A + B Mending a Mortgaged World by Jeremy Lee

Jeremy Lee’s paper to the Inverell Forum March 2009

I started preparing this address on the day of the inauguration of America’s 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama. Anyone who listened to the opening and closing prayers, or the incoming President’s speech to the nation must have been impressed by the fervent hopes for a new beginning and an era of peace. Only a few, however, understood that the ceremony took place on a battleground; not so much between nations - Iraq or Afghanistan; Georgia or Gaza; the Congo or Zimbabwe; but between two spiritual proposals for the future of this planet - God or Mammon. Our Lord told us a long time ago that none of us could serve two Masters. That truth is the essence of a crisis now engulfing the world, driving us towards a catastrophe which threatens to dispossess and enslave us all.

The key instrument in the hands of Mammon – the Money Power - is debt. Scripture warns us, “The borrower is the servant of the lender”. Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, put it another way: “Permit me to pass the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.” Who creates - as distinct from lends - Australia’s money? There’s so much evidence to answer this question that it is past any argument. The Australian Constitution, in Section 51, is clear that the responsibility belongs to the Federal Government and States – via their own State banking powers - in this country. Not the International Monetary Fund. Nor the World Bank or the Bank of International Settlements.

To emphasise the point, in 1937 ~ in the middle of the great Depression ~ the Federal government set up a Royal Commission into Finance and Banking. In his summary, the Chairman, Sir Mellis Napier said: “… That the Commonwealth Bank {i.e. at time a government-owned peoples’ bank) can make money available to governments or to others on such terms as it chooses even by way of a loan without interest or even without requiring interest or repayment of principal…”

But, like every economy in the world, Australia has now transferred its constitutional power to create its own money into private hands. And the same private hands have indebted Australians, and hold mastery over the people and their governments. To quote a former A.L.P. Federal Treasurer, one-time deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns, in his book “Oil in Troubled Waters”: 
“… I want first to explain how money is obtained or supplied in a capitalist economy. Banks certainly create credit or, more exactly, they create money. Creation of money by banks is a simple process… The banks, therefore, can create deposits by lending to customers… within very wide limits, the trading banks decide how much or little to lend and who to lend it to… Not only have the banks power to create money within wide limits, but they do so. 
As well as determining the total volume of money, the banks decide also to whom they will lend. It is obvious they will prefer rich and powerful people and the companies associated with them; they will prefer ‘old customers’, and they will not be too keen to lend to poorer people, to ‘battlers’, or to persons or even companies who may be competitive with their associates. The power to create money and to decide who should get it is a vast and significant social and economic power and for this reason, the Labor movement has always believed it should not be a privately owned power but be exercised solely by a public or peoples’ bank…”

That, for all its sins, was the old Labor Party in Australia – the party of Andrew Fisher and King O’Malley, of John Curtin and Ben Chifley; of national sovereignty and Australian ownership and mateship. Many people find it difficult to comprehend that the old Labor movement was gradually captured after World War II by a totally different idea – international Marxism. 
The new Labor used the same words, but had never had a blister on their hands. They weren’t ‘workers’, or patriots, but international academics. They followed Marx’s belief that the Debt System would finally destroy Capitalism and deliver the Marxists a global slave state.

Karl Marx put it this way in his book Das Capital in 1867: 
(Quote) “…Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to Communism…” (unquote)

By 1983 when the Hon. Bob Hawke became Prime Minister with Paul Keating as his Treasurer, the old A.L.P. had been subverted by the programme of gradualism from the Fabians and the Socialist International, who were one arm of the Money Power. Treasurer Keating, despite earlier promises, allowed 13 foreign banks to hang out their shingles on Australian soil. 
The magazine Euromoney awarded him title of “Treasurer of the Year”. The Commonwealth Bank, hitherto an icon known as the “Peoples’ Bank”, and founded by the Labor Party before World War I, was sold to the private banking monopoly. Incidentally, it is instructive to consider how modern Treasurers, whether Labor or Liberal, are rewarded by the Banks. Paul Keating is currently chairman of Lazard Carnegie Wylie, a subsidiary of the international bank Lazard Freres; while Peter Costello is an advisor to the International Monetary Fund.

“Deregulation”, so passionately argued by John Howard, Treasurer in the previous Fraser Liberal Government, was allowed full sway by Hawke and Keating. Australia increasingly became “internationalized”. It progressively wrecked its own farming and manufacturing industries, corporatized its resources, allowed foreign ownership of its vast minerals and mining, and lived on foreign debt. It excused this by calling it “free trade”. The largest single shareholder in each of the ‘big four’ allegedly Australian banks was, and is, Chase Nominees from America.

