NEWS FLASH! TAIWAN 'S 'NATIONAL DIVIDEND '

from Wallace Klinck, Canada
We have received confirmation of the recent monetary experiment in Taiwan whereby direct consumer credits were issued to all citizens. It remains to be determined how this issue was financed: by taxation, by enlarged public debt - or by a creation of credit not registered as debt.

A message from a colleague reads:
I can confirm that money (in the form of vouchers valid for use for purchasing consumer goods in shops) was recently (February 2009) made available for collection from the post office in Taiwan. The amount was NT3,600 (equivalent to about '75 (Canadian?) as calculated by currency exchange rate, but I am advised it is much more than this in purchasing power) for every man, woman and child (even babies).

My sister-in-law, who is a Taiwanese citizen and a UK citizen, and presently lives in the UK, was on holiday in Taiwan at the time with my brother and niece, and so she was eligible to collect NT3,600 as well (which she happily spent at the shops!), and her brother's family (2 adults and 3 young children) collected NT18,000.

The distribution was done under the guise of Chinese New Year celebrations and the customary 'red envelopes' (and probably also as a 'goodwill gesture' by the recently-elected KMT party) as a way of hiding the real economic need for it. As far as I am advised, there were no complaints! Nobody asked "where did the money come from?"*

As far as I can determine, the vouchers, issued by the government, are redeemed by the shopkeepers by exchanging them for cash, or equivalent (bank balance increase), from the government. I will try to find out more details on this part of the process. So, it seems we now have another example (of credits issued for consumption 'ed).

*At present, the population of Taiwan is about 23 million, so that amounts to a distribution of NT82.8 billion (about '1.725 billion), if all the vouchers are claimed and used (which, my brother advises me, they will be!) - it would be interesting to find out if the Taiwan government debt had an abnormal increase of NT83 billion in February this year, if not, it could be that the 'money' was issued 'debt-free' and 'tax-free'.

THE CLASH AND CRASH OF CIVILISATIONS

by James Reed
Samuel Huntington, US scholar, published a ground shaking essay, 'The Clash of Civilisations in 1996. The argument was highly controversial for academics at the time to contemplate: traditional disputes such as capitalism versus communism will be replaced by civilisational conflicts: the West versus Islam, China, Russia, Latin America, India, Japan and Africa. He said that the West was losing the war against the rest and pointed his finger at Paul Keating 's Asianisation policy as a defection from the West.

Huntington was on the right track, but decades before him, Eric Butler also recognised that conflicts would occur through pluralism and globalisation, and before him, Major Douglas. Nevertheless the 'clash of civilisations theme was present in a speech given by General Michael V. Hayden, Director of the US CIA, at Kansas State University last year ( 'The Shift in World Power China 's military build-up is aimed at achieving great-power status in the years ahead).

The rapidly growing populations of the Third World will expand by migration to the developed world and be a 'significant challenge. China will continue to grow in military strength, but is 'not an inevitable enemy of the US. That is CIA talk for we are s- scared of China.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan may become a failed State with terrorists ultimately getting their hands on 'the nukes '. Mexico is fast becoming a drug-State as Mexico 's drug cartels have a combined army as large as the Mexican army. Something resembling a civil war is occurring along the Mexican border, where 7,000 people have died, far more than in Afghanistan.

The US has its own little war right on its border, no doubt soon to migrate right through the US of A. Indeed, the Texas Governor has already asked B. Hussein Obama to militarise the Texas/Mexico border with US troops. Ten thousand people have been killed in the Mexico drug wars since 2007. Obama, in debt to Hispanics for votes, will do nothing.

Huntington was only partially right. He did not see that there are also internal tensions within civilisations, hurling them towards their doom. We, each day, are watching Western civilisation unravel. Survival measures are appropriate, and we writers here in the 'Saving Western Civilisation series attempt to articulate the major threats and challenges as we see them.

There is not a lot we can do to help save the Americans, but we need to be aware of their plight and learn the lessons that they seem unprepared to learn. Not only is there a 'clash of civilisations along ancient fault-lines, but there is also a 'crash within civilisations - internal forces which threaten to shatter them.

