Time ▾ Price ▴ Research: Usury

Showing posts with label Usury. Show all posts

Thursday, September 12, 2024

Financial Oligarchies vs. State Power | Michael Hudson

My articles about the origins of credit, money, and interest share a common frame of reference. From the inception of economic practices and enterprise in the ancient Near East, through classical antiquity and medieval Europe to today, wealthy classes have sought to transform themselves into an oligarchy that controls government and religion to protect, legitimize, and increase their wealth, especially their rent-extraction privileges as creditors, monopolists, or landlords.

Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 – 53 BC):

general, statesman, the richest man in Rome, and a textbook oligarch.

We see the same struggle through the ages, with financial elites opposing any government power capable of restricting their self-serving rent-seeking and creditor power at society’s expense. We see it today in the pro-creditor economic policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the ‘libertarian’ ideology, all of which seek to centralize power to allocate resources and plan economies within the financial sector instead of democratic governments. Today’s neoliberal idea is to eliminate government authority (except where it is controlled by rentier sectors) and let banks in the privatized financial sector control money and credit, which is the most important public utility.

That should be the context in which one examines every epoch’s economic view of the world, above all its perspective concerning how ‘free’ a market should be and just whose freedom is being endorsed. This has been the great question throughout the history of civilization—from the Bronze Age Near East, when rulers regularly proclaimed Clean Slates debt cancellations to restore economic order and check incipient oligarchies, through the five centuries of civil war in the Roman Republic and Jesus’s fight against the emerging Jewish oligarchy, to today’s civilizational struggle between the NATO West, dominated by U.S.-oriented rentier oligarchies, and the global majority now centered on the BRICS.

Rare Anomaly: Populist Pariah Oligarchs Proclaiming to Serve the Common Good — September 2, 2024.

China’s government has financed its remarkable industrial takeoff without having to borrow from private creditors. There was little money to borrow from its domestic population, so the Bank of China printed its own money. Unlike typical financial practice, it did not demand personal wealth be pledged as collateral because stock and bond holdings or substantial real estate did not yet exist. The government did not need to turn to bondholders to increase its public spending—and in any case, there were no domestic bondholders to borrow from in the wake of its Revolution. China did what any sovereign national government can do—what Abraham Lincoln did in the Civil War. It simply printed the money.

Quoted from:
Michael Hudson (September 1, 2024) - Reshaping Christianity and the Modern State: A Journey from Usury to Fiscal Power.

Friday, August 23, 2024

The Central Bank of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi | Stephen M. Goodson

From 1551 to 1911 Libya was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, by Italy from 1911 to 1943 and from 1943 to 1951 was under the military suzerainty of Britain and France. The Central Bank of Libya was founded in 1956 and was run as a typical central bank until the bloodless coup d’etat of 1 September 1969.

Mu’ammar Qathafi - A strict disciple of the Holy Q’uran, who abolished all forms of usury
and used the Central Bank of Libya for the sole benefit of the Libyan people.

Oil of an exceptionally high quality was discovered in 1959. However, King Idris al Mahdi as-Sanusi failed to capitalise on this bonanza or use it for the benefit of his people, and the bulk of the oil profits were siphoned into the coffers of the oil companies. On assuming power in 1969 Mu’ammar Muhammad al-Qathafi took control of most of the economic activities in the country, including the central bank, which for all practical purposes was run as a state bank. It operated as a banker of the local bankers and foreign bankers were not permitted to operate. Financing of government infrastructure did not atract riba (interest) and Libya had no national debt and no foreign debt. Its foreign exchange reserves exceeded $54 billion, which may be compared to reserves of developed countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada, which in 2010 were $50 billion and $40 billion respectively. GDP growth during the period 2000-10 was 4.32% per annum and the official figure for inflation was -0.27%.

Mass manifestation in support of Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli, July 1, 2011.

Colonel Qathafi was described by the mainstream media as being a “terrible dictator and a blood-sucking monster”, but the reality was that with the exception of the city of Benghazi and its environs, he had the support of 90% of the population. The following benefits provided by Qathafi explain why he was so popular:

■   Free education. Free electricity. Free health care. Free housing (There were no mortgages).
■ Students were paid the average salary for which subject they were studying.
■ Students studying overseas were provided with accommodation, an automobile and €2,500 per annum.
■   Newly-wed couples received a gift of 60,000 dinar ($50,000) from government.
■ Automobiles were sold at factory cost free of interest.
■ Private loans were provided free of interest.
■   Bread cost 15 US cents per loaf. Gasoline cost 12 US cents per litre.
■ Portion of profits from sale of oil was paid directly into bank accounts of citizens.
■ Farmers received free land, seeds and animals.
■ Full employment with those temporarily unemployed paid a full salary as if employed.

Qathafi’s Jamahariya “state of the masses” ensured that the wealth of this country of 5.79 million inhabitants was fairly distributed to all of its people. Beggars and homeless vagrants did not exist, while life expectancy at 75 years was the highest in Africa and 10% above the world average. The literacy rate was 82%. Regarding human rights Libya stood at 61 in the International Incarceration Index. The lower the rating, the lower the standing. The no.1 spot is currently occupied by the United States. Another major achievement, which Qathafi initiated was the conversion of the Nubian Sandstone Fossil Aquifer System into the Great Man-Made River, which supplies 6,500,000m³ of fresh water daily to the cities of Tripoli, Sirte and Benghazi. The extracted water is ten times cheaper than desalinated water. The total cost of the project, estimated at $25 billion was financed without a single foreign loan.

Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi's foreword to

A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.

Although the central banks of Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, North Sudan and Syria do not fall under the direct control of the Rothschild banking syndicate, Libya had the only central bank run on genuine state banking lines, which exhibited the classic symptoms of full employment, zero inflation and a modern day workers’ paradise. The question arises as to why NATO intervened on the pretext of fabricated human rights abuses, the so called responsibility to protect. Since 1971 when the United States abandoned the gold exchange standard for the petrodollar with the connivance of Saudi Arabia, any attempt to displace the United States dollar as the premier reserve currency has been blocked and opposed with violence.

Ezra Pound - 1943.

In November 2000 Saddam Hussein of Iraq decreed that all oil payments would in future be made in euros, as he did not wish to deal “in the currency of the enemy”. As has already been proven, the possession of weapons of mass destruction pretext was a deliberately concocted hoax and it was this currency decision, which cost Saddam Hussein his life and the destruction of his country.

True, whether the quote is authentic or not.

In similar circumstances Qathafi announced in 2010 the creation of the gold dinar as a replacement for the settlement of all foreign transactions in a proposed region of over 200 million people. Libya at that time possessed 144 tons of gold. What was intended was not a return to the gold standard per se, but a new unit of account with oil exports and other resources being paid for in gold dinars. Qathafi crossed a red line and paid the ultimate price [he was assassinated by Western invasion forces in Sirte on October 20, 2011].

The Truth About Libya - Stephen Mitford Goodson, 2011.

Since 2007 Iran has stipulated that payments be made in euro currency. On 17 February 2008 the Iranian Oil Bourse for trading in petroleum, petrochemicals and gas using primarily the euro, Iranian rial and a basket of non-US currencies was established. The first oil shipments under the new system were sold through this market in July 2011. This event must be deemed as one of the prime causes for the constant Israeli and American threats to annihilate Iran.

Quoted from:

Stephen Mitford Goodson (2017) - A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Usury | Ezra Pound

The first thing for a man to think of when proposing an economic system is: WHAT IS IT FOR? And the answer is: to make sure that the whole people shall be able to eat (in a healthy manner), to be housed (decently) and be clothed (in a way adequate to the climate).

Another form of that statement is Mussolini’s:

DISCIPLINE THE ECONOMIC FORCES AND EQUATE THEM TO THE NEEDS OF THE NATION.

The Left claim that private ownership has destroyed this true purpose of an economic system. Let us see how OWNERSHIP was defined, at the beginning of a capitalist era during the French Revolution.

OWNERSHIP is the right which every citizen has to enjoy and dispose of the portion of goods guaranteed him by the law. The right of ownership is limited, as are all other rights by the obligation to respect the rights of others. It cannot be prejudicial to the safety, nor to the liberty nor to the existence, nor to the ownership of other men like ourselves. Every possession, every traffic, which violates this principle is illicit and immoral.

Robespierre.

The perspective of the damned XIXth century shows little else than the violation of these principles by demoliberal usuriocracy. The doctrine of Capital, in short, has shown itself as little else than the idea that unprincipled thieves and antisocial groups should be allowed to gnaw into the rights of ownership. This tendency ‘to gnaw into’ has been recognised and stigmatised from the time of the laws of Moses and he called it neschek. And nothing differs more from this gnawing or corrosive than the right to share out the fruits of a common co-operative labour.

Indeed USURY has become the dominant force in the modern world.

Moreover, imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries, which, as we have seen, amounts to 4 or 5 thousand million pounds sterling in securities. Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather a Stratum, of rentiers, i.e, persons who live by “clipping coupons” who take absolutely no part in any enterprise, and whose profession is idleness. The exportation of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still further isolates this rentier stratum from production, and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country living on the exploitation of the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.

V. I. Lenin, quoting Hobson in ‘Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism’.

Very well! That is from Lenin. But you could quote the same substance from Hitler, who is a Nazi (note the paragraph from ‘Mein Kampf’ magnificently isolated by Wyndham Lewis in his ‘Hitler’) – ‘The struggle against international finance and loan capital has become the most important point in the National Socialist programme; the struggle of the German nation for its independence and freedom.’

You could quote it from Mussolini, a Fascist, or from C. H. Douglas, who calls himself a democrat and his followers the only true democrats. You could quote it from McNair Wilson who is a Christian Monarchy man. You could quote it from a dozen camps which have no suspicion they are quoting Lenin. The only people who do not seem to have read and digested this essay of his are the British Labour Party and various groups of professing communists throughout the Occident.

Milton Friedman — Lie for hire.

Thomas Piketty — Worse than Jewspapers.

Some facts are now known above parties, some perceptions are the common heritage of all men of good will, and only the Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers try now to obscure them. Among the worse than Jewspapers we must list the hired professors who misteach new generations of young, who lie for hire and who continue to lie from sheer sloth and inertia and from dog-like contempt for the wellbeing of all mankind. At this point, and to prevent the dragging of red herrings, I wish to distinguish between prejudice against the Jew as such and the suggestion that the Jew should face his own problem.

DOES he in his individual case wish to observe the law of Moses?

Does he propose to continue to rob other men by usury mechanism while wishing to be considered a ‘neighbour’?

Quoted from:
Ezra Pound (1939) - What is money for?


Fed Governors — Prevent the dragging of red herrings.

Larry Fink — Considered a ‘neighbour’?

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