By the time John Howard became Prime Minister in 1996, the rout was almost complete. The biggest international gathering of financiers ever held in Australia met in Sydney within three months of the election, and, under the chairmanship of John Corzene, C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs and now a United States Senator, instructed the new PM on acceptable policies if he wanted his programme ‘bankrolled’. Howard hastened to comply! This distasteful episode was fully reported in the Australian Financial Review.

Mammon, the international money power, was rampant and supreme throughout the industrial world, with its sights set on the New World Order, or Global Government. From Bob Hawke onwards our governments have been “globalist” – without ever asking the people at elections. Howard himself once said of Globalism that it was ‘inevitable’. There was nothing else. While he continued to deliver the plums of office, his party idolized him. But when reality caught up he couldn’t even retain his own seat in Parliament!

The new Rudd Government, with Treasurer Wayne Swan running the economy is the same horse with a different jockey. The whole game is to bail the banks – the perpetrators - out of their own mess – at the expense of the victims, the people. Australia is destined to sink into disaster unless it regains sovereign control over its own money system. There is no reason why it should not do so. Australia has been described by the World Bank as “the richest per capita nation in the world”. Yet we have one of the largest per capita foreign debts on record.

Both Labor and Coalition parties campaigned on this while in Opposition. In fact, when Treasurer Costello was seeking office in 1996 he drove a “debt bus” round Victoria highlighting the Foreign Debt. But during his term in office he conveniently forgot all about it and the Foreign Debt more than tripled! Neither major party makes any attempt to deal with our Foreign Debt when in office. The same debt conditions, with variations, prevail worldwide. The banks, which own the world’s money, control governments and elected politicians. Ordinary people starve in the midst of plenty, or work with their spouses to pay lifelong mortgages, which are now passed to their children. Australian housing debt levels are actually worse per capita than those in the U.S.A.

But absolute power corrupts absolutely! Wall Street and its global fraternity wallow in self-indulgence, taking their bloated bonuses and profits while communities and families collapse around them. Their luxury limousines and corporate jets pass by the homeless and the jobless on their way to the latest party, the snow-fields or their yachts. No political parties in office dare breath against their will! 
And, finally, when the loan packages accumulate into billions and trillions they gamble on such a scale that they are past accurate accounting and the banks themselves no longer trust each other. They demand that governments bail them out and charge their victims - you and I – for the cost of doing so. It is monstrous and must be changed.

But who is speaking out? No politician I am aware of dares say anything. Their parties are mortgaged to the banks; and the media, which survives by corporate ownership and advertising, toes the line in a manner which flies in the face of free speech.

As for the Church? Once it championed the poor and spoke resolutely against usury and exploitation. It stood for limited government. The only group Our Lord took physical action against were the money merchants who had turned His Father’s House into “a den of thieves”. It was a Bishop who led the campaign for Magna Carta in Britain against the despotic King John. Both Catholics and later Protestants opposed monopoly while defending private property. Christians advocated a just relationship between employers and workers and Magna Carta, 800 years ago, banished the money lenders from the country. But by the time the Bank of England was founded in 1694, the Churches gradually became mute, finally joining the queue for loans.

In 1960 the Congregationalist Union of Scotland, after an exhaustive hearing on finance and banking, issued a report which gained some attention. Included in its findings were the following: “We believe that the virtual monopoly of credit enjoyed by the banking system is contrary to all reason and justice….”

After taking evidence from bankers, economists and industrialists, it published a comprehensive report which is still available. It should be mandatory reading in all Churches. Pope Benedict the Fourteenth wrote a valuable Encyclical on the nature of fair and unfair contracts and the evils of compounding interest. Indeed, the Old Testament contained much on the forgiveness of debt and the idea of a Jubilee; while Our Lord Himself went further in the Lord’s Prayer, urging us to pray, “Forgive Us Our Debts, as we forgive our Debtors.”

In 1931, as the Great Depression reached full intensity, Pope Pius XI issued his Encyclical Quadragasimo Anno, in which he stated that those who controlled credit had become so powerful that: “none dare breathe against their will” – preventing a just relationship between employers and labour in the economy, and a just price for goods and services.