WATCHING THE CHINA BREAK

by Brian Simpson
As something of a footnote to James Reed 's piece on the clash and crash of civilisations, the tide seems to be definitely turning towards the 'crash of civilisations, the internal breakdown of civilisations. For example, apart from the coming chaos in Pakistan, China faces enormous social dislocation with its migrant population of 20-30 million people having already lost their jobs and homes.

These will become desperate people who could cause some headaches for the Communists who still rule China with an iron fist in a capitalist glove. The Chinese have been lifted from poverty well, millions of them - because Western capitalists have made China a factory of the world. But this is an insecure, unsustainable existence as the present global financial 'crisis shows. When China breaks this time, we all will be cut by the shrapnel.

DON 'T DO WHAT I DO DO WHAT I SAY !

by Betty Luks
Readers may remember the open letter to the Archbishop of York in response to his public criticism of the money markets questionable 'ponzi schemes ', etc. (O.T. Vol.45 No.4 2009). It seems the Archbishop 's public statements came back 'to bite him '. Last November Simon Barrow, co-director of the religion and society think tank 'Ekklesia (Source: Christian Council for Monetary Justice website) reported:

'Following huge losses during the financial crisis, the Church of England should return to the Christian principles of using material wealth for the common good. No-one is immune from the global economic crunch. That includes the Church of England, which has '5 billion tied up in assets, pensions and buildings.
When the archbishops of Canterbury and York started to sermonise on short-term greed and the failures of market, they were embarrassed to discover that the Church had been playing the system in pretty much the same way as everyone else.
Initially, things looked good. Due to its share holdings, England's Established Church gained hugely from rising oil, gold and copper prices, driven at least in part by speculators.

Hedging their bets:
'In 2006-7 the Church Commissioners, accountable to parliament, set up a currency-hedging programme, in effect short-selling sterling to guard against rises in other currencies. The C of E invested '13 million in Man Group, the largest listed hedge fund manager. It also has a stock lending programme through JP Morgan Chase and has traded debts, in spite of the Archbishop of Canterbury's criticism of doing so exclusively for profit.
The Church sold a '135 million mortgage portfolio last year.

Then things went pear-shaped. A week ago the Man Group was down 30 per cent in early trading after its profits slumped, potentially wiping '4 million off the value of the Church's holdings. The Commissioners have announced an average return on investments of almost 10 per cent a year over the last ten years. But most of these are in property and equities, which have taken a hammering as markets have fallen; so future prospects are not rosy. Exposure in banking (HSBC, TSB, RBS, and HSBOS, which has fallen a staggering 90 per cent) and mining (in defiance of ethical advice) is also costing the C of E dear ' '

So. Are we miserable sinners going to find our way forward via the ethical directions of the established Church? I fear not. We must press on ourselves. But first, you must get it quite clear in your mind there is nothing new about the secretive banking and finance cult (mammon).
There is clear evidence banks were operating their fraudulent 'credit-debt ponzi schemes 6000 years ago in Sumer and then later in Egypt. It wasn 't on the scale of this globalised world order of course, and, I might add it was easier then than now for the 'Money Cult to keep the details, the secrets, of how it was done more tightly controlled by 'the chosen few '.

Further reading: 'The Four Gospels '; 'The Babylonian Woe by David Astle; 'War Cycles Peace Cycles by Richard Kelly Hoskins, and especially 'The Money Trick from the Institute of Economic Democracy.

THE UGLY UNDIES OF GLOBALISATION : THE BANKS

by James Reed
Pacific Brands clothing, footwear and bedding giant is sacking workers and closing factories. Cheap offshore brands have made it no longer financially viable to manufacture clothes in Australia. OK, we understand. But wait the smell of the banks can be detected.

As an article on this in The Australian (26/2/09, p.17) says: 'The company has also extended its debt facilities by six months to August 2010. Merrill Lynch analyst David Errington said the lenders decision not to grant a longer extension suggested the drive to save costs was the result of pressure from Pac-Brand 's bankers. '
'It looks like someone has panicked, namely the banks, and you now have to cut the business ribbons to appease them, Mr. Errington said.

