelan president were united in a “fight against neo-liberalism and imperialism.”
Morales and Chavez represent a growing number of Latin American leaders who are opposed to U.S. attempts to impose a “free trade” agreement on the region.
Morales, a Socialist, is the first Bolivian politician to be elected with an absolute majority having won 54 percent of the vote. Morales is also the first Indian to come to power in Bolivia where 85 percent of the population is indigenous.
During the trip, Morales discussed his plans to nationalize Bolivia’s vast natural gas holdings, the second largest in South America. “Hydrocarbons and their nationalization—we’re going to talk about that,” Chavez said as he met Morales at Caracas’s international airport.
If the United States “wants bilateral diplomatic and commercial relations, it will have them, but without submission, without subordination, without conditions and without blackmail,” Morales said in Cuba.
On his return from Cuba, Morales held a private meeting with U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee. Representatives declined to give details.
“We join in the task of Fidel [Castro] in Cuba and Hugo in Venezuela to respond to the needs of the national majorities,” Morales said in Caracas the following day, Jan. 3. “The time of the people has arrived. This is the new millennium of the people.”
“We are going to change Bolivia. We are going to change Latin America,” he said. Chavez referred to the three nationalist presidents as “an axis of good.”
Chavez offered to provide Bolivia with diesel fuel, trade benefits and financial assistance for the social reforms Morales has proposed. Venezuela provides some 200,000 barrels a day of subsidized oil to Cuba and 12 other nations in Central America and the Caribbean Basin.
Chavez said Venezuela would supply 150,000 barrels of diesel fuel monthly to Bolivia. “I won’t accept you paying us a cent, you are going to pay us in agricultural products,” Chavez said.
Venezuela will also donate $30 million to Morales’s government following his Jan. 22 inauguration, Chavez said. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad welcomed a proposal from Chavez to develop three-way cooperation between Tehran, Caracas and La Paz on energy.
Chavez proposed cooperation in the field of oil and gas and asked Iran to supply Bolivia with the technical assistance required to help the Morales government nationalize its oil and gas industry. Morales said he intends to nationalize Bolivia’s vast natural gas holdings but not touch foreign oil and gas companies.
“I don’t want to prejudice anybody. I don’t want to expropriate or confiscate any wealth,” Morales said on a recent trip to Santa Cruz, the center of Bolivia’s gas production. “I want to learn from the businessmen.”
(Issue #3, January 16, 2006)
Link: http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/chavez_influence_growing.html
The Global March of Islamic Banking
By Phar Kim Beng
Next month Birmingham, the home of one of the United Kingdom's largest Muslim communities, will become the headquarters of the Islamic Bank of Britain; in London, there is already an Islamic stock brokerage. The spread of Islamic banking and finance throughout the world may not provide the exciting headlines that result from extremist Islamist terrorism, but it is arguably of farther-reaching importance - and enjoys the support of the Koran itself.
Islamic banking operations now exist in about 100 countries, with an estimated US$300 billion in assets, and are growing at 10-15% a year, according to Gohar Bilal, a former visiting scholar at the Islamic Legal Studies program of Harvard Law School.
Like any bank that complies with Islamic law, the new bank in Birmingham will not pay or charge interest on its transactions. Naturally, it will also appeal for its business primarily to European Muslims, who number nearly 2 million in Britain alone.
This is not to say that non-Muslim banks are ignoring this market. For example, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp (HSBC) in England already offers pension and home-loan schemes and a stockbroking service that comply with Islamic law (Sharia).
Still, the introduction of Islamic banking in Europe is tentative at the moment, meaning that it will at first focus on high-net-worth customers so as to recoup investments as soon as possible. In the long run, however, given the growth of the Muslim community in Europe, and the fact that non-Muslims will not be excluded from these services, Islamic banking and finance could turn out to be a useful bridge across societal gaps.
The growth of Islamic banking might seem remarkable in the context of the current image of Islam as an atavistic religion of terror and violence, a condition aggravated by the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the world watched in horror the acts perpetrated by the extremists. Indeed, Muslims themselves have for decades ignored the advances in Islamic banking, distracted by ideologues bent on creating Sharia-compliant states.
Yet Islamic banking is no less important than Islamic law at the state level, as it was mentioned in the Koran in four different revelations. According to Professor Muhammad Ariff of the Malaysia Institute of Economic Research (MIER): "The first revelation emphasizes that interest deprives wealth of God's blessings. The second revelation condemns it, placing interest in juxtaposition with wrongful appropriation of property belonging to others. The third revelation enjoins Muslims to stay clear of interest for the sake of their own welfare. The fourth revelation establishes a clear distinction between interest and trade, urging Muslims to take only the principal sum and to forgo even this sum if the borrower is unable to repay. It is further declared in the Koran that those who disregard the prohibition of interest are at war with God and His Prophet."
A pioneering effort led by Ahmad El Najjar took the form of a savings bank based on profit-sharing in the Egyptian town of Mit Ghamr in 1963. This experiment lasted until 1967, by which time there were nine such banks in the country. These banks, which neither charged nor paid interest, invested mostly by engaging in trade and industry, directly or in partnership with others, and shared the profits with their depositors. Thus they functioned in essence as saving-investment institutions rather than as commercial banks. The Nasir Social Bank, established in Egypt in 1971, was declared an interest-free commercial bank, although its charter made no reference to Islam or Sharia.
Islamic banking has been adopted at the national level in Pakistan, Sudan and Iran, and those countries have decided to Islamize the whole of their banking systems. In Malaysia, where progressive Islamization is being carried out, total assets of the Islamic banking industry rose by $3.5 billion or 20.8% to $20.5 billion by the end of 2003.
Islamic banking is not restricted to Islamic institutions purely. In 1996 Citicorp set up CitiIslamic Investment Bank in Bahrain. Following this precedent, financial institutions ABN Amro, American Express, ANZ Grindlays Bank, Chase Manhattan, Deutsche Bank, Nomura Securities and Union Bank of Switzerland now all have in-house Islamic units.
In the past, Islamic banking has been held back by complacency - the tendency to sit back and wait for Muslim investors to walk in the front door. Recently, however, a number of institutions have aggressively developed the market, including Dar Al-Mal Al-Islami Trust, Islamic Development Bank, Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corp, Al Baraka Group and Kuwait Finance House.
In predominantly Muslim countries, the central bank has a Sharia board, whereby panels of Islamic jurists seek to advise both the central bank governors and private commercial banks on what is legal and prohibited in Islam.
Yet despite the monumental advances in Islamic banking, one hardly hears any Islamic preachers, least of all extremists, calling for more of them, or acknowledging Islamic banking as a clear form of progress made in the name of Islam. Rather, they insist that implementing Islamic law and Islamic states constitute the two platforms of building "true" Islam.
