TOWARDS A NEW APPROACH TO INCOME DISTRIBUTION AND ENVIRONMENT SUSTAINABILITY

In their paper “Towards a New Approach to Income Distribution and Environmental Sustainability” Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt, University of Bradford, UK (1999) argue:
“In contemporary market economies, most production is debt financed. In order to pay off these debts, there is a necessity for economic growth that results in enormous waste of human effort and a misuse of the earth's resources. The Douglas-Orage Social Credit analysis, which attracted world-wide attention during the 1920s and 1930s, concluded that the pressure for economic growth, induced by the role of finance, led inevitably to economic and military rivalry between nations, and to long run environmental degradation, because short run maximization decisions squander non-sustainable resources, whilst ignoring the 'third party' social benefits and costs that arise out of the process of exchange.

The Draft Mining Scheme put forward by Douglas and Orage in 1920 sought to avoid these difficulties by devolving responsibility for finance to industrially based local producers' banks. Such a financial system could create a framework under which ecological sustainability becomes economically viable.
Economic developments over the decades since the Douglas - Orage texts were published have emphasized the need to remove the dominant role of finance in determining economic and industrial policy…” Read further:…

AS FOR THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT AND HIS BANKING CRONIES

Over the last few years the League has written on or featured articles on ‘the derivatives scam’. It is coming more and more to the ‘light of day’ – to the light of truth.
Obama: “Banks broke no laws” RealEcon TV, presents a video of President Obama, who is a creature of Wall St. himself, proclaiming that the "...banks broke no laws."
Mixing sub-prime mortgages into a derivatives package and giving it a ‘Triple A’ credit rating is fraud.
The question is asked: “Is fraud no longer illegal?” Obama even squirms a little as he defends his buddies in banking, almost as if the lies tasted foul coming out of his mouth.
Max Keiser breaks it down on the Keiser Report. Watch:

The Messages Are Not Encouraging: Just when you think the Fed cannot possibly get any more reckless or corrupt...
We are in "game over" territory here. The only question that remains now is when the collapse will take place and how bad it will be. Game over, head for the hills. Time to get in gear… If this insane criminal conduct on the part of the Fed (Federal Reserve) and Bank of America stands, we have officially gone past the point of no return and you need to get really smart about the real state of the financial system really fast, really soon.

If you are counting on "business as usual" to carry the day you are going to be sorely disappointed. If Europe implodes - and there's little chance it will not - then Bank of America's derivative position will go to sub-zero and if the FDIC is insuring their losses, that will be the end of the FDIC which means every bank deposit in the US will be uninsured overnight after 70 plus years or so of "nothing can ever go wrong" protection.
In the real world, when banks fail and they are not backed up by deposit insurance, depositors lose their deposits. Re-read that last sentence as many times as it takes to sink in.

The message finishes with these words: Note: Forget all the ** ads surrounding this article. Not a single one will help you. (The ads are for financial advice and banking!) Watch Video:

‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ NOT THE ONLY ‘GAME IN TOWN’

Take your pick. Farmers up-in-arms at the power various government legislated bodies now exercise. What is the issue that most concerns you? I feel sure you will find a group on-line seeking others to join them and fight government charges, bureaucracies, race-hate legislation, you name it. As an example, I just happened to tune in to the debate between “Lock-the-Gate Alliance” and a representative from mining interests in this country. To the credit of the radio presenter, the debate was impartially hosted and he did his best to fit in as many questions and comments by the listeners as the time allotted to the debate allowed for.

Here is democracy in action and worth following up. Spokesman for the Alliance writes:
“Complaint lodged against phoney Coal Seam Gas advertising campaign” by Drew Hutton, Fri 16-Sep-11. “Arguments that coal seam gas mining can't co-exist with agriculture and that it represents a grave threat to the future of rural Australia are at the heart of a complaint lodged today by Lock The Gate. The Alliance has lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Bureau against the coal seam gas industry advertising campaign 'We Want CSG'. Website found here… 

RESOURCE WEALTH SHOULD DELIVER BENEFITS TO REGIONS:

Senator Barnaby Joyce’s article appeared in the Canberra Times 6/10/2011:

One of the world's first billionaires, J. Paul Getty, once remarked that "the meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights." I find this incongruous coming from a famous industrialist and philanthropist who was a resident in a country where generally the contrary is the case. Australia, in contrast, has variant forms of ownership between the land title and the mineral rights.
Over the past 100 years, there has been the convenient moralising, prior to excising the property rights from the landowner, often without compensation. The Petroleum Act of 1915 was the mechanism by which the Queensland Labor government removed the petrol and gas rights from farmers. The reading of this act puts the fallacy to the argument that farmers never owned these rights. The rights were taken away because of the First World War but last time I checked the war is over. Coal seam gas, with the appropriate environmental checks and a fair return delivered to the landowner, has the capacity, just in Queensland, to deliver the energy equivalent of almost 5 billion barrels of oil. Managed properly this could be a new resource boom. Badly managed it could tick every box of a social and environmental disaster.