On October 15, 1991, Pope John Paul II was reported in the global media in these terms: “The Pope hit out yesterday at the kind of financial austerity plans imposed on debt-ridden nations by foreign lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.
“One must state firmly, so that the whole world hears it, that a country’s foreign debt can never be paid at the expense of the hunger and poverty of its people,” he told a meeting of Brazil’s Bishops …”

Yet our politicians quote these unscrupulous international financiers as though they were infallible! 
In fact, on 2nd April, 2009 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors from the Group of Twenty (G 20) Industrial Nations gathered in London with the Managing Director of the IMF and the President of the World Bank, and Chairmen of the International Monetary and Financial Committees and Development Committees of the IMF and the World Bank to address the global financial crisis. What mandate have Prime Minister Rudd or Treasurer Wayne Swan been given to accept the decisions of such a group?

Both Treasurer Peter Costello and Treasurer Wayne Swan bathe in the waters of the latest IMF statistics as though they were, and are, Holy Writ! Treasurer Paul Keating was feted as “International Treasurer of the Year” in the early 90s, even while thousands of Australian farmers were evicted off the land with interest rates between 20 and 30 per cent!

Since Pope John Paul’s condemnation – almost 20 years ago – both Catholic and Protestant churches have kept their silence while crisis has engulfed the world around them. Most pay usury on their church buildings without complaint, or charge interest on their investments. In the battle against Mammon the Churches are comfortably out of view on the sidelines! They watch with averted eyes the breakdown of families in their own congregations. For as long as I can remember, in this fabulously well- endowed nation we have had an average ten per cent of the population living below the poverty line. It’s going to be much higher before long. Within forty kilometres of my home town of Toowoomba in Queensland there are over 70 different church congregations, meeting for services each week. Some provide social assistance to casualties in society. But they never speak out publicly against evil policies which render so many into insolvency. Toowoomba – a city of churches – has one of the highest crime rates in Queensland. It’s more or less the same throughout the Western World.

Until now! As the new year of 2009 was about to dawn, some Church of England Bishops in the U.K. joined together in speaking out forcefully in condemning the policies of their government over the appalling debt crisis: Herald Sun 29 December, 2008: “Five senior Church of England Bishops have slammed the British Government over the financial crisis, accusing it of being ‘morally corrupt.’ The leading Bishops delivered a withering assessment of the Labour Party’s 11 years in office under prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in separate interviews with the Sunday Telegraph (UK). 
The Bishops of Manchester, Durham, Winchester, Carlisle and Hume warned that Britain was suffering from an addiction to debt, family breakdown and a widening gap between rich and poor.” Perhaps the most outspoken is another Church of England Bishop, John Sentamu, a Ugandan who is now Archbishop of York. He said: “Hell is an eternal maxed-out credit card. In heaven there are no debts. We must end the blind pursuit of profit and use our wealth and economic power in the service of a greater social purpose.”

But if Governments such as the United States and Australia have forfeited their constitutional power over their own money systems in favour of a monopoly of private banks, where is the solution? A totally nationalised banking system was a cornerstone of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. This would be even worse! A clear distinction must be made between the lending of money and the creation of new money. The right to lend money, with as much competition as possible between lenders, is a valuable and ancient function. Everything possible to prevent unjust extortion should be done.

But the creation of new money is a national, rather than a private responsibility. It should be a constitutional responsibility, carried out on behalf of the whole people in the most exacting and impartial manner. It should be done by a comprehensive National Balance Sheet, available to all citizens. When the whole examination of Profit and Loss, Appreciation and Depreciation, Assets, Liabilities and Trade Balance etc. shows an accurate final accounting, new money should be credited to the people in the form of a National Dividend payable to each person. In other words, it should be created debt-free. It should not be expropriated by governments for their own empire-building. Nor should it be the property of a group of private banks who have robbed the people of their own inheritance.

A very limited example can be seen in the State of Alaska, where oil revenues are distributed by cheque each twelvemonth directly to each citizen. There are no State taxes. Everyone, from six months old, receives his share of oil royalties, whether or not he or she is employed. The Alaskan government is prevented by law from deciding that it can spend the money better than the people can. There would have to be a public referendum before any alteration to the Alaska Permanent Fund.

Imagine, if you can, what life would be like if the richest per capita nation in the world – Australia – allocated its royalties the same way. 
If John Howard or Kevin Rudd, Nathan Rees or Anna Bligh, had to give the money back to the people instead of believing their ideas were the best, would not Australia be a more joyful country than it is in 2009?