Such a fixation is curious, if not pernicious. After all, while the Prophet Mohammed, whom all Islamic extremists insist Muslims must emulate, was a great law giver and statesman, facts that history does not dispute, he was also a merchant. In fact, prior to becoming the Prophet of Islam, he was known as an affable, able and honest trader by all the Arab tribes - two qualities that attracted Khadijah, a businesswoman of prominent standing, to make a marriage proposal to the Mohammed, to which he accepted.
In pursuing a form of puritanical Islam, Islamic extremists have sadly politicized the corporate memory and culture of Islam. They have also reduced the repertoire to which Islam could appeal to further its revival, such as through innovations in Islamic banking and finance.
Next month Birmingham, the home of one of the United Kingdom's largest Muslim communities, will become the headquarters of the Islamic Bank of Britain; in London, there is already an Islamic stock brokerage. The spread of Islamic banking and finance throughout the world may not provide the exciting headlines that result from extremist Islamist terrorism, but it is arguably of farther-reaching importance - and enjoys the support of the Koran itself.
Islamic banking operations now exist in about 100 countries, with an estimated US$300 billion in assets, and are growing at 10-15% a year, according to Gohar Bilal, a former visiting scholar at the Islamic Legal Studies program of Harvard Law School.
Like any bank that complies with Islamic law, the new bank in Birmingham will not pay or charge interest on its transactions. Naturally, it will also appeal for its business primarily to European Muslims, who number nearly 2 million in Britain alone.
This is not to say that non-Muslim banks are ignoring this market. For example, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp (HSBC) in England already offers pension and home-loan schemes and a stockbroking service that comply with Islamic law (Sharia).
Still, the introduction of Islamic banking in Europe is tentative at the moment, meaning that it will at first focus on high-net-worth customers so as to recoup investments as soon as possible. In the long run, however, given the growth of the Muslim community in Europe, and the fact that non-Muslims will not be excluded from these services, Islamic banking and finance could turn out to be a useful bridge across societal gaps.
The growth of Islamic banking might seem remarkable in the context of the current image of Islam as an atavistic religion of terror and violence, a condition aggravated by the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the world watched in horror the acts perpetrated by the extremists. Indeed, Muslims themselves have for decades ignored the advances in Islamic banking, distracted by ideologues bent on creating Sharia-compliant states.
Yet Islamic banking is no less important than Islamic law at the state level, as it was mentioned in the Koran in four different revelations. According to Professor Muhammad Ariff of the Malaysia Institute of Economic Research (MIER): "The first revelation emphasizes that interest deprives wealth of God's blessings. The second revelation condemns it, placing interest in juxtaposition with wrongful appropriation of property belonging to others. The third revelation enjoins Muslims to stay clear of interest for the sake of their own welfare. The fourth revelation establishes a clear distinction between interest and trade, urging Muslims to take only the principal sum and to forgo even this sum if the borrower is unable to repay. It is further declared in the Koran that those who disregard the prohibition of interest are at war with God and His Prophet."
A pioneering effort led by Ahmad El Najjar took the form of a savings bank based on profit-sharing in the Egyptian town of Mit Ghamr in 1963. This experiment lasted until 1967, by which time there were nine such banks in the country. These banks, which neither charged nor paid interest, invested mostly by engaging in trade and industry, directly or in partnership with others, and shared the profits with their depositors. Thus they functioned in essence as saving-investment institutions rather than as commercial banks. The Nasir Social Bank, established in Egypt in 1971, was declared an interest-free commercial bank, although its charter made no reference to Islam or Sharia.
Islamic banking has been adopted at the national level in Pakistan, Sudan and Iran, and those countries have decided to Islamize the whole of their banking systems. In Malaysia, where progressive Islamization is being carried out, total assets of the Islamic banking industry rose by $3.5 billion or 20.8% to $20.5 billion by the end of 2003.
Islamic banking is not restricted to Islamic institutions purely. In 1996 Citicorp set up CitiIslamic Investment Bank in Bahrain. Following this precedent, financial institutions ABN Amro, American Express, ANZ Grindlays Bank, Chase Manhattan, Deutsche Bank, Nomura Securities and Union Bank of Switzerland now all have in-house Islamic units.
In the past, Islamic banking has been held back by complacency - the tendency to sit back and wait for Muslim investors to walk in the front door. Recently, however, a number of institutions have aggressively developed the market, including Dar Al-Mal Al-Islami Trust, Islamic Development Bank, Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corp, Al Baraka Group and Kuwait Finance House.
In predominantly Muslim countries, the central bank has a Sharia board, whereby panels of Islamic jurists seek to advise both the central bank governors and private commercial banks on what is legal and prohibited in Islam.
Yet despite the monumental advances in Islamic banking, one hardly hears any Islamic preachers, least of all extremists, calling for more of them, or acknowledging Islamic banking as a clear form of progress made in the name of Islam. Rather, they insist that implementing Islamic law and Islamic states constitute the two platforms of building "true" Islam.
Such a fixation is curious, if not pernicious. After all, while the Prophet Mohammed, whom all Islamic extremists insist Muslims must emulate, was a great law giver and statesman, facts that history does not dispute, he was also a merchant. In fact, prior to becoming the Prophet of Islam, he was known as an affable, able and honest trader by all the Arab tribes - two qualities that attracted Khadijah, a businesswoman of prominent standing, to make a marriage proposal to the Mohammed, to which he accepted.
In pursuing a form of puritanical Islam, Islamic extremists have sadly politicized the corporate memory and culture of Islam. They have also reduced the repertoire to which Islam could appeal to further its revival, such as through innovations in Islamic banking and finance.
Letter From Venezuela
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
2-17-6
The Bush administration, which has demonstrated an appalling disregard for the rule of law and the welfare of its own people, is viciously attacking Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez, a populist leader who is using his nation's immense oil wealth to improve the lives of his people and his neighbors including many Americans.
ISLA MARGARITA, Venezuela The ongoing war of words being waged between the Bush administration and Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez was in full swing as I traveled from Miami to Caracas, the capital of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the outrageous comparison of Hugo Chávez with Adolf Hitler in the beginning of what The Washington Post reported as having been "an especially ugly week in the hostile relationship" between the Bush administration and the increasingly popular Chávez.
The week started with Venezuela expelling a U.S. naval attaché on charges of spying, which led to the expulsion of a senior Venezuelan diplomat from Washington, and ended with the U.S. blocking a deal in which Venezuela was to buy coastal patrol boats from Spain. While Spain had initially said it would replace the U.S.-made components on the boats with French-made parts, by the end of the week Spain had suddenly cancelled the lucrative contract with no explanation provided.
