Announcement

**Sapiens** · October 16, 2009, 12:48 PM

Re: Usury

http://books.google.com/books?id=0fV...fraude&f=false

**Sapiens** · November 03, 2009, 06:36 AM

Re: Usury

http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/789740...a/present.html

Ezra Pound
America, Roosevelt and the causes of the present war

Title of original work :
L’America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente
First published at Venice in 1944

First English Edition
Translated by JOHN DRUMMOND

The main events dealt with in this pamphlet are :
(1) The suppression of the paper-money issue in Pennsylvania, A.D. 1750.
(2) The American Revolution (1776) and its subsequent betrayals.
(3) How the United States fell into the hands of the international usurocracy during the Civil War after about 1863.

These events should be considered in relation to the present war (1939- ).

The Incidence of the War in the Process of History and the Fate of Revolutions

This war was not caused by any caprice on Mussolini’s part, nor on Hitler’s. This war is part of the secular war between usurers and peasants, between the usurocracy and whomever does an honest day’s work with his own brain or hands. I don’t know how many books one may have to read in order to understand this simple sentence, but a writer of history must count more on the selection of facts than on the bulk of exposition. A few pages of a writer like Georg Obst are worth more than the whole of D.R. Dewey’s Financial History, because Obst seeks to make himself clear to the reader, whereas Dewey sought to produce a work useful to the plutocratic bosses.

The historical process has been understood at various times, but this understanding on the part of a diligent minority fighting for the public good is again and again thrust down beneath the surface. In 1878 my grandfather said the same things that I’m saying now, but the memory of his efforts has been obliterated. The same applies to the revelations of men like Calhoun, Jackson, and Van Buren. Forty years ago Brooks Adams assembled some very significant facts, but his books were not widely read. He had no vocation for martyrdom, he confessed with irony.

There are, perhaps, thirty books a knowledge of which will enable us to understand how the American Revolution has been, and is still being, continued by the Italian Revolution, but none of these thirty books will be found on the bookstalls. It took me seven years to get hold of a set of The Works of John Adams, published in 1850-56 in ten volumes, edited with a Life of the Author by Charles Francis Adams, grandson of the Father of the Nation. Besides, these works are partly incomprehensible to anyone who is not already provided with some knowledge of economic or, more specifically, monetary matters.

If you can understand the cause, or causes, of one war, you will understand the cause or causes of several—perhaps of all. But the fundamental causes of war have received little publicity. Schoolbooks do not disclose the inner workings of banks. The mystery of economics has been more jealously guarded than were ever the mysteries of Eleusis. And the Central Bank of Greece was at Delphi.

In the nineteenth century the public more or less believed that political economy had been invented by Adam Smith. Regius Professorships were founded to falsify history and teach Whiggery. And even the Tudor monarchs used to talk about “tuning the pulpits.”

The cardinal fact of the American Revolution of 1776 was the suppression, in 1750, of the paper-money issue in Pennsylvania and other colonies, but history as taught in the U.S.A. speaks of more picturesque matters, such as the Boston Tea Party.

Ethics arise with agriculture. The ethics of the nomad do not go beyond the distinction between my sheep and your sheep. If the study of Aristotle and Demosthenes has not actually been suppressed, it has at least been soft-pedalled for perfectly deliberate and definite reasons. Certain classical authors speak too frankly for the tastes of the Grand Seigneurs of Usury.

The terminology of financial operations has already been studied and set forth with uncommon seriousness by Claudius Salmasius (De Modo Usurarum and De Foenore Trapezitico, Lugd. Bat. (Leyden), 1639 and 1640). But even those encyclopaedias that mention his name tend to ignore these two books.

What constitutes a sound basis of credit was already known and affirmed at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the founders of the Monte dei Paschi of Siena. It was, and is, the abundance, or the productive capacity, of nature taken together with the responsibility of the whole people.

I quote these apparently unconnected facts to indicate that certain high crimes are not due to any negligence on the part of a handful of scholars, and cannot be attributed to the ignorance of the whole of humanity, but that they can only happen on account of the ignorance of the great majority.

What the sages understood was recorded, but inscriptions disappear, books decay, while usurocratic publicity floods the public’s mind like a muddy tide, and the same greed, the same iniquities and monopolies rise up again subjecting the world to their foul dominion.

Captans Annonam Maledictus in Plebe sit

St. Ambrose went straight to the point. “Hoggers of harvest, cursed, cursed among the people !”

The history of usury begins with the loans of seed-corn in Babylon in the third millennium B.C. The first mention I know of a state monetary policy refers to the year 1766 B.C. when an Emperor of China, in order to alleviate the distress caused by famine and aggravated by grain monopolizers, opened a copper-mine and coined disks of metal perforated with a square hole. We read that he gave this money to the starving, and that they could then buy grain where the grain was.

It is not known whether the Emperor invented the idea, or if he followed a benevolent precedent. But one can see that he understood the nature and the social purpose of money, as well as one of the limitations of its power. A similar wisdom emerges from the phrase in the recent Fascist Republican Programme : “not the rights of property, but the rights to property.”

The decrees of the Emperor Frederick II, King of Sicily, used to begin with God the Eternal and the Creation of the World. This medieval style precludes any idea that social factors are without roots.

My ignorance, and yours, and that of the surrounding public is not to-day a natural phenomenon. Above and beyond natural ignorance, an artificial ignorance is diffused, artificially created by the usurocratic press, by several kinds of organizations striving to preserve their monopolies and privileges.

The basic fact of the history of the U.S.A. is the suppression (aforementioned) of the colonial paper-money, fifty-six years after the foundation of the (private) Bank “of England” (so-called).

Among the definitions of the word “banker” collected by Obst we find :

a banker is one who buys money and debts, creating other debts;
a banker is one who borrows money to lend it again at a profit

(i.e., at a higher rate of interest).

The advanced stage in the development of the usurers’ cunning marked by the foundation of the above-mentioned bank was clearly registered in Paterson’s prospectus : “the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”[1]

Paterson, in other words, proposed to lend not money but notes, gambling on the very likely probability that only a small fraction of the “depositors” would ever want to withdraw their money at the same time.

The trick came off, and in a grand way. But the Quakers of Pennsylvania were beginning to enter into competition pro bono publico pennsylvanico. That is to say, they lent their paper-money to farmers for purposes of land-reclamation up to an amount equal to half the value of the land in question, requiring repayment in ten annual instalments.

The bank in the mother country, through the instrumentality of the British Government, had this beneficial competition, which had brought prosperity to the colonies, suppressed in 1750.

After various other vexations the colonies declared their independence, which they achieved thanks to their geographical position and to the perturbed state of Europe.

The Emperor Tching Tang had understood the distributive function of money. Aristotle is right in saying that the Greeks called money NOMISMA because it was a product not of nature but of man. Money is, in the first place, an instrument of the will. The economic conditions of a society depend on the will of its rulers (hindered by ignorance or contrasting will-powers). It is true to say that the purely economic man does not exist, if we mean that the economic problem cannot be solved without allowing for human will as one of its components.

