The world of banking and monetary systems can seem too much to grasp as but John Kenneth Galbraith points out:
“The study of money, above all other fields in economics,
is one in which complexity is used to disguise
or to evade truth, not to reveal it”
The concept of money: the tragedy and the hope
When you open your mind to the question it is actually quite simple. Small groups millennia ago usurped the concept of “money” - which was a token of exchange value - by sophistry and deception. They deceived people into believing it was a commodity (along with land and labour) See intro to Polany - What is Money?
However its origins, to quote the N American indigenous people’s Lakota Bank:
“Money is only made possible by those that produce”
A Ponzi scheme
On inspection we see that the global economy today is an arcane and glorified Ponzi scheme based on the exponential growth of fiat debt. The core problem mathematically is usury or interest charges.
Modern debt money is typed into existence out of nothing by private banks and as the interest on the principle is not existing in the societal “money pool” more debt has to be created to enable repayment.
When the Amsterdam bank institutionalised this con trick in 1600’s, by handwritten ledger entries, it lead to rapid expansion of the European economy – the exploitation of South and North America and indirectly the Industrial Revolution. The core problem politically is that the world it creates is in the image and for the benefit of the unaccountable private families that control the banking system.
The current debt based money system is based on exploitation of people and planet and it is inherently exponential. It therefore necessitates an insatiable and rapacious consumption of the natural systems that sustain us.
“The greatest short coming of the human race is our
inability to understand the exponential function”
A.A. Bartlett, physicist.
The synonym for usury is slavery
It also forces us to carry a quite unnecessary burden of interest charges on absolutely everything - government finances, education, housing, food, hospitals, technology, consumer products, clothing, recreation etc. We pay bank owners a % on every monetary transaction we make throughout our entire lives. Only the bankers and their owners benefit.
The Green Party’s Money policy
The Green Party has now taken an enormous step forward by inviting us all to step outside the entrenched dystopian (for the majority) political and economic status quo. Now we have the opportunity to change the notion and structure of what we call money.
The Party is urging us to work for an equitable, honest and sustainable social system that can transcend the existing corrupt economic paradigm. This new social system will move beyond the bankers measures of progress - based on GDP - which in the words of Robert Kennedy:
“measures everything, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
The banking / debt crisis
Economic thinking should have been shaken up in 2008 with the financial collapse but instead governments propped up the whole corrupt edifice. Since then, the US Green Party has lead the way in adopting radical monetary policies. The UK Green Party followed in 2013 voting for similar radical new monetary policies.
These policies are the work of many money reformers over the years including American Monetary Institute and our own James Robinson, founder of the New Economics Foundation.
In short, the Green Party will take the power to create money from private banks, passing that power to public hands. It will radically diminish the negative effect of interest charges on our society. The national currency will be issued largely free of debt or interest by the state, at a national and local level. These policies will arm the British people with the greatest opportunity to create an enriching, equitable and sustainable future for us and our children.
''The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but also the government's greatest creative opportunity.
By the adoption of these principles the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity"
Abraham Lincoln
Real Money
Real money, created by and for the people, will be directed to environmentally and socially beneficial areas such as: a radically revamped education system shaped by Finnish ideas , renewable energy, social housing, agriculture, horticulture, a massively expanded market gardening system reflecting the ideas coming from the UN, Russia and other sources. That means taking back the power to feed and sustain ourselves - local food production, owned by locals, to feed local people healthy chemical free food.
A local & national banking system will provide loans / investment for public capital projects, affordable mortgages, loans / funding / micro-credit for students, for benign market activity and massive support for community and small businesses, and provided wider ownership is thereby furthered, for private capital investment – creative, enriching, sustainable investment – benefiting all society.
Now we have a political party with an “economic approach” which can regenerate our Earth by nurturing a biosphere that is safe and healthy for us all to live, create, play and learn in harmony rather than destructive competition and conflict.
I hope the reader will be inspired study more. Without a broad societal understanding of the money system there can be no hope of meaningful change.
We live in very dangerous times. The MONEY POWER and the system it controls is the material mechanism at the root of all our problems.
“An immense power & despotic economic dictatorship
is concentrated in the hands of a few -
no one can breathe against their will”
Pope Pius xi (1931)
He was right about the dictatorship but was he wrong in his defeatism? I’ll remind you of the words of Steve Biko:
“The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor
is the mind of the oppressed.”
Of course that raises the question as to how we perceive oppression - are we relatively “comfortable” Europeans actually free?
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those
who falsely believe they are free”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We can open that door to a wonderful new chapter in the evolution of Planet Earth.
John Yates:
Green Party member Exeter / Mid Devon
Custodian of meadow and woodlands in Exeter City, a Field of Dreams.
[Please note that the 2015 manifesto presents some of the above as policies for Green MP's to campaign for if elected to Parliament. The full power of the Party's conference policies can only be achieved by mass involvement in demanding that the obsolete banking system be replaced by an accountable national treasury controlling money for the good of all]
For several years I screened Money as Debt – a basic introduction to usury and money. Many found it transformed people's understanding of money. I found Steven Zarlenga’s book “Lost Science of Money” influential in grasping the historical context.
An introduction to: Just click away ......
* books,
Google reveals many films and video shorts.
Above all you have to inquire yourself to make the change.