Rumsfeld, who serves under a president who was, in fact, not elected by the people, made a rather odd comment comparing two legally elected leaders: "Chávez was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally," Rumsfeld said, "And then consolidated his power." The "populist leadership" of Chávez, which appeals to "masses of people," Rumsfeld said,
is "worrisome" to the Bush administration.
After a week in Venezuela, however, I have yet to meet a Venezuelan who has expressed any worries or concerns about the populist reforms initiated by Chávez. The Venezuelans and foreigners I have met have nothing but praise for the wide-ranging improvements Chávez has brought to the people. They talk frequently of the improved public hospitals and schools where medical treatment and education are now provided free of charge.
Venezuelans often ask if I am American. When I tell them that I am from Chicago they seem pleased and go out of their way to be helpful. I am writing from Playa El Yaque on the south coast of Isla Margarita, where American windsurfers in 1984 first discovered ideal sailing conditions with consistent strong winds and smooth seas. Since then it has become an international haven attracting windsurfers and kite-surfers from all over the world.
Driving through Caracas in a large American-made car from the 1980's, the taxi driver told me that Venezuela's cheap gasoline was "a gift" from Chávez. A gallon of gas costs less than 280 Bolivars, the equivalent of about 12 U.S. cents, and it costs less than $2 to fill the tank. Likewise, Venezuela provides subsidized oil and gas to dozens of nations throughout the Caribbean Basin and Latin America.
"Chávez is making friends while Bush is earning enmity," was the title of Andres Oppenheimer's article in The Miami Herald on February 9. "You don't have to be a genius to figure out why Washington is losing influence in Latin America," Oppenheimer wrote. "While Chávez is making headlines with vows to give about $3.7 billion a year to his neighbors, the Bush administration wants to cut back its estimated $1.2 billion in U.S. foreign aid to the region."
Hundreds of thousands of poor Americans in five Northeastern states have been on the receiving end of Venezuela's generosity. This winter alone, hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans from Pennsylvania and New York to Maine and Vermont have received more than 25 million gallons of subsidized heating oil for their homes.
"LYNCHING" CHÁVEZ
Late last year as oil prices spiked, a dozen U.S. senators asked 10 major oil companies to donate a portion of their record profits to help the poor. As USA Today reported, "Only Citgo [a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company] responded, dispatching tankers to housing projects in New York and Massachusetts in what Felix Rodriguez, the company president and chief executive, called a purely 'humanitarian' gesture.
"Rodriguez said that Chávez had ordered the giveaway so poor Americans wouldn't have to choose between food and heat."
But rather than showing appreciation, the USA Today article by David J. Lynch carried a photo of motorists pumping gas at a Citgo gas station with the alarming caption, "Chávez could destroy the U.S. economy in 90 days, an energy banker said."
"What if Chávez closed Citgo's refineries?" the CIA-linked newspaper asked?
"He'd only have to do that for 90 days, and he'd destroy our economy," Matthew Simmons, "a prominent energy investment banker," told Lynch. "He actually has our livelihood in his hands," Simmons said.
"At the high point of oil and gas prices, a dozen U.S. senators of both parties appealed to oil companies' 'sense of corporate citizenship' to help less fortunate Americans get through the winter in the face of cuts in federal assistance," Fadi Kabboul of the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington wrote to USA Today in response to the Lynch article. "Citgo did its part. No other oil company has done so. It makes the criticism in the article seem petty."
So why is the Bush administration so hostile to Chávez? Why is a government that shares its oil wealth with its people and neighbors considered a threat? Why is the foreign leader who was first to offer help to the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast viewed as harboring evil intentions by the controlled media and the federal government whose own response to the dire plight of its citizens has been called "late, uncertain and ineffective," by Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine)?
The answer to these questions is obvious. Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter with the largest proven reserves outside of the Mideast, has long been considered by the "big oil" companies as America's own privately-run gas station. Chávez, however, has put an end to foreign control and plundering of Venezuela's oil resources and the immense profits they generate. One does not have to look far to see that, over the decades, very little of this nation's oil wealth has trickled down to the average Venezuelan.
Venezuela is particularly strong in refining capacity. As I rode past the sprawling refinery outside of Puerto de la Cruz, I was amazed at the size of Venezuela's second largest refinery, which covers thousands of acres. Venezuela's largest refinery, the Paraguana Refining Center is five times larger with a capacity of nearly 1 million barrels per day.
Venezuela also owns a 50 percent equity interest in the Hovensa refinery on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which has a capacity of 500,000 barrels per day, and it leases the huge Emmastad refinery on the nearby island of Curacao. Over decades, most of the products produced at these refineries have been exported to the U.S.
The Bush administration and the "big oil" money behind it are clearly displeased with the change in ownership, the nationalization of Venezuela's oil fields, which Chávez brought about. These plutocrats are now engaged in an international political and propaganda campaign to malign the popular leader who has stood up to their global tyranny.
New Year's Day 2006 saw the return of Venezuelan state control over 32 privately operated oil fields. Venezuelan oil minister Rafael Ramirez said the state successfully completed "the recovery" of the 32 fields whose control had been ceded to private hands in the 1990s under concessions allowing companies to independently pump oil under contract.
In 2001, Venezuela passed a law requiring oil production to be carried out by companies majority-owned by the government. The deadline for converting the privately-owned operating agreements into joint ventures in which the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), would hold the controlling stake was Dec. 31.
While other oil companies went along with the conversions, Exxon Mobil Corp. of Irving, Texas, resisted the contract changes, the Associated Press reported on Jan. 4. The conversions to joint ventures with PDVSA "will significantly reduce the oil companies' share of profits and control over operations and could also undermine the value of their Venezuelan assets," AP reported.
Venezuela's stake could be as much as 90 percent in the new ventures. The amount of investment made by the private companies in the fields will determine the amount of control they have, Ramirez said
American Free Press
2-17-6
The Bush administration, which has demonstrated an appalling disregard for the rule of law and the welfare of its own people, is viciously attacking Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez, a populist leader who is using his nation's immense oil wealth to improve the lives of his people and his neighbors including many Americans.
ISLA MARGARITA, Venezuela The ongoing war of words being waged between the Bush administration and Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez was in full swing as I traveled from Miami to Caracas, the capital of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the outrageous comparison of Hugo Chávez with Adolf Hitler in the beginning of what The Washington Post reported as having been "an especially ugly week in the hostile relationship" between the Bush administration and the increasingly popular Chávez.
The week started with Venezuela expelling a U.S. naval attaché on charges of spying, which led to the expulsion of a senior Venezuelan diplomat from Washington, and ended with the U.S. blocking a deal in which Venezuela was to buy coastal patrol boats from Spain. While Spain had initially said it would replace the U.S.-made components on the boats with French-made parts, by the end of the week Spain had suddenly cancelled the lucrative contract with no explanation provided.
