WRITING OFF DEBT

by Jeremy Lee
The ubiquitous James Wolfensohn, former Australian financier who now heads the World Bank, is expressing sympathy for the arguments of those protesting round the world against globalism. He sounds like the father about to chastise an errant son, who says sadly as he flexes his muscles, "This hurts me more than it does you".

Part of a report in The Australian Financial Review (27/10/2000) said "World poverty is emerging as a major concern at elite gatherings of economic policy makers, partly in response to the real needs of the growing numbers of poor people but also because of the anti-globalisation backlash.
The president of the World Bank, Mr. James Wolfensohn, has even likened the challenge of reducing world poverty to the sacrifices in two world wars of Australian soldiers in 'making our planet a safer place' the most passionate appeal for progress on reducing poverty was made by Mr. Wolfensohn at a gala dinner in New York on Monday night. The celebrated Australian addressed a gathering that included billionaires in surroundings that could not have been more palatial… While poverty was alarming today, with 80 percent of the world earning just 20 per cent of its income, Mr. Wolfensohn warned that all but 50 million of the 2 billion people born in the next 25 years would live in developing countries.

Mr. Wolfensohn appealed to a sense of duty, but he also suggested that First World nations would be forced to intervene out of self-interest because poverty would become a threat to their security. The challenge was so great that Mr. Wolfensohn appealed to a sense of heroism…"

There is something almost surrealist in Wolfensohn's words. It conjures up images of million and billionaires, munching their caviar, as they ponder an uprising of the destitute. It is said that Wolfensohn, when approached by a Jubilee 2000 church member with a request that Third World debt be written off, replied by asking whether the Church would also hand its property and investments over to the poor. Wolfensohn had a point, and the church member retreated in silence!

But there is a difference, which Wolfensohn ignored. The bankers now create as well as lend the world's money, claiming ownership of real credit in the process. Even if debt was written off the same terrible injustice would re-assert itself if the private ownership of money-creation is not changed. Each month in Australia the money supply is increased by billions of dollars, by allowing private banks to create and extend credit on usurious terms. The same happens in all other countries.

If, on the other hand, Australia re-assumed control of its own money system, and released the nation's new money requirements debt-free, the result would be a gradual and orderly reduction of debt aggregate. If the World Bank really wishes for alleviation of poverty and permanent improvement, it should publicly recommend that credit-creation be removed from private banks, which should confine themselves to lending. Until such a recommendation, the obscenely rich at their gala dinners are like the alcoholics who will do anything to solve their condition - except give up drink!

A major task is to inform the swelling number of anti-globalists about the true nature of "the root of all evil".

THE POOR IN AUSTRALIA

It is now clear that the Government is completely isolated from the ever-increasing destitution in the community. It keeps its eyes firmly fixed on statistics, which hide reality. The Australian (27/10/2000) reported: "…In a survey by the Australian Council of Social Service released last month, 67 percent of community welfare agencies reported an increase in the numbers they were assisting. At the same time, government funding fell from 76 percent to 72 percent of their income and fees charged to clients rose from 8 per cent to 11.6 per cent. Thirty-eight percent of organisations reported an increase in the numbers they had to turn away…
St. Vincent de Paul was moved to send a letter to all Federal MPs this week expressing concern about the increasing numbers of people - 80,000 in the past year - that the Government is referring to it…"

But Mr. Costello says, "Our fundamentals are sound!"

THE JOBS REVOLUTION

Bigger and bigger numbers of people are going to end up on "work for the dole" as a mask for technology-driven unemployment if things go on as they are. No doubt Minister Tony Abbott will claim success.

Robert Gottliebsen (The Australian, 1/11/2000) described it thus:
"After years of jobs-a-plenty the industrial game is changing, as Australian companies prepare for a massive restructuring during the next two or three years to take advantage of the new technologies.
The restructuring will eliminate or relocate tens of thousands of blue-collar and white-collar jobs… Many trade unions, particularly those in Victoria, have almost no understanding of what is ahead of them and, as a result, they could blow the jobs of thousands of their members…"

Gottliebsen gave as one example the case of the automation of the wharves by Chris Corrigan and Patrick Stevedores. Unless other ports and harbours followed suit, huge amounts of shipping would be diverted to NSW, where the danger of strikes would be vastly reduced and low-cost docking facilities would attract vessels. Job losses would be enormous and union power to negotiate wage conditions almost eliminated. High-wage States would lose industries to low-wage States. No longer would multinationals have to play countries against each other; they could play one State against another inside a Federation like Australia.

