http://www.themoneymasters.com/principles.htm
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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);
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.
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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;
Corollaries
a. this implies the prohibition of all
private money creation;
b. this implies the prohibition of
fractional reserve banking;
c. this implies the requirement of
full reserve banking;
d. this implies withdrawal from
international banks with credit/
reserve-creating authority (such
as the IMF SDRs);
2.) in amounts calculated to
stabilize the general price level;
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