Rumsfeld, who serves under a president who was, in fact, not elected by the people, made a rather odd comment comparing two legally elected leaders: "Chávez was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally," Rumsfeld said, "And then consolidated his power." The "populist leadership" of Chávez, which appeals to "masses of people," Rumsfeld said,
is "worrisome" to the Bush administration.
After a week in Venezuela, however, I have yet to meet a Venezuelan who has expressed any worries or concerns about the populist reforms initiated by Chávez. The Venezuelans and foreigners I have met have nothing but praise for the wide-ranging improvements Chávez has brought to the people. They talk frequently of the improved public hospitals and schools where medical treatment and education are now provided free of charge.
Venezuelans often ask if I am American. When I tell them that I am from Chicago they seem pleased and go out of their way to be helpful. I am writing from Playa El Yaque on the south coast of Isla Margarita, where American windsurfers in 1984 first discovered ideal sailing conditions with consistent strong winds and smooth seas. Since then it has become an international haven attracting windsurfers and kite-surfers from all over the world.
Driving through Caracas in a large American-made car from the 1980's, the taxi driver told me that Venezuela's cheap gasoline was "a gift" from Chávez. A gallon of gas costs less than 280 Bolivars, the equivalent of about 12 U.S. cents, and it costs less than $2 to fill the tank. Likewise, Venezuela provides subsidized oil and gas to dozens of nations throughout the Caribbean Basin and Latin America.
"Chávez is making friends while Bush is earning enmity," was the title of Andres Oppenheimer's article in The Miami Herald on February 9. "You don't have to be a genius to figure out why Washington is losing influence in Latin America," Oppenheimer wrote. "While Chávez is making headlines with vows to give about $3.7 billion a year to his neighbors, the Bush administration wants to cut back its estimated $1.2 billion in U.S. foreign aid to the region."
Hundreds of thousands of poor Americans in five Northeastern states have been on the receiving end of Venezuela's generosity. This winter alone, hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans from Pennsylvania and New York to Maine and Vermont have received more than 25 million gallons of subsidized heating oil for their homes.
"LYNCHING" CHÁVEZ
Late last year as oil prices spiked, a dozen U.S. senators asked 10 major oil companies to donate a portion of their record profits to help the poor. As USA Today reported, "Only Citgo [a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company] responded, dispatching tankers to housing projects in New York and Massachusetts in what Felix Rodriguez, the company president and chief executive, called a purely 'humanitarian' gesture.
"Rodriguez said that Chávez had ordered the giveaway so poor Americans wouldn't have to choose between food and heat."
But rather than showing appreciation, the USA Today article by David J. Lynch carried a photo of motorists pumping gas at a Citgo gas station with the alarming caption, "Chávez could destroy the U.S. economy in 90 days, an energy banker said."
"What if Chávez closed Citgo's refineries?" the CIA-linked newspaper asked?
"He'd only have to do that for 90 days, and he'd destroy our economy," Matthew Simmons, "a prominent energy investment banker," told Lynch. "He actually has our livelihood in his hands," Simmons said.
"At the high point of oil and gas prices, a dozen U.S. senators of both parties appealed to oil companies' 'sense of corporate citizenship' to help less fortunate Americans get through the winter in the face of cuts in federal assistance," Fadi Kabboul of the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington wrote to USA Today in response to the Lynch article. "Citgo did its part. No other oil company has done so. It makes the criticism in the article seem petty."
So why is the Bush administration so hostile to Chávez? Why is a government that shares its oil wealth with its people and neighbors considered a threat? Why is the foreign leader who was first to offer help to the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast viewed as harboring evil intentions by the controlled media and the federal government whose own response to the dire plight of its citizens has been called "late, uncertain and ineffective," by Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine)?
The answer to these questions is obvious. Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter with the largest proven reserves outside of the Mideast, has long been considered by the "big oil" companies as America's own privately-run gas station. Chávez, however, has put an end to foreign control and plundering of Venezuela's oil resources and the immense profits they generate. One does not have to look far to see that, over the decades, very little of this nation's oil wealth has trickled down to the average Venezuelan.
Venezuela is particularly strong in refining capacity. As I rode past the sprawling refinery outside of Puerto de la Cruz, I was amazed at the size of Venezuela's second largest refinery, which covers thousands of acres. Venezuela's largest refinery, the Paraguana Refining Center is five times larger with a capacity of nearly 1 million barrels per day.
Venezuela also owns a 50 percent equity interest in the Hovensa refinery on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which has a capacity of 500,000 barrels per day, and it leases the huge Emmastad refinery on the nearby island of Curacao. Over decades, most of the products produced at these refineries have been exported to the U.S.
The Bush administration and the "big oil" money behind it are clearly displeased with the change in ownership, the nationalization of Venezuela's oil fields, which Chávez brought about. These plutocrats are now engaged in an international political and propaganda campaign to malign the popular leader who has stood up to their global tyranny.
New Year's Day 2006 saw the return of Venezuelan state control over 32 privately operated oil fields. Venezuelan oil minister Rafael Ramirez said the state successfully completed "the recovery" of the 32 fields whose control had been ceded to private hands in the 1990s under concessions allowing companies to independently pump oil under contract.
In 2001, Venezuela passed a law requiring oil production to be carried out by companies majority-owned by the government. The deadline for converting the privately-owned operating agreements into joint ventures in which the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), would hold the controlling stake was Dec. 31.
While other oil companies went along with the conversions, Exxon Mobil Corp. of Irving, Texas, resisted the contract changes, the Associated Press reported on Jan. 4. The conversions to joint ventures with PDVSA "will significantly reduce the oil companies' share of profits and control over operations and could also undermine the value of their Venezuelan assets," AP reported.
Venezuela's stake could be as much as 90 percent in the new ventures. The amount of investment made by the private companies in the fields will determine the amount of control they have, Ramirez said
Monday, June 06, 2005
"Globalization is broken"
By Clyde Prestowitz
Jun 2, 2005, 08:14
first published by Axis of Logic
American pressure on Beijing to revalue the yuan is now dominating the news, but China is following Japan as a manifestation of a much bigger problem. Globalization is broken. As now structured, it is undermining U.S. productive capability and becoming unsustainable.
Without fundamental change in the rules of globalization, any conceivable yuan revaluation now won't have much impact on world economic imbalances. Remember that in the 1980s economists said a revaluation of the Japanese yen between 20 percent and 30 percent would balance trade. But the yen has more than doubled since then, and Japan still maintains a large trade surplus both globally and with the United States, as do all of the world's major economies.