So big are the implications of this new technology that we can only get a partial picture of the implications in this picture of the Patrick operation by Andrew Fraser (The Australian, 27/10/2000):"…The executive chairman of Patrick Stevedores is far from finished with his vision for Australia's waterfront, outlining yesterday a radical makeover of the company's Sydney operations, involving robots moving containers round the wharves. "But he also said that those crane operators who would be required in his vision for the future did not necessarily have to be on site.
'It's not beyond the realm of possibility that he may be at home in his living room,' Mr. Corrigan told a Brisbane business audience. 'Technically, the person doesn't have to go on site at all' This new system would be the main way of lifting the capacity of the Sydney operation from its current rate of 114,000 containers per berth per year to 3 million containers per berth per year ...."

A 27,000 percent increase in handling facilities - all driven by a few armchair operators sitting at home! What will happen to the displaced wharfies? Either jobs in the '! New Economy"- that's computers -or work for the dole!

(For new readers: The answer, if we want to build freedom for each person, is Social Credit. C.H. Douglas, the Social Credit founder, realised the implications of technology in the first 20 years of the 1900's, and foresaw that a different way of distributing income would have to be devised in technology-driven economies -the National Dividend. It's a concept way ahead of "work for the dole!" But it can't be done unless the "monopoly of credit", now in the hands of the banks, is ended.)

ROBOTS - FREEING HUMANS FROM WORK

While we're talking of robots, the following was contained in a challenging article by Helen O'Neill (The Australian Magazine, 21-22/10/2000):
" In 1998, a United Nations World Robotic report estimated that 720,000 robots worldwide were already doing the work of up to two million people. In Japan, for example, there is one robot to every six-production workers in the motor vehicle industry. Mechanical creatures of all shapes and sizes exist… most of these machines are much more useful, working in car factories, food processing plants and electronics manufacturing centres. Robotic hands are at work in some hospitals, allowing surgeons to be more precise. Other machines are learning how to kill - Thai scientists recently unveiled a fully-armed shoot-on-sight robot designed to work as a security guard…"

And they tell us the "New Economy" is going to absorb the world's unemployed! They don't even believe it themselves.
(Meanwhile - if anyone has a robot that writes articles for weekly newsletters, I'm interested! I'm about eligible for the leisure age!)

THE CONTAMINATED FOOD CHAIN

by Betty Luks
It was in 1989 Geoffrey Dobbs wrote of the "Currie'd Egg Row" in Britain ("Cheapness at a Nasty Price" Home Journal'). The uproar was about the outbreak of salmonella eneritidis in egg production; the salmonella being a bacterium which can infect both the gut and the oviduct in chickens without obvious sickness, but can cause food poisoning in humans.

All foods carry innumerable bacteria which our bodies deal with, and our senses are trained to detect food going bad, but when heat-treated poultry excreta or offals, or putrid, ground-up dead sheep are fed to our food sources, we are inviting all sorts of troubles. The circumstances in which the 1989 outbreak occurred cast a spotlight on the sort of food being fed to factory-chickens and to other animals mass-produced for human consumption. The public was to learn that a probable source of the salmonella in the egg production was the inclusion of poultry-excrement as well as edible parts of their bodies (e.g. guts, feet and heads) in the chicken food. A media-howl went up from the producers of this dubious food and forced the resignation of the then health minister (named Currie).

Geoffrey warned, "Hens are not carnivorous by nature and neither are cows; but we learn that a particularly horrible disease called BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which drives cows mad), has been traced to giving dairy cows feed containing the ground-up remains of sheep infected with a disease called scrapie.

He also noted. "It is only the big corporations that supply the super-markets which have the necessary capital and equipment to grind up and heat-treat these unacceptable items and mix them up with vegetable matter so as to obscure their nature and origin." He called for "hormone-fed beef and poultry excreta or offals meat, or eggs laid by hens fed on, and milk and meat from cows fed on ground-up sheep to all be prominently labelled, and let the super-markets see what profits they can make out of them when the public knows what it is buying!"

Fears that 'mad cow' now in Sheep Flocks
Not surprisingly we read in The Age, 2/11/2000, that there are great fears in Britain that the continued practice of using 'recycled species' (notice how this term sounds so much more acceptable than 'dead diseased sheep' or 'offal' or 'manure and feathers'?) may have spread to other animals.