The purpose of a monopoly is to be able to sell the material or product monopolized at an unjustly inflated price, scorning the public good and victimizing one’s neighbour.

During the last thirty years the news-stands and bookshops have displayed and sold a considerable number of more or less “appraximative” works retailing the affairs of various monopolies : of petrol, of metals, etc. But the great whudunnit of money never appeared among them.

In a certain sense Brooks Adams had written it, but not in “popular” form. The kernel of his exposition is contained in the following paragraph.

Perhaps no financier has ever lived abler than Samuel Loyd. Certainly he understood as few men, even of later generations, have understood, the mighty engine of the single standard. He comprehended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency must rise in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at command, his class might be able to establish such a rise, almost at pleasure; certainly that they could manipulate it when it came, by taking advantage of foreign exchange. He perceived moreover that, once established, a contraction of the currency might be forced to an extreme, and that when money rose beyond price, as in 1825, debtors would have to surrender their property on such terms as creditors might dictate.[2]

This is the kernel.

The modern revelation of the usurocratic mechanism remained at this point until Arthur Kitson gave his evidence before the Macmillan Committee, when he traced the curve showing the relationships between debt and credit after the Napoleonic wars, after the American Civil War, and their bearing on the post-Versailles period. (Notice to-day the American propaganda in favour of a “return to gold”.)

Aristotle mentions the olive-press monopoly practiced by Thales just to prove that a philosopher could easily outwit other people if he had nothing better to do, or if he did not find the exercise of his cerebral facilities more interesting.

The monopoly of money, or the restriction of its circulation, is merely a variation of this simple form of monopoly. That is all. The stupid fall into the trap. Wars are provoked in succession, deliberately, by the great usurers, in order to create debts, to create scarcity, so that they can extort the interest on these debts, so that they can raise the price of money (i.e., the price of the various monetary units controlled by, or in the possession of, the same usurocrats), altering the prices of the various monetary units when it suits them, raising and lowering the prices of the various foodstuffs when it suits them, completely indifferent to the human victim, to the accumulated treasures of civilization, to the cultural heritage.

In Two Continents

Every revolution is betrayed.

The story of the young American Republic may serve, to a certain extent, as a warning to the Italian Republic of to-day,[3] just as any other exact knowledge of history may be useful to the understanding of the historical process in times of crisis.

The victory of the American armies, Lord Cornwallis’s surrender, etc., did not end the secular war between producer and usurer which continued, if somewhat subduedly, without the slightest truce. The idea that a war might ever have abolished interest on debt was regarded with irony by one of the “Fathers of the Republic.” After a few skirmishes between advance patrols, there came an action in the grand style, now known as the “Scandal of the Assumption.” The manœuvre was classic. The soldiers of the Revolution had been paid by the various colonies in paper-money that recognized the debt of the colony to the veteran. These “certificates of indebtedness” began to lose their purchasing-power, which fell to twenty per cent. of the face value. A hundred dollars in certificates were worth only twenty. At a certain moment twenty-nine members of the National Congress, in league with their friends, bought up large quantities of the certificates. After this action, the Nation, now newly organized as an executive unit, “assumed” the responsibility of paying them at par. (Claude G. Bowers, former U.S. Ambassador in Spain, gives the details in his Jefferson and Hamilton).

Hamilton’s racial origins have never been determined with certainty, though his eloquence, suavity, and drawing-room talents suggest a certain affinity with the abilities of Disraeli. Jefferson, who opposed Hamilton’s manoeuvres, pinned his faith on the Secretary of the Treasury, Gallatin, of “Swiss” origin. A certain prejudice was aroused against Gallatin, but Jefferson insisted that he was the “most able man in the administration after the President” (i.e., after himself).

Jefferson professed not to understand agriculture (adding deferentially : but Mr. Madison—he does). He claimed a certain ignorance of economics. He insisted that the bank was useful because it gave “ubiquity” to Gallatin’s money. And, in fact, the bank gave it this ubiquity. Giving ubiquity to purchasing-power is one of the perfectly legitimate and very useful functions of banks. But to temper any exaggerated admiration of the workings of usurocratic procedures that may have become sanctified by habit, we may note that John Adams exclaimed in his old age :

Every bank of discount is downright corruption
taxing the public for private individuals’ gain.
and if I say this in my will
the American people wd/ pronounce I died crazy.[4]

Some ten years ago I had occasion to condense the introductory study of American history into a “book” of less than thirty lines. This book shows that Jefferson was less ignorant of finance and money than his modesty would have pretended. Here are my four chapters :

CHAPTER I

All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation,
John Adams[5]

CHAPTER II

... and if the national bills issued be bottomed (as is indispensable) on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no interest on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to every one the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them.
Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Crawford, 1816 July 20)[6]

CHAPTER III

... and gave the people of this Republic the greatest blessing they ever had—their own paper to pay their own debts.
Abraham Lincoln[7]

CHAPTER IV

The Congress shall have Power ...

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
(Constitution of the United States, Article I Legislative Department, Section 8, clause 5)

done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth
In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names,
George Washington—President and deputy from Virginia

It should be noted that only the last of these statements is to be found in a publication easily accessible to the great majority of the citizens of the great but denatured democracy. The American Constitution, from which it is taken, is written in a style that is not very attractive to the average reader. The key-phrases come a long way after the beginning and the citizen gets bored before he catches up with them. For years, now, Congress has taken no notice of the powers it has been invested with by this Document. Now and then some crank from Nebraska or Dakota raises an uncouth voice to demand a little of the liberty proclaimed by the Fathers of the Republic, but the roar of the rotary presses soon drowns such rustic vociferations.

One day, thinking of the trouble it had cost me to unearth these four “chapters,” I asked the head of the American history department of the Library of Congress if there existed a history of America, whether in one volume or in ten, that contained these four chapters, or the substance of them.

After reflecting for a while he replied that so far as he knew I was the first to have brought together and in relation to each other the four great names of the greatest presidents of the Republic.

Lincoln was assassinated after he made the statement given above.

The theatrical gesture of the assassin does not explain how it happened that he escaped from Washington, after the alarm had been raised, by the only road that was not guarded; nor its synchronization with the attempted assassination of Seward, the Secretary of State, nor various other details of the affair. The fact remains that Lincoln had assumed a position in clear opposition to the usurocracy.

Subsequent Betrayals

For a clearer understanding, American history may be divided into the following periods.

(1) The Colonial period up to the suppression of the paper money in 1750.

(2) Preparation for the break with England of 1776.

“The revolution,” said John Adams, “took place in the minds of the people during the sixteen years preceding the battle of Lexington.[8]

(3) Formation and organization of the new order, culminating in the struggle between Hamilton (for the bankers) and Jefferson (for “Democracy”).

It must be admitted that Washington came under Hamilton’s influence. John Adams, the second President, held the high office for only four years. Jefferson ruled for eight years as President, and for a further sixteen during which he guided his successors. Next came Madison, eight years, Monroe, eight years, and then Adams’s son for only four years, like his father before him.