The real problem is that globalization is a different game for many countries than it is for America. While China's peg of the yuan to the dollar is now the focus of criticism, most Asian countries have long managed their currencies to keep them weak against the dollar in order to stimulate their exports. Japan has spent over $300 billion in currency intervention in recent years to keep the dollar up and the yen and export prices down. In addition, many countries offer tax holidays, financial incentives and protected markets to attract new facilities in "strategic" industries that no one expects to move just because currencies fluctuate.
These actions follow from policies specifically aimed at accumulating large trade and dollar surpluses as a matter both of stimulating growth from exports and of assuring national economic sovereignty by avoiding dependence on foreign lenders.
While U.S. state governors extend financial incentives to attract investment, they have only peanuts to offer compared with foreign countries and of course, do not control their own currencies. The federal government has long shown no interest in attracting foreign factories to its shores or keeping U.S. factories there. Rather, America's emphasis is entirely on consumption-led growth. Banks aggressively offer credit cards to students with only part-time jobs. Home equity loans with tax-deductible interest payments are used to pay for vacation trips. Not only does the White House call for tax cuts in war time, but tells consumers it's their patriotic duty to buy more. Americans at all levels really do believe that debt and deficits don't matter.
The confluence of America's consumerism with the strategic, export-led growth policies of many other countries has produced a world with one net consumer, the United States, which now consumes about $700 billion a year more than it produces. All other major economies are net sellers, depending directly or indirectly on U.S.-bound exports for much or all of their growth. Because America consumes more than it makes, it must borrow from abroad to finance its excess consumption. In a kind of vendor finance program, a few foreign central banks provide the financing by buying U.S. Treasury bills and other U.S. assets.
Thus, globalization has evolved into a kind of pyramid scheme. To maintain global growth, the United States must consume and borrow ever more while foreign banks buy ever more U.S. Treasuries so their producers can export ever more.
America has long been ambivalent about this situation. Consumers love the low import prices, U.S. chief executives love the foreign tax holidays and the U.S. government loves the foreign lending that helps keep U.S. interest rates low. But the chronically overvalued dollar and the foreign investment incentives also cause a steady transfer of production and technology abroad while putting downward pressure on wages and building large foreign claims on future U.S. income. This results in political pressures and U.S. charges of unfairness against trading partners with big surpluses. In the past, cosmetic fixes like "voluntary" export restraint agreements were used to relieve pressure while the fundamental forces kept operating until the next fix.
Now the sustainability of the system has been put into question by the entrance of three billion new players from China, India and the former Soviet bloc at a moment when the Internet and global air express have negated time and distance along with the long standard economic assumptions that labor, capital and technology don't move between countries.
These new players are unusual. While having the low wages of developing countries, several hundred million of them have first-world skills. That they are effectively next door and also planning to grow by exporting to U.S. markets dramatically increases the pressure on an already stressed system. Even for America there are ultimate limits on consumption and borrowing. U.S. borrowing already absorbs 80 percent of the world's available savings. At 100 percent, the global economy will be in deep crisis.
The only way to avoid that is to insist that the globalization game be played the same way by all its players. Sure, China needs to revalue, but without other big changes, globalization as we know it will be on life support.
(Clyde Prestowitz is the author of ''Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East.'')
Jun 2, 2005, 08:14
first published by Axis of Logic
American pressure on Beijing to revalue the yuan is now dominating the news, but China is following Japan as a manifestation of a much bigger problem. Globalization is broken. As now structured, it is undermining U.S. productive capability and becoming unsustainable.
Without fundamental change in the rules of globalization, any conceivable yuan revaluation now won't have much impact on world economic imbalances. Remember that in the 1980s economists said a revaluation of the Japanese yen between 20 percent and 30 percent would balance trade. But the yen has more than doubled since then, and Japan still maintains a large trade surplus both globally and with the United States, as do all of the world's major economies.
The real problem is that globalization is a different game for many countries than it is for America. While China's peg of the yuan to the dollar is now the focus of criticism, most Asian countries have long managed their currencies to keep them weak against the dollar in order to stimulate their exports. Japan has spent over $300 billion in currency intervention in recent years to keep the dollar up and the yen and export prices down. In addition, many countries offer tax holidays, financial incentives and protected markets to attract new facilities in "strategic" industries that no one expects to move just because currencies fluctuate.
These actions follow from policies specifically aimed at accumulating large trade and dollar surpluses as a matter both of stimulating growth from exports and of assuring national economic sovereignty by avoiding dependence on foreign lenders.
While U.S. state governors extend financial incentives to attract investment, they have only peanuts to offer compared with foreign countries and of course, do not control their own currencies. The federal government has long shown no interest in attracting foreign factories to its shores or keeping U.S. factories there. Rather, America's emphasis is entirely on consumption-led growth. Banks aggressively offer credit cards to students with only part-time jobs. Home equity loans with tax-deductible interest payments are used to pay for vacation trips. Not only does the White House call for tax cuts in war time, but tells consumers it's their patriotic duty to buy more. Americans at all levels really do believe that debt and deficits don't matter.
The confluence of America's consumerism with the strategic, export-led growth policies of many other countries has produced a world with one net consumer, the United States, which now consumes about $700 billion a year more than it produces. All other major economies are net sellers, depending directly or indirectly on U.S.-bound exports for much or all of their growth. Because America consumes more than it makes, it must borrow from abroad to finance its excess consumption. In a kind of vendor finance program, a few foreign central banks provide the financing by buying U.S. Treasury bills and other U.S. assets.
Thus, globalization has evolved into a kind of pyramid scheme. To maintain global growth, the United States must consume and borrow ever more while foreign banks buy ever more U.S. Treasuries so their producers can export ever more.
America has long been ambivalent about this situation. Consumers love the low import prices, U.S. chief executives love the foreign tax holidays and the U.S. government loves the foreign lending that helps keep U.S. interest rates low. But the chronically overvalued dollar and the foreign investment incentives also cause a steady transfer of production and technology abroad while putting downward pressure on wages and building large foreign claims on future U.S. income. This results in political pressures and U.S. charges of unfairness against trading partners with big surpluses. In the past, cosmetic fixes like "voluntary" export restraint agreements were used to relieve pressure while the fundamental forces kept operating until the next fix.
Now the sustainability of the system has been put into question by the entrance of three billion new players from China, India and the former Soviet bloc at a moment when the Internet and global air express have negated time and distance along with the long standard economic assumptions that labor, capital and technology don't move between countries.
These new players are unusual. While having the low wages of developing countries, several hundred million of them have first-world skills. That they are effectively next door and also planning to grow by exporting to U.S. markets dramatically increases the pressure on an already stressed system. Even for America there are ultimate limits on consumption and borrowing. U.S. borrowing already absorbs 80 percent of the world's available savings. At 100 percent, the global economy will be in deep crisis.
The only way to avoid that is to insist that the globalization game be played the same way by all its players. Sure, China needs to revalue, but without other big changes, globalization as we know it will be on life support.