Yes, and to appease the banks, we have to cut our culture, society and traditions to ribbons and that 's as good an argument for social credit as you could get.

THIS IS REAL ALICE-IN-WONDERLAND STUFF

While we know Kevin Rudd is doing the same sort of thing in this country, at this stage the US presents a clearer picture. We are told the financial figures for the many US bailouts have reached the absurd figures of $US 9.7 trillion.
But it is the financial system itself and the huge corporations being bailed out not the people, such as those who have lost their homes and are sleeping in the tent-city in California.
And yet, there is enough new credit being created to hand over a cheque for $US 92,000 to every American household, or enough to pay 90 per cent of the home mortgages in the country! (The Privateer, Number 625 March 2009)

Instead of which, the US government is bailing out their banking/financial cronies, who not only created the credit-debt out of nothing to begin with, but now want to wipe off some of the top-heavy debt figures in their books in the latest attempt to forestall the whole house of credit-cards crashing down around them! How do they do this, you ask?
Simple: First by turning off the 'credit-debt tap. In other words, not issuing new credits and not 'rolling over overdrafts and loans that have come up for renewal, etc. In their own special 'lingo ', they are deflating the credit bubble. By causing mass bankruptcies they can then wipe out many of the noughts at the end of their credit-debt accounts system and hopefully - perpetuate the credit-debt system.

The Global THREE 'D 's: The Privateer explains it thus:
'The first one is DE-flation: This one is enormous. It has no precedent in history in either scale or dimension. And it is still going on. Worldwide, the combined losses on shares and real estate now come close to $US 100 TRILLION ' '
Then there are/were the derivatives casinos.
It has been pay-back for quite some time among the money men in their 'shadow banking world and the big fish have just about gobbled up most of the smaller fry.

The Privateer continues:
'The second of the global 'D 's is - DE-leveraging. This one still going on too, at very high speed. It has however now gained a steady rhythm as businesses, families and individuals across the world begin to repay the debts they owe. That gives the deflation another push because a commercial bank loan repaid, contracts the total volume of bank loans outstanding. Deleveraging is in this sense feeding deflation.

Notice how words once associated only with the real physical world are commonly used by the banking/ financial world, thus sowing in our minds the idea that economics (national housekeeping*) and finance/money are often interchangeable terms and both stem from the real world?
Next time you read an article on the subject, count how many times economists and money-men confound finance/money with the physical word of economics.

'The third of the global 'D 's is - DE-globalisation. This can clearly be observed by noting the fantastic fall in ocean traffic The global result of that is that fewer foreign economic goods are arriving on foreign shores and the flow will contract further in the months and years ahead '

Shipping companies operate within the financial system as does everyone else. An instance of what actually happens was reported to me just before last Christmas. A lone overseas ship was held up in a port in Queensland, not because it didn 't have orders for the cargo it planned to load, as well as an assured overseas buyer, no, it was held up because it could not obtain the necessary Letter of Credit!

*The Wikipedia: original concept of 'economics ': 'Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek (oikonomia, "management of a household, administration") from (oikos, "house") + (nomos, "custom" or "law"), hence "rules of the house(hold)."
In a modern 'money economy, production, distribution and consumption is governed, directly and indirectly, by the policies of those who control the financial system.

DEBT CART ROLLS ON... DIFFERENT COLOUR, SAME DRIVER

Corporate bonds step where banks fear to tread, Jagger and Power. The Times, 23/3/09: 'Businesses, frozen out by the world's biggest banks, have flocked to the corporate bond market to raise new funds, triggering a 160 per cent surge in debt issuance since the beginning of the year. About $331 billion ( '229 billion) has been raised through corporate bond issues since January in Europe, America and Britain, compared with $127 billion for the same period last year.
According to Dealogic, the data consultancy, there has been a threefold rise since 2004 on the average amount raised each year in this market. Financiers say that the rise has happened because banks effectively stopped lending competitively to business after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, last September. Barclays Capital, the world leader in the bond markets, is expecting 2009 to be a record year. It has raised more than $70 billion for clients since January through corporate bond issues.