The headlines bear out Geoffrey Dobbs' concerns as we read, "Fears 'mad cow' now in sheep flocks". Unwisely (or greedily) "Britain introduced a ban on animal remains in cattle food in 1988 but stopped short of banning 'cannibalism' for all livestock..." A judicial inquiry has found that a 'culture of reassurance' by government ministers and officials had misled the British public about the BSE epidemic, forcing the Blair government to review its health regulations. It was also reported" 'intra-species recycling' could risk a new BSE-like disease in another animal", and "Some experts suggested that the new ban should ultimately be widened to outlaw the feeding of feathers and chicken manure to poultry and even fish waste to fish". What a revolting thought!

One would hope the fish farms in Australia are not feeding their fish kept in fish-lots 'recycled intra-species'. Surely the British farmers have a strong case against the big corporations who produced and promoted the food containing animal remains, let alone the families of those who have died as a result of eating the contaminated meat!

Instinct and Commonsense the Best Guides
A biologist by profession, in 1989 Dr. Dobbs explained to his readers. 'The real cycle of such organic material passes first through the soil, which alone is equipped to deal with its vast array of organisms: bacteria, protozoa, fungi, mites, insects, etc., and then through plants preferably twice, before it is suitable for ingestion by any but 'scavenger' species, as experience which has settled into unconscious instinct, has long shown."

Implications of Vaccine Brushed Aside
In 1998 our UK sister-publication On Target, quoting from The Daily Telegraph, 27/2 brought to the readers attention a possible link between the MMR triple vaccine (for measles, mumps and rubella) and bowel disease that could in turn be linked to autism in children. "Within two weeks of this report being publicly aired, which is a breathtakingly short time for any form of investigation, the Chief Medical Officer. Sir Kenneth Calman strongly defended the existing immunisation policy and the World Health Organisation, eight royal colleges and medical associations were cited to back up his stand."
The UK On Target went on to report 3,000,000 cattle were in the process of being slaughtered at enormous cost to the farmers and yet the implications for children of the MMR triple vaccine were brushed aside. Nearly three years later. October 22nd 2000 the Melbourne newspaper, Sunday Herald Sun, carried an article with the headlines Vaccine Recall Fears from Peter Kononczuk in London.
Britain's health minister has announced the recall of a polio vaccine already used on millions of children because of fears it could transmit the human variant of mad cow disease (BSE). The Medeva vaccine has been used in the UK since the early 1980s and has accounted for a third of the inoculations given to children and travellers. Britain's Medicines Control Agency ordered the recall after it was discovered the vaccine was produced using material from British calf foetuses (calf serum) as a growth agent. It seems the Department of Health had repeatedly "sought and received assurances from Medeva that British bovine material was not being used in the production". The article reported British pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham will provide a replacement vaccine. God help the little children!

THE REFORM OF ECONOMICS TEACHING

by Antonia Feitz
I've said it before but it's worth repeating: the bad guys always forget that the earth is always renewed in the young. Always. In a wonderful example of that truth French economics students have demanded that economics be taught in accordance with reality, and especially from a human perspective. And to their credit, their lecturers are siding with them.

As reported in Le Monde, "It was in the beginning a modest initiative, almost confidential. It has now become a subject of important debate, which has put in a state of effervescence the community of economists. Should not the teaching of economics in universities be re-thought?" (www.lemonde.fr/ article/0.2320,93489,00.html).

It began in June this year when a small group of economics students web-posted a petition protesting against the "uncontrolled use of mathematics" in the teaching of economics. (www.respublica.fr/ autisme-economie). They called for an end to the mathematical dominance and to the domination of neo-classical theory in the curriculum.
(Note, 'neo-classical is the equivalent of our 'economic rationalist' ideology).

The students have demanded a plurality of approaches and, in particular, an emphasis on economic realities as opposed to theoretical blathering. Le Monde picked up the story when the petition had 150 signatures, including many from Frances most prestigious universities. On the June 21st, the paper ran an article on the petition.
(reform www.lemonde.fr/article_impression/0,2322,72463,00.html).

As other French media - including TV and radio - became interested, the signatories grew. In response to the petition, some academics web-posted their own petition, supporting the students' call for reform. (www.republica.fr/autisme-economie).