(4) The fourth period covers the twelve years of Jackson (eight) and Van Buren (four), but the decade of 1830-40 has disappeared from the school-books. The public knows, and school-children get taught, that Jackson killed a few Redskins, chewed tobacco, and beat the English at New Orleans, after the peace of Ghent, but before news of its signing had arrived. This military victory of the Hero of New Orleans was nevertheless of service to America, for no one will be so ingenuous as to suppose that London would have observed the treaty had the British forces won the battle.

But the real war was the war between the bank and the people, waged and won for the people by Jackson and Van Buren.

This is the fact that explains the silence of “history” and the small respect paid to Van Buren throughout the whole period of American decadence, which dates from Lincoln’s assassination.

Usurocracy, defeated by the operations of Jackson and Van Buren, next directed its beam of obfuscation onto the question of negro slavery, or “chattel slavery,” as it was called. The dramatic and sentimental possibilities of this problem were far superior to those immediately visible in the bank struggle.

During the pre-war phase the debates in Congress reveal an extremely penetrating perception on the part of the more intelligent members. But after Lincoln’s death discussions lost much of their clarity. The indebtedness of the South to the City of New York took second place. The subject lost its news value.

Usurocracy had discovered that the slave-owning system was less profitable than that of “free” labour. Anyone who possessed a slave had to keep him alive and in a fit condition to work. This cost more than “free” labour, in respect of which, under the capitalist system, the employer had no responsibility whatsoever. The defeat of the slave owners was already determined, predetermined.

Civil and Uncivil

Perhaps the elements of “conscience” and “idealism” never played so important a part in the preparation of a war as in the present instance. The problem of mass emotion is not a mathematical or a monetary problem, but when the passions of the multitude are aroused certain banking elements set about to exploit the situation.

The aim of the Civil War was unmasked in an issue of the Hazard Circular in 1862 :

The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the volume of money. ... It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate ... for we cannot control (their issue and circulation).[9]

As for the system which allowed the national money of the U.S.A. to be controlled by “finance,” namely the usurocracy which was then established in London, it is summed up in a letter, dated 25 June, 1863, from the Rothschild firm in London to the firm of Ikleheimer, Morton & Van der Gould in New York, containing the following words :

“Very few people
“will understand this. Those who do will be occupied
“getting profits. The general public will probably not
“see it’s against their interest.”[10]

This opinion of the various Shermans, Rothschilds, etc., proved to be perfectly right. The protests of the minority representatives in the United States, and of various cranks elsewhere, have failed to overcome the power of the usurers and of the international usurocratic press, including that of England, France, and Italy.

The Comte de Vergennes had every reason to say to John Adams that the newspapers ruled the world.

John Adams’s great-grandson had every reason to write that after Waterloo the power of the usurers met with no serious defeat.[11]

The first serious attempt against them, after Lincoln’s, began with the Fascist Revolution, to be reaffirmed by the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis.

University textbooks, throughout the whole of the century of usury, known as the nineteenth, were written to maintain the domination of usury and to keep the professors in their chairs. A book like D.R. Dewey’s Financial History of the United States contains an enormous quantity of incontrovertible facts, but omits those which are really relevant and revealing. These cardinal facts, on which the whole problem turns, are only to be found in a few pamphlets that slip through the controls, or in fundamental “works” in which their discovery requires great patience on the part of the reader : a hundred pages of reading-matter for three revealing lines.

Conclusion

What ! finished already ? No doubt the reader expects me to explain myself further. But I’m not so sure. I have, I think, given the facts necessary for an understanding of the problem of war, of wars in succession. I might go on explaining and heaping up additional facts for six hundred pages or more.

In 1878 a member got up in Congress and expressed the hope that he might keep some of the non-interest-bearing National debt in circulation as currency.

One reader in five hundred will understand this remark. And I am quite sure that the record of this capricious proposal survives only in one contemporary newspaper clipping, apart from its interment in the archives of the American Capitol.

The state can lend. The fleet that was victorious at Salamis was built with money lent to the shipbuilders by the state.

The practice of state-loans fell into evil repute because the emperors of the Roman decadence allowed money to be lent to unworthy borrowers who did not repay it.

Wisdom resides less in the means than in the affirmation of ends. If there is the will to attain the end, the means will be found. If the end is perfidious, no means can have in itself any inherent virtue capable of preventing the perversion of justice.

Against this, it may be observed that certain systems, and certain mechanisms of means, have been purposely invented and set working in order to mislead the public, and to keep them ignorant of the facts of history and of the best means of creating and maintaining social justice. The ideological and propagandist battle should be directed against the practice of this obscurantism.

In recent centuries gold has been used by the bankers mainly as an instrument for creating scarcity—a scarcity, in the first instance, of gold itself in a certain locality, nation, or nations, strategically determinative.

For a long time now the gold standard has not, in fact, existed. What has existed has been a false-gold standard.

The abolition of a so-called “gold” currency, or of a paper currency issued in a variable relationship to a real or supposed quantity of gold, and the institution of a currency based on “work,” would have one great advantage : work cannot be monopolized. But all the artful dodges of accounting used by the usurers to manipulate the present forms of money would be attempted in the case of any new kind of money.

In this respect the conservatives who cry “No monkeying about with money!” are quite right.

But the fundamental fraud is monopoly ! It is necessary to understand this. It is necessary to understand how it has been practiced from the year 1694, when the Bank “of England” was founded, until to-day.

It is necessary to perceive that Napoleon and several other Heads of States have been struggling against the same snares and pitfalls, the same trickery.

The history of the last twenty-five years in Europe is unknown to the Italian people, and especially to the authorities and economists of Italy and Germany. A summary of the League of Nations infamy is contained in Odon Por’s Politica economico-sociale in Italia. Anno XVII-XVIII.

The usurers’ assault was launched from London and Washington, united in operation. In 1863 the central office was in London, the branch in New York. To-day the position is reversed : the head-quarters across the Atlantic, and the branch in London. The role of France is known. Mussolini was condemned by the international usurocracy from the moment he discovered the connexion between the usurers in New York and their creatures in Moscow. This is all fairly well known throughout Italy. I have tried to piece together a little of the earlier state of affairs behind the scenes.

The Bolshevik was a sham and, to a certain extent, a betrayed revolution.

Bolshevism proposed to destroy capital, but what it did was to destroy property—particularly peasant property. Stalin’s attack on capitalism in his Foundations of Leninism merits attention. He thoroughly understands the iniquity of the various Roosevelts, Churchills, Blums, and the rest of them. But Bolshevism stooped to the methods of economic warfare, flooding foreign markets with goods and foodstuffs at cut prices; and with the purchase of the Suez Canal shares it has now frankly embarked on a financial war. It is allied up to the hilt with liberalism, for the liberals always get around to talking of the export of manpower—of human beings, that is—in exchange for foodstuffs. Stalin disposes of “forty truckloads of human material” for work on a canal. The only difference is one of economic detail: the enormous perversion is common to each tentacle of the monster.

(1) Wars are made to create debts.

(2) War is the highest form of sabotage, the most atrocious form of sabotage.