Let me make a point: Over the last 12 months - from December 07 to December 08 - Australia’s Money Supply has increased by $147 billion. (Reserve Bank Bulletin, Monetary Aggregates, Feb 2009) Let us suppose that, instead of borrowing this money into existence at interest, Australia had created exactly the same sum debt-free, and sent a cheque to every Australian citizen; what would be the position? Australia’s debts would be $147 billion less (plus one year’s interest) than now. Each Australian would have received $7,000 $28,000 for two parents and two children.

So where are we at the moment? Are the many efforts to “stimulate the economy” going to work? 

Is the 1.2 TRILLION dollar package introduced by President Obama going to bring back the good times in America? Or the $2.3 billion dollar Budget Deficit Obama’s going to bring down? 
Will Wayne Swan’s retreat into the latest Budget Deficit of $42 billion restore prosperity to Australia? It’s madness!

The human mind is limited in what it can grasp. One million sounds very much like a billion, and a billion sounds much like a trillion. Our minds switch off. Think of it this way: One million seconds comes to about 11-and-a-half days. A billion seconds comes to about 32 years! A TRILLION seconds comes to 32,000 years!
Wayne Swan’s ‘stimulus package’, at a dollar a second, comes to one thousand and twenty four years! At interest our kids have got to repay!

Notice that every news commentator on radio or TV never questions the banker’s point of view. Every suggestion to “change direction” involves more borrowing – either now or down the track. But how can any economy suffering a debt crisis borrow its way out of debt? It‘s symptomatic of the drunk who will do anything to solve his problem – except give up drink! It’s as certain as the sun rising that the so-called global crisis will not respond to any of the solutions offered so far by the likes of Barack Obama, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Gordon Brown, Wayne Swan, the World Economic Forum, the IMF, or the G8. The Global approach is the most dangerous of all.

The real solution – which would involve curbing the money-lenders – has been known for nearly 90 years.

In the first half of the 20th Century the World fractured into two camps with the Communist Revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union. Communism and Capitalism - supposedly - became deadly enemies. Few noticed that both sides operated the same monetary systems. Chase Manhattan had its headquarters on Wall Street, with its second biggest branch at 1 Karl Marx Place, Moscow. Bankers financed both sides, and also financed the sudden rise of Adolph Hitler.

In the ‘20s, in the middle of this East v. West confrontation, an unassuming Scottish Engineer developed a proposition he called “The A + B Theorem.” It showed quite clearly that any nation or community which allowed its money system to be issued solely in the form of debt would embark on a course of alternating Boom-and-Bust which, over the course of time, would dislocate any semblance of a harmonious society. It would, instead, result in dislocation, exploitation, ecological destruction and war. By rectifying the mechanism – and he showed how it could be done – a free and harmonious society could be enhanced.

Balance Sheet and National Dividend: 
There were two main parts of his proposal: Firstly, that a careful and detailed Balance Sheet should be drawn up annually, for publication and distribution to all adult citizens in each economy. Secondly, that, depending on the final outcome of this Balance Sheet, a National Dividend would be distributed to each individual citizen without condition or means test, and whether or not the recipient was employed. It would be a birthright to which each man, woman and child was entitled.

The proposal flew in the face of financial orthodoxy, on which so many professional careers and reputations had been based. Prominent economists were outraged – including Sir Douglas Copeland, the Federal Government’s chief economist in the ‘thirties. How could an engineer understand the intricacies of high finance, which had dogged so many experts in history? What was required was more work, less pay, and exports to pay our debts. Ordinary people, on the other hand, realized that the world was one of abundance, in contrast to the bankers’ argument that we were all “living beyond our means” or “not producing enough” or “having the Depression we had to have”.

Tens of thousands flocked to hear Douglas speak. Politicians welcomed him to Australia. An attempt was made on his life between Perth and Melbourne. The accuracy of his quietly spoken words were echoed in city and country. Even a number of Church leaders commented that his proposals could heal the bitter divisions between nations and communities. But the banking monopoly did everything possible to intimidate, confuse or silence the issue.

In the grim reality of World War II, which ended the financial crisis, and over the intervening years, the memory of the Depression hardship receded. C.H. Douglas and the A + B theorem were forgotten except by a small minority, and we started replacing, once again, the enormous ravages and destruction of war. Once again, we reverted to a way of life based on interest-bearing debt. The cycle of Boom and Bust started all over again. We lived in materialism built on time-payment, sending the Bill to our children. Since the end of World War II there has been no world peace. War, conflict, poverty and death have continued to span the globe. The moment of truth has arrived. And we are hoping our politicians can miraculously produce bailouts and rescue packages, while leaving the banks in charge!