(Clyde Prestowitz is the author of ''Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East.'')
Friday, May 27, 2005
Psychiatrist Blows The Lid On Antidepressants
By Jon Rappoport
NoMoreFakeNews.com
5-27-5
For the past year, I've been receiving communications from a practicing American psychiatrist, who has an office in the southeastern US. He sees patients privately and also works at a large hospital. Increasingly, this man has been expressing doubts about the drugs he has been prescribing.
Now, he has blown the lid off his own profession, and it appears he is ready to switch careers or become an alternative practitioner.
Here is an excerpt from our recent conversation:
Q: Why do you doubt the drugs?
A: They're toxic and injurious.
Q: Which ones?
A: All of them.
Q: And in particular?
A: The antidepressants. Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, and so on. They are not showing, on balance, good results, and patients have been experiencing adverse effects.
Q: Such as?
A: Sleeplessness, nightmares, erratic behavior, highs and lows, crashes, attempts to commit suicide, exacerbated depression, violence, dramatic personality changes.
Q: Why do you think this is happening?
A: To be honest, I don't know. But my sense is, in general, that the drugs interfere in unpredictable ways with various neurotransmitter systems. I also believe they can work extreme changes in blood sugar levels and electrolyte levels. You know, it's not hard to create these effects with chemicals. The body is not able to integrate them in its normal functioning. I would compare it to suddenly setting up all sorts of roadblocks and detours and forced lane changes on a busy highway. You will get big trouble.
Q: Have you tried to communicate your concerns to colleagues and medical groups?
A: For a short time, I did. But I was given the cold shoulder. I got the distinct feeling I was being treated like some wayward child who had his facts all wrong.
Q: Who do you blame for this drugging catastrophe?
A: At the moment, everybody. The doctors, the drug companies, the FDA, the psychiatric teaching institutions, even the press. And at some point, patients are going to have to take responsibility and not follow the orders of their doctors.
Q: Do you believe that doctors should cut back and give the drugs to some people and not others?
A: That sounds good, but there is no way to know what effects the drugs will cause in any given individual, especially as time passes. Even in the short term, I have seen some frightening things.
Q: Do you believe the profession of psychiatry has made some kind of overarching deal with the drug companies?
A: Yes. The drug companies are everywhere. They stick their noses into everyone's business.
Q: What lies about the drugs have you had to purge from your own mind?
A: The main one is that they're some kind of miracle breakthrough. Another one is that I can rely on the judgments and certifications of the FDA. We're playing Russian Roulette out here. It's a very dangerous situation.
Q: Do you believe that some of the school shootings have resulted from children being on the antidepressants?
A: I didn't, until one day a sixteen-year-old patient of mine showed up for his appointment with a 9mm hand gun. Then I began to comb back through reports on a bunch of those shootings. I can tell you, it focuses the mind to see a young patient sitting across from you---you've put him on an antidepressant and now he's talking about "a new day" and he takes the gun out of his pocket and lays it on a table next to him by the Kleenex. You think to yourself, "I may have created a killer and his first victim could be me." People want to outlaw all guns. I'd start with the drugs.
Q: How about the diagnosis of depression itself?
A: I've come to realize that you can't do an interview with a patient and then come out with a shorthand assessment. It's wrong. It reduces all sorts of problems down to a label, and then you have your official gateway into the drugs.
Q: Your colleagues think you're over-reacting?
A: I think I'm under-reacting. I think we have an epidemic on our hands, but it has nothing to do with mental disorders. It has to do with the chemicals we're facilitating.
Q: This boy with the gun---were you able to talk him down?
A: I spent two hours with him that day. I told him he was having a reaction to the drug. At first, it made no sense to him. He was on a manic sort of ride. That really scared me---that I couldn't make him see what was happening to him. He was in the middle of an episode and he couldn't stand outside it. Finally, he eased up a little. He began to weep in my office. It wasn't really crying. Tears just ran down his cheeks while he was talking. He didn't seem to notice them. He had almost stopped being human. He was a...creature. He was on a mission of some kind. His view of the world had totally changed. In his mind set, destruction was the only course of action.
Q: And then?
A: He calmed down a little. I was afraid to ask him for the gun. He just picked it up and put it back in his pocket. After he left, I called his mother. She went home from her job and met him. I had asked her to call the police but she wouldn't. Later, she told me she sat and talked with him for a long time and then he handed over the gun. It was a very tense situation. I had her remove the bottle of pills from her medicine cabinet. Then I had to follow up. I weaned him slowly from the drug. It took two months. He finally sort of returned to being the person he was. Even then I wasn't sure he'd be okay. He was definitely addicted to the drug. Luckily, I didn't cut him off suddenly. He might have killed people during the withdrawal cycle.
Q: Did you continue to see this boy as a patient?
A: I did a nutritional assessment with the help of a doctor who is very good with that. We found the boy was having strange reactions to certain soft drinks that have speed-type boosters in them. We gradually weaned him off them. Then we discovered he was reacting to dyes and other chemicals in junk food. So we had to change his diet. That wasn't easy.
Q: He was addicted in several ways to chemicals.
A: That's right. There was peer pressure for him to keep eating junk. All his friends did. They called him weird for going off the food they were eating every day. Finally, I discovered that, five years before I saw him, he'd been on Ritalin for a year. You know, for ADHD. He'd been driven into depression by that. He basically felt, at eleven, that his life was over. All paths and interests were closed to him.
Q: How is he now?
A: Much better. But he's not all the way back.
Q: Do you think there is permanent brain damage?
A: I don't know. He's now living outside the US with his father. I get reports once in awhile.
Q: How does he feel about his own experience?
A: He wants it to be an example to other families.
Q: You didn't go into medicine to deal with this.
A: No. In school, my ideals were high. But I allowed myself to be led down the garden path. I fell for the sales pitch. I'm telling you, this is not a good situation. We are a society on the brink. Something has to be done.
Q: How do you feel about Bush's mental health screening program for all children?
A: All in all, it may turn out to be the worst thing he's done as president. It's just a tip of his hat to his pharmaceutical supporters. But the consequences---if this plan gets rolling---will be devastating.
Q: Is there some underlying principle at work here? Some paradigm that everyone is accepting that is putting us into a bad situation?
A: You know the answer to that. It's the combination of easy diagnosis plus the drug fix. The pill craze for everything. Take a drug and everything will work out. I see it as the classic street-drug promotion. Feel good. Take this drug and you'll feel different and better. Combine that with the basic immaturity of most people and you have the interlock. Why work out your problems and strive to have the life you want when you can arrive at the best destination with a pill? I'd take this a step further. If you stacked up all the tranquilizers and antidepressants, for adults, next to, say, marijuana, as a way of dealing with stress, I'd say that a very modest amount of a mild marijuana would be more successful than all those other drugs at the levels they're normally prescribed. If I were forced to recommend one or the other, I'd go with the marijuana. And I'd say the drug companies know this. Which is one reason why, in the US, the enforcement on marijuana has been stepping up. But again, you're always dealing with an individual. Each person is different. I've seen people who react very badly to pot. It affects them like a psychedelic.