(3) A nation that will not get itself into debt drives the usurers to fury.

Postscriptum

The details of the Italian and German opposition to the usurocratic conspiracy are available. What has been lacking in Italy, especially among practical people, among industrialists, large as well as small, among businessmen, and not only small businessmen, is a comprehensive survey of the usurocratic mechanism, an awareness of the relationships between commercial transactions, of the relationship between the management of a factory or business and the international monetary system, not on a short-term basis, at three-monthly or three-yearly intervals, but over periods of centuries or half-centuries : and always with the sole object—lucre. And always with the same mechanism, too, namely the creation of debts for the extortion of the interest, of monopolies so that they can keep all prices continually fluctuating, including the prices of the various monetary units, of the various national currencies.

The following are some of the sources at which the student may be able to slake a little of the curiosity that I hope this pamphlet will have stimulated.

Georg OBST, Das Bankgesch�ft, C.E. Poeschel Verlag, Stuttgart.
ARISTOTLE, Politics.
Claudius Salmasius, De Modo Usurarum, Elzevier, Lugd. Bat. (Leyden), 1639.
Claudius Salmasius, De Foenore Trapezitico, Joannis Maire, Lugd. Bat., 1640.
Histoire G�n�rale de la Chine ou Annales de cet Empire, traduites du Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou, par le feu p�re Joseph Anne-Marie de Moyriac De Mailla [or de Moyria de Maillac], Paris, 1777-83, 12 volumes [or 1777-85, 13 volumes].
T. Louis Camparette, “The Reorganization of the Municipal Administration under the Antonines,” American Journal of Philology, Vol. XXVII, No. 2.
The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with A Life of the Author, notes and illustrations, by his Grandson, Charles Francis Adams. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1850-56.
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, XX volumes, Washington, 1903-4.
The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, written in 1854 and remaining in manuscript until its publication as Vol. II of the “Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1918,” Govt. Print. Off., Washington, 1920.
Claude G. BOWERS, Jefferson and Hamilton, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1925.
Willis A. OVERHOLSER, A Short Review and Analysis of the History of Money in the United States, published by the author, Libertyville, Ill., 1936.
Odon POR, Politica economico-sociale in Italia. Anno XVII-XVIII. Florence, 1940. [English translation by Ezra Pound : Italy’s Policy of Social Economics, 1939-40, Bergamo, 1941.]

And for a wider view of the historical process :

Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay. First New York edition (Macmillan), 1896. [New edition, with an Introduction by Charles A. Beard, Knopf, New York, 1943.]
Brooks Adams, The New Empire, Macmillan, New York, 1902.
Arthur Kitson, The Bankers’ Conspiracy ! which started the World Crisis, Elliot Stock, London, 1933.

My efforts during the last ten years, in so far as the historical process and especially the monetary problem are concerned, have been directed towards establishing a correlation between Fascist economics and the economics of canon law (i.e., Catholic and medieval economics), on the one hand, and, on the other, Major Douglas’s Social Credit proposals together with those of Gesell, known as the “Natural Economic Order,” or sometimes as “Freiwirtschaft.” With regard to this last, it should be noted that the mechanism, more or less invented by Gesell, is separable from his more or less political views; it could function just as well, that is, in a controlled economic system, as under the regime of unrestricted commerce that Gesell assumed.

NOTE : In all studies of economics and the historical process we need a freshly determined and a freshly clarified terminology. Even a writer like Obst, who is careful to define his words, has failed to establish a complete terminology, and to make all the distinctions one would have wished. A clearer distinction between a means of saving and a means of exchange might throw some light on the various subjective obscurities of several authors. Meanwhile I welcome with relief Fernando Ritter’s tendency to speak of money not in “financial” or “economic” terms, but in terms of grain and fertilizers.

Finale Enfatico

I hope the reader has not “understood it all straight of.” I should like to invent some kind of typographical dodge which would force every reader to stop and reflect for five minutes (or for five hours), to go back to the facts mentioned and think over their significance for himself. And I should like him to sum the facts up for himself, and to draw his own conclusions.

In case I should have proved wanting in clarity of expression, I repeat :

The meaning of the phrase “It will not do to allow the greenback ... to circulate” is this : private individuals, without any responsibility before the American nation, were able to get control of the nation’s money, forcing the people to pay non-official fines and taxes for the sole benefit of this hidden power, the usurocracy. After Lincoln’s death the real power in the United States passed from the hands of the official government into those of the Rothschilds and others of their evil combine. The democratic system perished. From that time on it has been useless to speak of the United States as an autonomous entity. From what precise moment it became useless and absurd to speak of the British Empire as an autonomous entity still remains to be determined.

It’s so much waste of time to speak of this or that “democracy.” The real government was, and is, to be found behind the scenes. The “democratic” system works as follows. Two or more parties, all under orders from the usurocracy, appear before the public. As a matter of form, and to reassure the simpletons, some honest men and one or two independent idealists are allowed to do a little clean work as long as they don’t touch the various rackets. The biggest rackets are those of finance and monopolization, including the monopolization of money itself, both within the nation and in combination with the various foreign currencies.

When there is a danger of abundance of any, or almost all, commodities, then the usurocracy unleashes a war in order to diminish purchasing-power.

Major Douglas had already by 1920 pointed out the fact of potential plenty. The Loeb Survey Report (Report of the National Survey of Potential Product Capacity, New York City Housing Authority, 1935) has demonstrated the accuracy of the Major’s statement.

The danger of abundance causes the unleashing of war. Even before the previous war Anatole France, in L’lle des Pingouins, ironically informed his readers of the workings of “commercial” wars :

“Certainly,” replied the interpreter, “there are industrial wars. Nations without commerce and industry have no reason to go to war, but commercial nations are forced to adopt a policy of conquest. Our wars must, of necessity, increase in number as our industrial activity increases. When one of our industries fails to find an outlet for its products we must have a war to open up new markets. This year, in fact, we have had a coal war, a copper war, and a cotton war. In Third Zealand we have massacred two thirds of the natives to force the remainder to buy umbrellas and braces.”

This book by “France” was immensely popular round about 1908, but the world failed to learn its lesson.

The history of the United States cannot be given in sixteen pages. I have brought together a few facts which have been overlooked in the weightier tomes, and which the reader must know if he is not to remain in the dark and in ignorance of the bellifacient process. Nevertheless, a history of the United States, in summary form but adequate for the needs of all save specialists, could be composed by putting together this pamphlet, W.E. Woodward’s New American History, Overholser’s Short History of Money in the United States, and an extract from Claude G. Bower’s Jefferson and Hamilton.

The reason for the present publication, at this particular moment,[12] is to indicate the incidence of the present war in the series of wars provoked by the same never-dying agency, namely the world usurocracy, or the congregation of High Finance : Roosevelt being in all this a kind of malignant tumour, not autonomous, not self-created, but an unclean exponent of something less circumscribed than his own evil personal existence; a magistrate with legally limited jurisdiction, a perjurer, not fully aware of what he does, why he does it, or where it leads to. His political life ought to be brought sub judice.