Jack Lang, the minister of education, has since informed Le Monde that he will be announcing "the formation of a commission charged with making an evaluation of the situation and submitting to him some proposals. An economist of renown has been approached about leading this investigation."

There was a meeting held at the Sorbonne on October 4th where the student leaders, Olivier Vaury and Gilles Raveaud decided to conduct a series of debates in universities throughout France. In December the reformers plan to hold a national meeting to develop concrete proposals. Though some economic rationalists have tried to dismiss the demand for reform as a Trotskyite conspiracy, it seems they're in for a shock, at least in academia. (Material taken from the post-autistic economics newsletter No. 2, October 3rd, 2000)

The students' petition
Naturally economics students and teachers all over the world are galvanized by the French reformers. They are organising their own petitions based on the original French students' petition. Here is their complaint (and all critics of economic rationalism will just love their first criticism)

Open letter from economics students to professors and others responsible for the teaching of this discipline.

We economics students in the university(ies) of , declare ourselves to be generally dissatisfied with the teaching that we receive. This is so for the following reasons:
1. We wish to escape from imaginary worlds! Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered, that is to say for the most part neo-classical theory or approaches derived from it, does not generally answer this expectation. Indeed, even when the theory legitimately detaches itself from contingencies in the first instance, it rarely carries out the necessary return to the facts. The empirical side (historical facts, functioning of institutions, study of the behaviours and strategies of the agents...) is almost non-existent. Furthermore, this gap in the teaching, this disregard for concrete realities, poses an enormous problem for those who would like to render themselves useful to economic and social factors.

2. We oppose the uncontrolled use of mathematics! The instrumental use of mathematics appears necessary. But resort to mathematical formalisation when it is not an instrument but rather an end in itself, leads to a true schizophrenia in relation to the real world. Formalisation makes it easy to construct exercises and to manipulate models whose significance is limited to finding "the good result" (that is, the logical result following from the initial hypotheses) in order to be able to write "a good paper". This custom, under the pretence of being scientific, facilitates assessment and selection, but never responds to the question that we are posing regarding contemporary economic debates.

3. We are for a pluralism of approaches in economics! Too often the lectures leave no place for reflection. Out of all the approaches to economic questions that exist, generally only one is presented to us. This approach is supposed to explain everything by means of a purely axiomatic process as if this were THE economic truth. We do not accept this dogmatism. We want a pluralism of approaches, adapted to the complexity of the objects and to the uncertainty surrounding most of the big questions in economics (unemployment, inequalities, the place of financial markets, the advantages and disadvantages of free-trade, globalisation, economic development. etc.).

4. Call to teachers: wake up before it is too late! We appreciate that our professors are themselves subject to some constraints. Nevertheless, we appeal to all those who understand our claims and who wish for change. If serious reform does not take place rapidly, the risk is great that economics students, whose numbers are already decreasing, will abandon the field in mass, not because they have lost interest, but because they have been cut off from the realities and debates of the contemporary world. We no longer want to have this autistic science imposed on us. We do not ask for the impossible, but only that good sense may prevail.

We hope, therefore, to be heard very soon.

HILLARY'S SECRET REVEALED

The American journal Criminal Politics, 31/8/1999, quoting from a New York City newspaper Forward claims: "Hillary Clinton has admitted her Jewish background and to having Jewish relatives." The claim is based on a lead story in the Forward newspaper of New York City. 6/8/1999 and the reference it makes to Hillary's grandmother.

The lead story caption reads... "Meet Hillary Clinton's Grandmother Della Rosenberg - The Feisty Wife of a Yiddish-Speaking Jewish Immigrant". The sub-caption reads: "Family's Secret a Boost for her Senate Chances".
Please note, up to the time Hillary started to campaign for the Senate her Jewish background was kept a secret from the American public. Why? What did they have to hide? Many an American probably has Jewish ancestors.

Criminal Politics suggests both the Clintons may be active practising Jews, referring to articles and photographs they have published over the years showing Clinton participating in Jewish ceremonies within the White House. So what? you might ask. Don't you think the American people, predominately Christian, might want to know if their President is posing as a Christian, but in fact, secretly practises Judaism?

Further reading: Controversy of Zion, Facts are Facts, Conquest Through Immigration: How Zionism Turned Palestine into a Jewish State. Contact your League Book Services.