Q: You're saying the science behind the antidepressants is false.
A: Absolutely. Judging by the effects of the drugs, it has to be. It may sound good and proper. All the right words are used. But I don't care about that anymore. I go by results. My eyes have been opened.
Q: Then why are the drug companies pushing these drugs?
A: I'm not an expert to speak to about that. Certainly there is the profit motive. But I think there is also the myth of progress.
Q: What do you mean?
A: That myth states that technology must keep making advances. It's the legend of forward motion. If technology is to be seen as good, it has to keep turning out better advances---otherwise something is wrong. And there can't be anything wrong.
Q: It's like a hectic race.
A: Yes. If you stop, you might fall down. Secrets might be exposed. Shortcomings might show up. So you have to keep pushing. You have to keep saying you're doing better and better. I'm sure you can see where this gets you. You make new mistakes to cover up old mistakes. You become careless. You lie. You hire promotion people to tout your work. You keep the whole thing rolling forward, no matter what. That's where we are.
Q: And you were carried on that wave.
A: For many years. But now I've stopped.
Q: Is it uncomfortable?
A: Not so much anymore. But at first I was very upset and angry. I was blaming everyone but myself. I felt like I was in chains, that my whole education and career were at stake. And I was my career. What else did I have? Getting off the boat was quite difficult. I had every advantage this society has to offer. I was---
Q: The expert.
A: Yes. That's a powerful feeling. People come to you with questions and you have the answers. If you don't, then you're thrown down in the pit with everyone else. Part of being a doctor is being above the pit, out of the problem. You're the solution. You don't want to fall. And the only thing that keeps you from falling is what you've learned. Your knowledge. When you see that that's based on lies, you don't know what to do. It's like being a priest and realizing that everyone gets to the far shore by his own means. You don't want to let go of the doctrine that put you on the pulpit.
Q: So what would a new paradigm look like?
A: For mental health? We have to get rid of all the old classsifications and disorders. We have to let all that sink into oblivion. That was wrong. That was largely fantasy.
Q: It was a story.
A: We told it, and now we have to stop telling it. Because we've ended up intervening in people's lives in a very pernicious way.
Q: Part of the story necessitated that kind of intervention.
A: Yes. And, not to take myself off the hook, but people want that kind of story, as you say. They want that "expert story." They want someone else to come in and tell them what to do and what to think and what drug to take.
Q: Why do you think that is?
A: Because people have taken the easy path. They have opted for what I would call a flat version of reality. If they started adding dimensions on their own---
Q: They would be forced to tell their own story.
A: In the terms you're using, yes. That's what would happen.
Q: And how would society look then?
A: Much different. Much more risky, perhaps, but much more alive. Psychology and psychiatry don't allow for that kind of outcome. All mental disorders are constructs. They're named by committees, as I'm sure you know. They're a form of centralized pattern. In this context, the word "shrink" is very appropriate. That's what we've been doing. Shrinking down the perception of what reality and the mind are all about.
Q: Can you imagine what would happen if the lid were taken off?
A: I work with that idea every day now.
Q: And how does it look?
A: More and more appealing.
NoMoreFakeNews.com
5-27-5
For the past year, I've been receiving communications from a practicing American psychiatrist, who has an office in the southeastern US. He sees patients privately and also works at a large hospital. Increasingly, this man has been expressing doubts about the drugs he has been prescribing.
Now, he has blown the lid off his own profession, and it appears he is ready to switch careers or become an alternative practitioner.
Here is an excerpt from our recent conversation:
Q: Why do you doubt the drugs?
A: They're toxic and injurious.
Q: Which ones?
A: All of them.
Q: And in particular?
A: The antidepressants. Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, and so on. They are not showing, on balance, good results, and patients have been experiencing adverse effects.
Q: Such as?
A: Sleeplessness, nightmares, erratic behavior, highs and lows, crashes, attempts to commit suicide, exacerbated depression, violence, dramatic personality changes.
Q: Why do you think this is happening?
A: To be honest, I don't know. But my sense is, in general, that the drugs interfere in unpredictable ways with various neurotransmitter systems. I also believe they can work extreme changes in blood sugar levels and electrolyte levels. You know, it's not hard to create these effects with chemicals. The body is not able to integrate them in its normal functioning. I would compare it to suddenly setting up all sorts of roadblocks and detours and forced lane changes on a busy highway. You will get big trouble.
Q: Have you tried to communicate your concerns to colleagues and medical groups?
A: For a short time, I did. But I was given the cold shoulder. I got the distinct feeling I was being treated like some wayward child who had his facts all wrong.
Q: Who do you blame for this drugging catastrophe?
A: At the moment, everybody. The doctors, the drug companies, the FDA, the psychiatric teaching institutions, even the press. And at some point, patients are going to have to take responsibility and not follow the orders of their doctors.
Q: Do you believe that doctors should cut back and give the drugs to some people and not others?
A: That sounds good, but there is no way to know what effects the drugs will cause in any given individual, especially as time passes. Even in the short term, I have seen some frightening things.
Q: Do you believe the profession of psychiatry has made some kind of overarching deal with the drug companies?
A: Yes. The drug companies are everywhere. They stick their noses into everyone's business.
Q: What lies about the drugs have you had to purge from your own mind?
A: The main one is that they're some kind of miracle breakthrough. Another one is that I can rely on the judgments and certifications of the FDA. We're playing Russian Roulette out here. It's a very dangerous situation.
Q: Do you believe that some of the school shootings have resulted from children being on the antidepressants?
A: I didn't, until one day a sixteen-year-old patient of mine showed up for his appointment with a 9mm hand gun. Then I began to comb back through reports on a bunch of those shootings. I can tell you, it focuses the mind to see a young patient sitting across from you---you've put him on an antidepressant and now he's talking about "a new day" and he takes the gun out of his pocket and lays it on a table next to him by the Kleenex. You think to yourself, "I may have created a killer and his first victim could be me." People want to outlaw all guns. I'd start with the drugs.
Q: How about the diagnosis of depression itself?
A: I've come to realize that you can't do an interview with a patient and then come out with a shorthand assessment. It's wrong. It reduces all sorts of problems down to a label, and then you have your official gateway into the drugs.
Q: Your colleagues think you're over-reacting?
A: I think I'm under-reacting. I think we have an epidemic on our hands, but it has nothing to do with mental disorders. It has to do with the chemicals we're facilitating.