END

EZRA POUND
A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1908 A Lume Spento
1927 A Draft of Cantos XVII-XXVII
1909 Person�
1928 Selected Poems with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot
1909 Exultations
1910 The Spirit of Romance
1928 Ta Hio, or The Great Learning of Confucius
1911 Canzoni
1912 Ripostes
1930 A Draft of Thirty Cantos
1912 Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti
1930 Imaginary Letters
1931 How to Read
1914 Des Imagistes
1931 Guido Cavalcanti Rime. Critical text with notes, etc., by Pound
1915 The Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson, edited with an introduction by Ezra Pound
1932 Profile
1933 Active Anthology
1915 Cathay
1933 A.B.C. of Economics
1916 Certain Noble Plays of Japan: with an Introduction by W.B. Yeats
1934 A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI
1934 A.B.C. of Reading
1916 Noh or Accomplishment
1934 Make it New
1916 Gaudier Brzzska: A Memoir
1934 Homage to Sextus Prepertius (printed originally in Quia Pauper Amavi)
1916 Lustra
1917 Catholic Anthology
1935 Jefferson and/or Mussolini
1917 Passages from the Letters of J.B. Yeats to his son W.B. Yeats
1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos
1937 Politc Essays
1918 Pavannes and Divisions
1938 Guide to Kulchur
1919 Quia Pauper Amavi
1940 Cantos LII-LXXI
1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberly
1940 A Selection of Poems (Sesame Books)
1920 Umbra
1942 Cofucio: Studio Integrale
1920 Instigations, together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character by Ernest Fenollosa
1947 The Unwobbling Pivot and The Great Digest, translated by Ezra Pound
1948 The Pisan Cantos
1923 Indiscretions
1948 The Cantos (The whole poem to date)
1924 Antheil, and the Treatise on Harmony
1948 If this be Treason
1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos
1950 Patria Mia
1926 Person�, Collected Poems of Ezra Pound
1950 The Analects of Confucius
1951 The Letters of Ezra Pound
1927 The Exile (Periodical edited by Ezra Pound)
1951 The ABC of Reading, 2nd Edition

For a list of Ezra Pound’s most important pamphlets see the inside front cover of this pamphlet.

___________________

1 Quoted by Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations, Chap. III. See also Pound’s Canto XLVI. —Tr.

2 Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, new edition, Knopf, New York, 1943, p. 315.—Tr.

3 At the time of writing, the Fascist Social Republic, 1943-5.—Tr.

4 The Italian text follows the author’s own paraphrase in Canto LXXI, which is therefore used here. The source is a letter to Benjamin Rush, 28 August, 1811, see the Works, vol. IX, p. 638.—Tr.

5 Quoted by H. Jerry Voorhis, Extension of Remarks in the House of Representatives, 6 June, 1938, Congressional Record, Appendix, Vol. 83, Part 11, p. 2363.—Tr.

6 Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, Vol. XV, p. 31.—Tr.

7 From a letter to Col. E. Taylor, 1864, about the origin of the greenback, see Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Constitutional Edition, Vol. VII, p. 270.—Tr.

8 See Cantos XXXII and L. This thought, though never quite in these words, occurs several times in Adam’s letters from 1815 onwards.—Tr.

9 Quoted by Willis A. Overholser, History of Money in the United States, Chap. IV. see also H. Jerry Voorhis, loc. cit.—Tr.

10 The Italian text follows the author’s own paraphrase in Canto XLVI, which is therefore used here. The full text is given by Overholser, loc. cit. The words here quoted are attributed in the letter to "a certain Mr. John Sherman," presumably the American statesman of that name.—Tr.

11 Brooks Adams, op. cit., pp. 306, 310, 326-7, and Chap. XI generally.—Tr.

12 i.e. Fascist Republican Italy, 1944.—Tr.

**BillBoard** · March 16, 2010, 08:55 PM

Re: Usury

I found this article which complements those Sapiens posted.

Usury and Titles to Interest

It's usually thought that the traditional notion of usury was that of lending out money at interest. This is not incorrect if it's understood in a very specific way; but from the High Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, at least, the standard view was not that usury is any sort of lending at interest but that it is "when gain is sought to be acquired from the use of a thing not fruitful in itself, without labor, expense, or risk on the part of the lender." I say the 'standard view'; there were actually quite a few variations both leading up to this particular formulation (established by the Fifth Lateran Council in 1515) and afterward. But the basic idea was that the mere fact of loaning something gives no automatic right to charge interest on the loan; money on its own never carries an intrinsic title to interest, although under particular circumstances there can be extrinsic titles to interest; and thus usury consists in acting as if one had a right to treat borrowers a certain way when one has no such right, treating the loan as carrying a title to interest when it has no such title. And it certainly was the case that moral philosophers and theologians were very, very picky about what counted as a title to interest. But the entire late Medieval period was a period of considerable economic change, and that final clause of the Lateran interpretation of usury, "without labor, expense, or risk," turn out continually to require more careful specification as new means and ways of making money developed and as it became easier and easier to make loans of very different kinds. If we were to allow ourselves to give a rough, crude summary of how our modern finanical institutions, one way to describe this history would be to say that it was a sort arms race between moral philosophers and moral theologians on the one hand and usurers on the other as increasing economic prosperity changed the typical ways loans worked; a race in which the usurers kept finding new ways to skim profit from loans and the moral philosophers kept refining their classifications in order to sort out legitimate profit from genuine usury. It was an arms race that the usurers effectively won.

The key instrument by which the moral philosophers made sense of the new economic world was by this idea of titles to interest. An intrinsic title to interest would mean that, in and of itself, a loan would allow for interest. The medieval position was very firm here, drawing from both its theological and philosophical sources: money does not breed. It carries no intrinsic potential for profit, and it is immoral and unnatural to treat it as if it did -- 'unnatural', indeed, is the word they often used for it. I have here and there seen arguments that in our modern economy money is somehow different from what it was in the medieval period, so that now it does carry an intrinsic title to interest; but this is not a reasonable position at all, for it would mean that lenders would have the right to charge borrowers interest even if the borrowers had never contractually committed to paying the interest: if you just lent someone five dollars in a casual transaction, and there was intrinsic title to interest, then you could arbitrarily choose to start charging them interest, simply on the basis of the fact that you loaned it to them, even if you had never mentioned that you were going to do so. Clearly there is no reasonable way this could work; money does not carry any sort of automatic percentage of interest so that you can only charge a particular amount of interest, nor does it carry any special timeline to restrict you to charging interest only monthly rather than (say) by the minute, so far from serving as the foundation for a rational lending system, taking money to have an intrinsic title to interest would be the foundation for an utterly insane and arbitrary system in which borrowers were totally at the mercy of lenders.