In America private landowners retain the rights to the shale gas on their property. In Louisiana, gas companies recently paid a local church $27 million just for the rights to drill on parish land. Real estate agent Mike Smith was paid $1.3 million for the right to drill on his 300 acres and a 25 per cent royalty. There are around 1 million private owners of mineral rights in America, accruing $21.5 billion in royalty payments each year.
Compare that to Australia. On evidence received by a Senate inquiry, landowners receive about 75 cents for every thousand dollars of coal seam gas produced. Mike in Louisiana gets over 300 times that level of compensation.

Lately I have found that my involvement in trying to get a better deal for farmers has become slightly more personal with exploration rights being granted over my land. My incentive to swim is extenuated by being dropped in the CSG ocean. If more of this enormous opportunity goes to local landowners, then that money will stay in the town and help develop the town. That money will be spun around the local economy, driving development and spreading further opportunity.

In 1930, the discovery of the East Texas Field and much of this wealth accrued to ordinary Texans. Some, like the Clampetts, may have left for Beverly Hills, but many stayed. Dallas, once a backwater, boomed. The University of Texas is now in the top 50 universities in the world, a higher ranking than any in Australia. From the desert, Houston emerged to be the fourth biggest city in America.
The East Texas Field was the biggest oil field discovered up to that time at 6 billion barrels of oil. The gas in the Bowen and Surat basins amount to about 5 billion barrels of oil. But that opportunity will only truly create a lasting legacy of wealth, if the people of Roma, Chinchilla, Dalby and Gladstone can keep some of the wealth they create. There is no reason Roma can't be a vastly more substantial town than it is.

There are many in Australia that are disdainfully dismissive that we can develop anything away from the Harbour in Sydney. I find this lack of vision restrictive and in some instances noxious. The wealth that is apparent from the current minerals boom should be instrumental in developing new parts of Australia.
In the current discussion that Labor has about "squandering the minerals boom", if you dig under the surface what they're actually doing is propping up the demographic status quo, rather than developing something new.

You never hear them talk about delivering the royalties back to the regions from which they emanated. You never hear them talk about developing new population centres in the north, or more central parts of Australia. You do hear about the minerals wealth of the mining boom building a new electrified rail line from Chatswood to Parramatta, or a new airport at Perth.
Australians are people of vision and want to see our natural wealth invested in a visionary way. Private individuals, who live in an area, will do that and we should be vastly more dubious about the platitudes of those in the political house to deliver an outcome more than a stone's throw away from the demands of the political franchise.  

WE THE PEOPLE … OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA

by Betty Luks
We all need to ask ourselves what do we want to come out of this disorder and chaos we see and experience all round us. Why are people revolting against the present world order and what do they want to see take its place?
But first let me remind you just what productive capacity was actually available during WW II - even though used for the wrong reasons. Just imagine what peace and security there could have been for the families of the nations listed below if the production systems had been geared for the peace and security of the people and not for war, destruction and profits for the military/industrial complexes!

Taken from “I.P.A. Facts”, February-March, 1968, Vol. 17, No. 2, an organ of The Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne, the following facts speak for themselves (in dollar terms). During the Second World War (1939-1945) the enormous productive capacity - real credit - expended on the war and measured in financial terms would have provided: • a $24,000 house : • $8,000 furniture : • $40,000 cash : for EVERY family in the U.S.A., Canada, Britain, Australia, Iceland, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and Belgium.
In addition, each city in these countries with a population of over 200,000 could have been given a cash donation of $150 million for public needs such as schools, hospitals and libraries.”
Now there is an example of how money could – and should – be used in the interests of the people – that is, you, me, us. We, the real people, i.e., we the ordinary men, women and children of the nations.

The League accepts the Christian view that all systems exist to serve the individual, and that a competitive, free enterprise system is not only the most efficient way to produce the individual's requirements, but to ensure that the threat of totalitarianism is averted by effective decentralisation of power. Gentle reader have you ever thought about the obscene waste of the earth’s resources on the part of the world’s elite in their push for world control?
There is also much talk about the left/right conflict, but this is a false picture and is intended to keep ‘we the people’ at each others’ throats and divided. Following are some important words that need to be updated and defined.

The Cultural Heritage is an Asset belonging to the entire nation:
We speak of the ‘Commonwealth of Australia’. The words ‘common’ and ‘wealth’ mean in effect ‘the common well-being’. Social crediters would go further and say the term ‘wealth’ is a word used to express the total of goods which can satisfy human desire, as well as the means of producing such goods – for the common well-being.