Q: This boy with the gun---were you able to talk him down?
A: I spent two hours with him that day. I told him he was having a reaction to the drug. At first, it made no sense to him. He was on a manic sort of ride. That really scared me---that I couldn't make him see what was happening to him. He was in the middle of an episode and he couldn't stand outside it. Finally, he eased up a little. He began to weep in my office. It wasn't really crying. Tears just ran down his cheeks while he was talking. He didn't seem to notice them. He had almost stopped being human. He was a...creature. He was on a mission of some kind. His view of the world had totally changed. In his mind set, destruction was the only course of action.
Q: And then?
A: He calmed down a little. I was afraid to ask him for the gun. He just picked it up and put it back in his pocket. After he left, I called his mother. She went home from her job and met him. I had asked her to call the police but she wouldn't. Later, she told me she sat and talked with him for a long time and then he handed over the gun. It was a very tense situation. I had her remove the bottle of pills from her medicine cabinet. Then I had to follow up. I weaned him slowly from the drug. It took two months. He finally sort of returned to being the person he was. Even then I wasn't sure he'd be okay. He was definitely addicted to the drug. Luckily, I didn't cut him off suddenly. He might have killed people during the withdrawal cycle.
Q: Did you continue to see this boy as a patient?
A: I did a nutritional assessment with the help of a doctor who is very good with that. We found the boy was having strange reactions to certain soft drinks that have speed-type boosters in them. We gradually weaned him off them. Then we discovered he was reacting to dyes and other chemicals in junk food. So we had to change his diet. That wasn't easy.
Q: He was addicted in several ways to chemicals.
A: That's right. There was peer pressure for him to keep eating junk. All his friends did. They called him weird for going off the food they were eating every day. Finally, I discovered that, five years before I saw him, he'd been on Ritalin for a year. You know, for ADHD. He'd been driven into depression by that. He basically felt, at eleven, that his life was over. All paths and interests were closed to him.
Q: How is he now?
A: Much better. But he's not all the way back.
Q: Do you think there is permanent brain damage?
A: I don't know. He's now living outside the US with his father. I get reports once in awhile.
Q: How does he feel about his own experience?
A: He wants it to be an example to other families.
Q: You didn't go into medicine to deal with this.
A: No. In school, my ideals were high. But I allowed myself to be led down the garden path. I fell for the sales pitch. I'm telling you, this is not a good situation. We are a society on the brink. Something has to be done.
Q: How do you feel about Bush's mental health screening program for all children?
A: All in all, it may turn out to be the worst thing he's done as president. It's just a tip of his hat to his pharmaceutical supporters. But the consequences---if this plan gets rolling---will be devastating.
Q: Is there some underlying principle at work here? Some paradigm that everyone is accepting that is putting us into a bad situation?
A: You know the answer to that. It's the combination of easy diagnosis plus the drug fix. The pill craze for everything. Take a drug and everything will work out. I see it as the classic street-drug promotion. Feel good. Take this drug and you'll feel different and better. Combine that with the basic immaturity of most people and you have the interlock. Why work out your problems and strive to have the life you want when you can arrive at the best destination with a pill? I'd take this a step further. If you stacked up all the tranquilizers and antidepressants, for adults, next to, say, marijuana, as a way of dealing with stress, I'd say that a very modest amount of a mild marijuana would be more successful than all those other drugs at the levels they're normally prescribed. If I were forced to recommend one or the other, I'd go with the marijuana. And I'd say the drug companies know this. Which is one reason why, in the US, the enforcement on marijuana has been stepping up. But again, you're always dealing with an individual. Each person is different. I've seen people who react very badly to pot. It affects them like a psychedelic.
Q: You're saying the science behind the antidepressants is false.
A: Absolutely. Judging by the effects of the drugs, it has to be. It may sound good and proper. All the right words are used. But I don't care about that anymore. I go by results. My eyes have been opened.
Q: Then why are the drug companies pushing these drugs?
A: I'm not an expert to speak to about that. Certainly there is the profit motive. But I think there is also the myth of progress.
Q: What do you mean?
A: That myth states that technology must keep making advances. It's the legend of forward motion. If technology is to be seen as good, it has to keep turning out better advances---otherwise something is wrong. And there can't be anything wrong.
Q: It's like a hectic race.
A: Yes. If you stop, you might fall down. Secrets might be exposed. Shortcomings might show up. So you have to keep pushing. You have to keep saying you're doing better and better. I'm sure you can see where this gets you. You make new mistakes to cover up old mistakes. You become careless. You lie. You hire promotion people to tout your work. You keep the whole thing rolling forward, no matter what. That's where we are.
Q: And you were carried on that wave.
A: For many years. But now I've stopped.
Q: Is it uncomfortable?
A: Not so much anymore. But at first I was very upset and angry. I was blaming everyone but myself. I felt like I was in chains, that my whole education and career were at stake. And I was my career. What else did I have? Getting off the boat was quite difficult. I had every advantage this society has to offer. I was---
Q: The expert.
A: Yes. That's a powerful feeling. People come to you with questions and you have the answers. If you don't, then you're thrown down in the pit with everyone else. Part of being a doctor is being above the pit, out of the problem. You're the solution. You don't want to fall. And the only thing that keeps you from falling is what you've learned. Your knowledge. When you see that that's based on lies, you don't know what to do. It's like being a priest and realizing that everyone gets to the far shore by his own means. You don't want to let go of the doctrine that put you on the pulpit.
Q: So what would a new paradigm look like?
A: For mental health? We have to get rid of all the old classsifications and disorders. We have to let all that sink into oblivion. That was wrong. That was largely fantasy.
Q: It was a story.
A: We told it, and now we have to stop telling it. Because we've ended up intervening in people's lives in a very pernicious way.
Q: Part of the story necessitated that kind of intervention.
A: Yes. And, not to take myself off the hook, but people want that kind of story, as you say. They want that "expert story." They want someone else to come in and tell them what to do and what to think and what drug to take.
Q: Why do you think that is?
A: Because people have taken the easy path. They have opted for what I would call a flat version of reality. If they started adding dimensions on their own---
Q: They would be forced to tell their own story.
A: In the terms you're using, yes. That's what would happen.
Q: And how would society look then?
A: Much different. Much more risky, perhaps, but much more alive. Psychology and psychiatry don't allow for that kind of outcome. All mental disorders are constructs. They're named by committees, as I'm sure you know. They're a form of centralized pattern. In this context, the word "shrink" is very appropriate. That's what we've been doing. Shrinking down the perception of what reality and the mind are all about.
Q: Can you imagine what would happen if the lid were taken off?
A: I work with that idea every day now.
Q: And how does it look?
A: More and more appealing.
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