So that leaves only extrinsic titles to interest. Extrinsic titles to interest do not derive from the loan itself but more generally from the common good. Because they are dependent on the common good, they are also sharply limited by it. More precisely, extrinsic titles to interest did not run afoul of the principles of justice because justice (in financial matters) is fair and equally beneficial exchange, and the extrinsic titles to interest existed precisely to equalize the benefits of the exchange. Lending is a risky business in many ways, so it's very easy for the lender to lose out in some way in a loan; and borrowing is also a risky business, but sometimes a very necessary one, and so there need to be standards in place so that borrowers don't tend to lose out but can still find lenders from whom they can borrow. This is an extraordinarily complicated problem that took all the ingenuity of some the most brilliant minds of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, and led both to some clever analysis of banking practices and to the invention of entirely new financial institutions, like the montes pietatis, the forerunners of both pawn shops and modern banks. (Indeed, a few of the oldest European banks and pawn shops started out as montes pietatis founded by Franciscan theologians who have since been canonized as saints.)

There was no general unanimity about legitimate extrinsic titles of interest, although virtually everyone agreed they existed. And the discussions are greatly complicated by the rivalry between the Dominicans, who tended to take a much more conservative view of what could be allowed, and the Franciscans, who tended to be much more generous and adventuresome in their views on the subject. But five kinds of extrinsic title were often proposed as legitimate reasons for taking interest on a loan:

(1) lucrum cessans
(2) damnum emergens
(3) poena conventionalis
(4) praemium legale
(5) periculum sortis

Damnum emergens was probably the one that was least controversial and most widely accepted. The idea is basically that in certain kinds of loans it is clear that in the very fact of doing the lending the lender is taking damages. We're not talking about hypothetical harms; sometimes the lender is incurring harm or expense by the very fact of doing the lending. Thus the Franciscans argued that it was fine for a mons pietatis to charge interest on a loan if the interest were for the clear and carefully defined purpose of covering the operating expenses of the institution. Obviously simply to lend at zero interest while simultaneously paying your employees is not, as we would say, a sustainable business model, so there was a damage incurred in the fact of lending in the first place, one that allowed for legitimate compensation.

Somewhat more controversial was lucrum cessans. Sometimes lending, even lending that does not involve any particular sort of actual damage to the lender, means that the lender is losing out on profit that he would have certainly had if he had not done the lending. It's important to be careful here, because we tend to have a very generous notion of how this would work, but the scholastics did not. Many of the early scholastics did not even think that it was possible to be certain of counterfactual profits, the profits you would have had if you had done something differently. However, as lending became more stable, people began to allow that in some cases it was sufficiently certain that the lender was losing out on profit due to making the loan. An obvious case would be if the lender actually pulled mony out of a profit-making venture to make the loan. But it was never accepted that you could simply stipulate that you would have made profit on the money you were lending; you had to have specific reasons leading to certainty for practical purposes that you were losing out on legitimate profits by lending.

I have seen arguments that in our current financial system loans almost always carry extrinsic title of damnum emergens and lucrum cessans. I think this is transparently false if you actually look at the circumstances surrounding most loans, and the arguments otherwise are equally transparent attempts to get answers that had already been predetermined. But even if it were true, it would not justify our current systems of interest. Damnum emergens only allows you to break even on the particular loan you are making; and lucrum cessans only allows you to keep your profits from other ventures relatively stable over the duration of the loan -- one might think of it as a different sort of breaking even. They keep lending from being a bad situation for the lender, but that's it. You can't make a profit from lending itself if these are your only titles to interest. In fact, damnum emergens and lucrum cessans were very carefully and deliberately formulated to prevent them from being used as justifications for profits on mere lending.

The other three allow a tiny bit more wiggle room. Poena conventionalis is an interest, determined by contract between borrower and lender, that compensates for inconveniences the lender will be likely to experience if the borrower fails to return the loan by a certain period of time. That is, the borrower agrees to pay an additional percentage beyond the loan itself if his payment is not timely, due to the fact that his delay (mora) would hurt the lender in some way. You can see that we are slowly getting less concrete in these extrinsic titles: damnum emergens and lucrum cessans compensate for harms you have reason to think are actually being occurred in the very loan itself. Poena conventionalis is for a harm that one has reason to think will occur if certain conditions aren't met. But it's still anchored: you really do have to have reason to think that you will be hurt in some way by the delay, and you can't charge interest on the loan until the delay actually occurs.

Praemium legale, on the other hand, is much more indirect. Moral theologians and philosophers who were dealing with the problems of the emerging banking industry began to realize that the common good was genuinely improved if you had people who were willing to lend to those who for some reason needed to borrow. Thus lending was to that extent a civic activity that should be encouraged, at least within certain bounds. So it was occasionally suggested that the government, when it saw that lending needed to be encouraged, could allow a certain amount of interest on loans generally in order to provide an incentive for engaging in the risky and occasionally expensive business of lending. Obviously there were some people who thought that this was just giving the store away; but those who proposed it as a legitimate title to interest seem typically to have regarded it as a fairly restricted thing, and it's easy enough to see why. If you are trying to encourage actual lending, you can't make the incentive to lenders so great that borrowers no longer want to borrow, however desperate they are. You need to find a level of incentive that won't be a serious disincentive for borrowers. Since the point of the whole title is to serve the common good, you can't have an incentive that in general leaves borrowers worse off -- for instance, it would be self-defeating from the point of the common good law serves if you gave the lenders an incentive that regularly drove borrowers into bankruptcy and poverty. To be a just exchange, a loan has to leave both lender and borrower better off, allowing, of course, for the fact that sometimes unforeseeable events can make this impossible through no real fault of either the lender or the borrower. The tendency of the loans has to be in some way to the benefit of both parties, because only if your lending system has general tendency to improve everyone's life can it be said to be conducive to the common good, and it is only to the extent that lending is conducive to the common good that praemium legale can be a title to interest. (Some Catholics today worry about interest on savings accounts and the like, and wonder whether it violates the prohibition on usury. There's certainly nothing wrong with refusing to take interest on such things, as Dorothy Day did; but if praemium legale is a legitimate title to interest, the very small amount of interest on such accounts, which mutually benefits both parties and encourages both saving and lending, would certainly fall under it.)

One of the trickiest issues involved in lending is the defaulting of loans. None of the other titles to interest do much to handle this very risky part of lending, especially in the case where the default is real, that is, where the borrower no longer has the means to pay the loan. If the above titles were all that were involved, lenders would simply have to take the damage of defaulted loans: it's unjust and oppressive to squeeze money deliberately from those who can't afford to give it to you, so if a borrower suddenly comes into serious and unavoidable expenses (medical bills would probably be the modern example), trying to continue to collect the loan would be unjust and oppressive. Because of this, some moral philosophers suggested that periculum sortis, the chance that the loan might never be paid back, could be considered a legitimate title to interest, a way of limiting the danger posed by sheer bad luck. Such a title is rather dangerous, in the sense that it is difficult to pin down precisely. Not every borrower is equally likely to default; not every loan is equally damaging if never repaid; not every lender is equally endangered by defaults. So this title would require careful consideration of circumstances, and obviously would involve a great deal more approximation than the other titles. Because of this, those who allowed this title to interest tended to put serious restrictions on it, to prevent it from being used as a sneaky way of skimming money off of people.