Until the political leaders of our country can establish an accurate accountancy mechanism for determining a just relationship between our real economy and the symbolism of the finance system, we will continue to move from social disaster to disaster, in a world of waste, pollution, poverty and destruction. Prime Minister Rudd can no more ‘stimulate the economy” by borrowing $42 billion from the banks, than President Obama can do so in the United States by borrowing trillions from the Federal Reserve. It is simple mathematics – the world cannot borrow its way out of debt!

The alternative is a world of harmony and brotherhood, a world of service to each other, instead of regulation and control. We should heed the lesson of history and many civilizations - no man can serve two masters.

In 1924, Clifford Hugh Douglas, the Scottish Engineer referred to earlier, wrote one his major works, Social Credit. It is, I believe, prophetic. He was neither a demagogue nor a revolutionary. He saw clearly that there was a struggle between centralised power and the freedom of the individual. By far the most potent instrument in this struggle was the monopoly of credit. 
He was writing in a period of great stability, in contrast to today. Nevertheless, to the discerning eye, the growing collapse was apparent. Wars and depressions lay ahead. A period would arrive, perhaps in a number of decades still to come, where the death of civilization was upon us. 
More and more people who dare to think can recognize that our world is dying. Most of us would not be here were this not so.

Douglas wrote in 1924: 
“… The breakup of the present financial and social system is certain. Nothing can stop it. …. There will probably come….. a period at which the blind forces of destruction appear to be in the ascendant….” That moment is upon us. Our civilization is dying. Already the plans for our dispossession and immolation have been made. Evil men believe they can accumulate enough power to run the world of the future. The cost will be our freedom, and the freedom of our children. So where to from here? In each country a few men and women have seen what is happening and have struggled ineffectually to halt the disaster. They have stood candidates for office, written letters, published warnings or organized protests. But the onrush of materialism, indifference, confusion and self-interest has prevailed.

One body, so far, has remained silent – the Church. It was this body which guided the design of our civilisation in the first place. What would happen if, like those five Church of England Bishops, church congregations of every persuasion in our country decided to speak out? What if Church leaders, priests, pastors and ministers spoke out fearlessly, not in partisan politics, but on fundamental moral issues?

Whatever you conceive the Church to be, it has a mandate for times such as these. It was told to teach all nations of another type of Kingdom. It would arrive “on earth as it is in Heaven.” Whatever else is said, such an alternative Kingdom was not to be poverty-stricken and bankrupt. If it taught us to seek the Truth, the Truth would make us free. And if we sought the true principles of this alternative Kingdom, and applied them, “all else would be added to our nation” – Australia!

Is it too late to ask this question? Or is it what we should have been doing all the time?

I believe that if Christians everywhere began to speak publicly for the cause of freedom – not in the sanctimonious privacy of their congregations, but loudly and controversially in the streets and the market place, the squares and newspaper columns and at the elections of their governments, this nation would change. Young people would see the Church, not as a pathetic comedy, - an Australian version of the Vicar of Dibley - but as the leadership of a cause worth following. We could rid this country of its widespread corruption. Government would become a servant again – not a self-appointed control mechanism. And the old Australia for which the Anzacs fought and died, would live again, peaceful and debt-free.

We must understand that, so pervasive is the education system that most young people today cannot understand what is happening. They KNOW they are being deceived, without understanding the nature of the deception. If they don’t obey the rules they live in poverty - even though the rules don’t work! What Australia needs is a vision.

Let us look at how our debt system works, and how ever-growing debt enslaves and destroys us - in the midst of incredible plenty.

BANKS
|

INDUSTRY
|

WAGES, SALARIES, DIVIDENDS--------|-------------------------GOODS + SERVICES

PRICES
|

IN THE MARKET PLACE

This chart is used to show that purchasing power must be made to balance total prices for a properly functioning economy.

In conclusion, C.H. Douglas, who warned us of the inevitable collapse induced by a continuation of the debt system, went on to say: 
“… A comparatively short period will probably serve to decide whether we are to master the mighty economic and social machine that we have created, or whether it is to master us…. (It will be) the difference between yet one more retreat into the Dark Ages, or the emergence into the full light of a day of such splendour as we can at present only envisage dimly.” --- That moment is upon us.

Further reading: 
"Economic Democracy" by C.H. Douglas, " Social Credit" by C.H. Douglas, "Releasing Reality" by E.D. Butler