Wikipedia explanation of the Bond Market:
'The bond market (also known as the debt, credit, or fixed income market) is a financial market where participants buy and sell debt securities, usually in the form of bonds.
As of 2006, the size of the international bond market is an estimated $45 trillion, of which the size of the outstanding U.S. bond market debt was $25.2 trillion. Nearly all of the $923 billion average daily trading volume (as of early 2007) in the U.S. bond market takes place between broker-dealers and large institutions in a decentralized, over-the-counter (OTC) market.
However, a small number of bonds, primarily corporate, are listed on exchanges. References to the "bond market" usually refer to the government bond market, because of its size, liquidity, lack of credit risk (that 's because we taxation-slaves are seen as the final guarantee that governments will repay 'ed) and, therefore, sensitivity to interest rates. Because of the inverse relationship between bond valuation and interest rates, the bond market is often used to indicate changes in interest rates or the shape of the yield curve. '

BIG DIVERSITY, BIG TROUBLE

by Brian Simpson
'The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learnt to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, New York 2006) by Walter Benn Michaels, is an interesting book. This is from a writer of the Left attacking what we would call multiculturalism in its hard form, the idea that even though (according to the Establishment), race is a 'myth ', the current culture of diversity worship 'trumpeted as the repudiation of racism and biological existentialism in fact grew out of and perpetuates the very concepts it congratulates itself on having escaped. (p.7)

All this we know, but it is good to hear it coming from the Left as it enables students to be able to raise questions which can make their pinko lecturers squirm. If races, like fairies, don 't exist, then why do people of colour put so much emphasis into the racial concept? Why is race so important to them?

Isn 't it therefore 'racist to deny the racial concept if people of colour believe in it? If diversity is so good for a Society, then why does it result in so much trouble? Why is it that the bigger the diversity, the greater the trouble? Please Professor Pinko, explain.

OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM : EATEN AWAY BY PC WHITE ANTS

by James Reed
Our education system is in a mess. English teachers, no doubt under the influence of postmodernist dogmas, are pushing to downgrade the importance of literature and upgrade the study of other 'texts in multi-model forms. (The Australian 28/2-1/3/09, pp1, 2.) Maths is also in crisis as teachers depart in droves (The Australian 4/3/09 p.3).

As a former teacher of English, but also lower high school maths, I can personally understand what is happening here. Our schools are appallingly undisciplined places. Students are frequently out of control, sometimes bashing other students and teachers. Even in the best of classrooms in the public system, it is just teenage child-minding. You can see civilisation draining away, every teaching day. No wonder I was on the verge of becoming an alcoholic.

To turn this back, if we can, we need to recognise that we have a fight on our hands. Personally, I would like to see the home-schooling movement grow and replace this decayed system. It looked like the tree had died. Then, one day I noticed a green trunk coming up from the earth. A new tree was slowly replacing the old decayed tree.Saving Western civilisation is just like that. Let the old tree be eaten away by the white ants of political correctness, let us grow the new tree of knowledge. That 's the quest of the League in a nutshell!

ONE OF OUR NATIONAL TREASURES?

Major General Cosgrove was interviewed on ABC Radio recently. The following is a portion of that interview with a female interviewer on guns and children. Major General Cosgrove was in preparations for sponsoring a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military headquarters.
Regardless of how you feel about gun laws you 've got to love this - one of the best comeback lines of all time.

Female Interviewer: So, General Cosgrove, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base?
General Cosgrove: We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery and shooting.

Female Interviewer: Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?
General Cosgrove: I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the rifle range.

Female Interviewer: Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?
General Cosgrove: I don't see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm.

Female Interviewer: But you're equipping them to become violent killers.
General Cosgrove: Well, Ma'am, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you?

The radio went silent and the interview ended. Thanks to a supporter for this news item.