So the prohibition of usury did not absolutely prevent the charging of interest; interest could be charged if you had a legitimate title to it. It was never assumed, of course, that the lender had an automatic right to charge interest; and it would have seemed utterly absurd to the moral philosophers and theologians who discussed the matter that a contract that in fact tended to harm the borrower could possibly be regarded as acceptable by a right-minded person. If Bernardino of Siena or Antonino of Florence were alive today, they would not condemn every kind of interest that we charge. But it is pretty clear that they would be horrified out our easy acceptance of kinds of interest that harm people who are already poor or in need, at our complete failure to hold interest-charging institutions to the standard of actually showing that they have the right to charge the interest they do on the loans they make, and would insist that Christians not sit around and simply accept it as the way of things, but use their ingenuity and reason to develop new kinds of institutions that would be more suitable to the common good.

And I rather suspect that in this age of lukewarm and lazy Laodicea their plea for this inventiveness and creativity would fall into the void.

UPDATE

John Wilkins asked for some further online reading. The study of scholastic economic thought is relatively hopping, and constantly changing, so it's tricky to find works that are both accessible online and not outdated. Indeed, I can't guarantee that the above is anything more than an approximation, since someone somewhere might have come up with a better way of looking at this or that point by looking more closely at heretofore overlooked or misunderstood passages. In addition one has to be somewhat careful with the online works; many of the works online that discuss the matter discuss it entirely from the perspective of one modern school of economics, which can lead to a somewhat selective reading of the texts. But even the outdated material is sometimes good for at least getting the basic terminology and issues down. As for primary sources, there are a few of them online, but not very many.

The Montes Pietatis, Interest, and Usury articles from the old Catholic Encyclopedia

The SEP article on Gregory of Rimini briefly discusses his economic thought in section 6

Thomas Aquinas on the sin of usury. St. Thomas allows damnum emergens, but that's about it; later theologians often interpreted him a bit more loosely in order to get various practices in, but Thomas's hard line on the subject is one reason for the fact that the Dominicans tended to be more conservative on the subject.

Session X of the Fifth Lateran Council

Benedict XIV, Vix Pervenit (1745)

Brian McCall, Unprofitable Lending: Modern Credit Regulation and the Lost Theory of Usury (PDF)

Robert Mochrie, Justice in Exchange: The Economic Philosophy of John Duns Scotus

George Augustine Thomas O'Brien, An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching

Owen Aloysius Hill, Ethics, General and Special. This and the previous are somewhat dated in their discussions of usury and interest, but still decent enough for getting a sense of the terminology and issues.

A lot of the late medieval and early modern scholastic work is associated with the School of Salamanca; Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson's The School of Salamanca is still after all this time a good first introduction to Salamanticensic economic theory, although I can't find it online. And Eric Kerridge's Usury, Interest, and the Reformation does a good job of assembling relevant sources.

Incidentally, the most famous philosophical defense of usury (on the grounds that people have a right to enter into any monetary contracts they please) is that of Jeremy Bentham; which is perhaps worth noting, since outright defenses of usury as moral are very, very rare.

**metalman** · March 16, 2010, 10:32 PM

Re: Usury

thx for reminding me of sapiens & for bumping one of his many great threads.

**BillBoard** · March 20, 2010, 01:37 PM

Re: Usury

Originally posted by metalman View Post

thx for reminding me of sapiens & for bumping one of his many great threads.

MM - I miss his posts terribly. I am trying to read everything he posted since he left a trail of nuggets to follow. I can now explain to other people what a debt token is without skipping a beat. I hope his family is doing well considering how much he must be missed by them.

**BillBoard** · July 03, 2011, 10:55 AM

Re: Usury

Usury
There must be no lending at interest.
Plato

The beginnings of capitalism are rooted in the innovation of currency and usury, which is the charging of interest on capital lent. It is these two innovations that grew to become the heart and soul of capitalistic exploitation. Both are superbly suited to the efficient organization and utilization of resources that move an economy. But for some reason several of the worlds great religions are dead set against usury. The only time Jesus, the Jewish Rabbi got really pissed off in the bible was when he dealt with the moneylenders. The Buddha taught about right behaviour and right occupation and included stealing, forgery and usury as negative pursuits. The Prophet Mohamed�s last sermon in 632 AD, the year of his death spoke of all interest or usury dues coming from the time of ignorance to be forgiven and then he personally canceled the interest payable to the family of his uncle. Today people seldom reflect on the meaning of usury because they are too busy being indentured.

Usury is a topic that modern people have entirely forgotten, and which you will not find mentioned in most books on Economics, yet its vital importance was recognised throughout all history until quite recently. Webster�s New World Dictionary defines usury simply as "The lending of money at an excessive or unlawfully high rate of interest." But in reality the character of usury has nothing to do with the taking of high or low interest. It is concerned with something quite different. The dictionary definition does not do justice to many thousands of years of thinking on this subject and to the personal suffering and damage done again and again to societies.

The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason:
it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve.
Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.
Aristotle

Basically usury is the taking of interest on a loan that is not productive which is totally different than issuing or investing money to create new wealth, new business. When money is invested and risked for the purpose of the creation of new wealth the lender of the money gets a percentage, which is his profit. This definition creates a divide between investment for profit, for the earning of money through the merger of capitalists and entrepreneurs who work together to make money and the lending of money for all other things. When a new business is created that generates new wealth the lender of the money to such an endeavour naturally gets a fair percentage of the profit. This is only right and fair. Sharing profit among capitalists, management, and even labour is one thing, charging interest on money is another.

Charging compound interest on money lent is different than sharing in profits. When a person takes out a mortgage to buy a $l00,000 home; by the time the loan is paid off thirty years later he or she has given the holder of the mortgage approximately $300,000. This is compound interest in action and is usury by definition because the homeowner is paying an extra 200,000 dollars for what? There are all the reasons we were taught in school but they are false reasons for in most cases the banker creates the money from nothing, he merely created debits and credits with the house put up on the ledger to secure the loan. On one side of the books goes the house worth 100,000 and against that a check is written for 100,000. It would be just as easy for a government to create the money, also from nothing, and charge only a nominal fee for the transaction.