I thought of the glowing reports and eulogies found in the mainline media at the sad death of Mr. Steve Jobs of Apple fame. While the man had an exceptional mind and helped design some amazing products, he also drew on the cultural heritage that belongs to all Americans – he was not a ‘self-made’ man. He didn’t have to build factories, roads, planes, etc., in order to distribute the products his company produced. Apple used the infrastructure built up over many years and built by the generations who came before him.

In considering our Wealth as a nation we must include as a very important part - the great cultural heritage that has been handed down to us by our forefathers. The rich natural resources, the farms and factories would be of little use and could never have evolved were it not for the organised scientific knowledge bequeathed to us by our ancestors. This part of our wealth is an asset belonging to the entire nation.

The modern economic production system is not a system of individual production and exchange of production between individuals. It is more and more the synthetic assembly, in a central pool, of wealth consisting of goods and services which are more and more due to the use of power, to modern scientific processes and all sorts of organisations.

The real wealth of any person, or of any nation, may be measured by his or its ability to deliver wanted goods and services where and when required.  

CHICK MAGNETS? BULLET MAGNETS!

by James Reed
I understand that some lads like to consider themselves “chick magnets”, that is, highly attractive to women. I do not know. But with Australian female soldiers now leading the charge against the machine guns we now have the issue of “enemy magnets”: “Soldiers ‘Fear Women an Enemy Magnet’”. The Australian, October 5, 2011, p.6.

Australian soldiers in Afghanistan have themselves said that having women soldiers could lead to the Taliban (who have a “woman problem”) attacking harder and trying to kill or capture females. But Defence Minister Stephen Smith has responded that the “historic change” of women on the frontline “shouldn’t be viewed through the prism of one particular conflict or one particular mission.” Let us remember those words as the first dead female Australian soldier arrives home in a body bag.  

WE ARE AGAINST “NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMICS”: LOOK IT UP !

by James Reed
The Occupy Wall Street Crew are right! Brendan O’Neill is right! (“The protests are really an expression of middle-class anger with the working classes”) Even The Australian’s “Cut & Paste” is right! They are all “right”! And this is how it is so. Yes, the protests are an expression of middle-class anger, a roasting by “bottleshop bolsheviks” and ”chardonnay socialists” about the evils of global capitalism.

Normally I would oppose these sorts of people, but for once they have touched on the issues of real concern, one which has been central to the social credit movement as well, the ruthless greed of global capitalism.

Some of the protesters are rather ‘out of this world’ weird, people studying magic, new-age futurism and other odd things. Yet at least this is something, some symbolic recognition that the system is not working.

What would the mainline media prefer: the fire bombs being thrown in Greece? At present, most of the violence in New York seems to be done by the police, freely dispersing pepper spray, perhaps in the mistaken belief that peppered ‘pinkos’ taste better to hungry, angry, gaol-inmates, than merely unwashed ones!  

WHIMPING OUT OVER BOLT

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
The Herald and Weekly Times will not appeal against the Federal Court decision against Andrew Bolt. A notice required by the court will be published. A statement issued by the Herald and Weekly Times says that section 18 of the Racial Discrimination Act should be “revisited by the legislature”.
This sentiment has been expressed by Professor James Allen (“Race-Hate Laws Must be Repealed” The Australian 21, October 2011, p.34) Chris Merritt (“Erosion of Free Speech is Left Unresolved” The Australian 21 October 2011, p.34) says that “the law” in Australia is taking a “horrific course”. The Bolt decision and the uncertainty now created by not appealing will erode free speech.

May I suggest that some journalist rewrite totally the Bolt articles (the articles themselves may not be republished, but this does not prevent a new article expressing the same theme being published). Do a fine job on this – no, factual mistakes. No errors. Spend the time to get everything right. Then publish in good faith, the new articles. Let’s see what happens then. In the meantime, a movement for repealing the race-hate laws is needed. Get Tony Rabbit to do something.  

LETTER TO THE PRESS

To the Editor of The Age, 27th October 2011:
It was inspiring to be among the huge crowd which welcomed the Queen at Federation Square in beautiful Melbourne sunshine. Royalty has a drawing power which republican presidents can never attain; and it is not just because of glamorous symbolism and ceremony. The Christian monarch represents a quality of living which is clearly superior to much of current politicking with its emphasis on power and wealth achieved at the expense of others. By contrast, the Queen and Prince Phillip, as they walked down the red carpet to the quaintly decorated tram number 158, were continuing their lives of dedicated service to the people of Australia.
Your leading article ('The Queen and Australia's future', 27/10) got it wrong. It is not 'anomalous' that Australia 'persists with constitutional arrangements that do not fully reflect its independence'. What very definitely is anomalous is the silence of republicans who make such claims in the face of our growing loss of independence to the UNO, the IMF and their associated international bodies.

- - Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Victoria