To take interest for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality, which is contrary to justice. Now, money was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange. Hence, it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent, which payment is known as interest.
Thomas Aquinas

The proper use, distribution and supply of money is of vital importance to the efficient running of society. Modern societies are completely reliant on an adequate supply of money as the early Americans noticed quite quickly back in the days of Benjamin Franklin. Without money, industry will grind to a halt, farms become mere self-sustaining units, surplus food disappears, transport of all goods cease, unemployment soars, and hungry populations kill and steal to stay alive. It is not hard to imagine the catastrophic conditions created if money was to completely vanish but the effects of monetary manipulation, though more subtle and hidden, also create catastrophes. Money is the life-blood of society; money flows throughout society just as vital nutrients flow throughout the body, giving sustained growth, development and vitality. Constrict the flow through manipulation and all kinds of bad things happen. Money is the method by which goods and services are exchanged; remove money or hamper supply and the results are disastrous. We need only recall the Great Depression of the 1930's to visualise this. In 1921 Nobel Prize winner Frederick Soddy said, �There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative. Starting with nothing whatever of their own, bankers have got the whole world into their debt irredeemably, by a trick.�

We were all raised to believe that when an individual borrows money from a bank the banker lends us money that other private individuals have brought to the bank. And thought there is some truth to this it is not necessary. How do banks create money out of nothing by mere bookkeeping entries? By the following manufacturing process:

Smith, a businessman, needs $10,000. He goes to the bank and explains the nature of the business he proposes to conduct. He takes to the bank certified figures indicating the value of his business, factory, farm, home, etc. If the banker is satisfied with the amount of real wealth to be pledged, he gives John Jones a note to sign. This note is a mortgage upon the wealth John Jones owns, and gives the banker legal powers to confiscate the wealth, if John Jones does not pay at a specified time the number of dollars he is borrowing. The banker then manufactures the money on his ledgers.

Assets............$10,000 (Collateral against the loan)
Liabilities.�$10,000 (which is actually represents a new deposit in the bank, 10, 000 is simply credited into Smiths checking account)

At that instant, there is $10,000 more money in existence and available for use than before the banker made these entries. What does Smith do with this bookkeeping money? He goes back to his factory with a bankbook, not with actual currency, showing a deposit to his account of $10,000. The "Deposits" are actually and legally nothing but liabilities of the bank. They are the money the bank owes, not what it has. A bank deposit is actually a bank's promise, nothing more. What can Smith do with this newly created deposit? He can and does write checks against this deposit to pay laborers, buy raw materials, and pay general overhead, incident to carrying on the manufacture and distribution of wealth. How is this possible? Other banks are doing the same thing at the same time. A bank against which checks are drawn receives the proceeds of similarly manufactured deposits in other banks. Each bank receives checks drawn on other banks that offset those drawn against it. They all have to work together and are coordinated by central banks that lubricate the system by lending member banks money at low interest rates when and if they need it to make up for actual deposits they do not have. The largest central bank is the US Federal Reserve system that is mistakenly thought to be under governmental control, it is not. This entire system gets tremendous boosts when a flood of oil wealth and deposits hit the banking system like it did in the early seventies. But today in America, which hardly saves any �real� money anymore in the form of savings deposits, they are somehow able to continue lending.

Usury is very personal in effect and is mentioned in religious texts exactly because of the spiritual harm it does. Taken down to its most simple level, if a man went to a baker and asked to borrow half a dozen loaves of bread, because his family was hungry, and the baker said yes, but added, �you must pay me back seven loaves,� this would be usury because the man is not using the loan of the bread productively, he is consuming the loaves immediately. No more wealth is created by the act. If he were asking for money to start a bakery to produce products which would reap income and profit it would be different. Neither he nor the world becomes any wealthier from this kind of transaction. These extra loafs are claimed out of nothing, or in this particular case out of the wealth of the man who borrowed the loaves as opposed to coming out of new wealth created with the money or in this case bread. That is why usury is called "usury� which really infers a wearing down, a dilapidating or diminishing. It�s a violation in a certain sense, a taking advantage of another. It makes, in this case, a poor and unfortunate man poorer. It assumes a creation of new wealth that does not exist. In the case of a house it can be the same. When a person is not fortunate enough to have money to own his own shelter he has to go into a form of servitude for fifteen to thirty years paying back a fortune to institutions that take advantage of his need.

Do not take advantage of each other.
Lev 25: 14-17
Exodus (22.25) contains one of the earliest commands with respect to money lending: "If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be to him as a creditor, and you shall not exact interest from him" Most codes of law and writers on morals from the beginning have denounced as wrong the practice of usury. They have recognised that this practice does grave harm to society as a whole, and must, therefore, as far as possible, be forbidden. Lending money at interest gives us the opportunity to exploit the passions or necessities of other men by compelling them to submit to ruinous conditions. The Church has always protested it as the abuse of another man's necessity; it is in itself unjust, an extortion, or robbery. Why could not the baker just lend the man the bread with the hope of receiving back no more than was given? When there is real community neighbours don�t normally exploit their neighbours.

"Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he
that loveth another hath fulfilled the law."
Romans 13:8

If we have no money and go to a richer friend to borrow we pay it back when we can and most people would normally think it somewhere between dishonourable to disgusting to charge interest. But if a friend came to us to borrow money for the purpose of doing something with the money that was likely to increase its value, and we knew that this was his purpose, we should have a perfect right to share the results with him, and no one would think that dishonourable. Beyond this when we lend money to a friend, or to anyone in fact for something that they obviously do not have money for themselves the highest act of caring, of love, especially among friends, is to lend the money without the expectation of getting it back. If we have it to give why do we need it back? With this expectation, that waits on a poor persons ability to come up with wealth that they do not have now, comes a tension that often ruins friendships. Is money worth that? There is a spiritual teaching that says not to lend money if you need or are going to want it back. In this lending becomes a giving, though in the free giving it most often comes back anyway. This kind of attitude reduces the tension of lending money.

Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors
Mt 6.12

To put the mind too much into the wind of money is a sickness. A psychological imbalance arises because the spirituality of the person is compromised. The more money we have the greater the temptation to think about money. And with more money power issues emerge clawing even more intensely at the mind. Religion ideally speaks of ones soul and the path of staying on the truth of life. In this regard Jesus said that it was more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel to thread the eye of a needle meaning one easily looses ones soul with wealth and it is very difficult to get it back.

The love of money is the root of all evil
Timothy 6:10

Hillaire Belloc sums up the definition of usury to be, �a claim to increment, or extra wealth, which is not there to be claimed. It is a practice that diminishes the capital wealth of the needy and eats it up to the profit of the lender - so that, if Usury goes unchecked, it must end in the absorption of all private property into the hands of a few money brokers.� The section on the concentrate of wealth betrays this truth and much of the world is pretty much the way it is because of the basics of this entire process. It is so in control of society that it is assumed to be correct and naturally part of the basic information put forth in educational textbooks. It is as unchallengeable as any fundamentalist religion. The bankers realised long ago that an under-educated, ignorant and confused population is easier to subvert than a healthy and intelligent people.

Usury is a hidden force in commerce that plays out constantly in the background of most commerce. For example when buying a Coke for one dollar, part of that buck goes to pay for the sugar, caramel colouring, etc.; part is to pay for the labour that went into making it; part is for the transportation and distribution costs, etc. But part of the dollar you pay for the Coke is used to service debt. The factory where it was canned was financed by debt. The truck that delivered it was financed by debt. The store where it was sold is mortgaged, and so on. As much as 30 to 40 percent of the money we pay for a can of Coke is used to service some kind of debt. This debt service is a significant part of every commercial transaction and serves as the mechanism to transfer wealth upward.

The Banker is a person who produces nothing of value, slowly, and then more rapidly, gains a death grip over the land, buildings and labor of future generations. The borrowers have become the servants of the lenders and have placed themselves on the economic treadmill of debt. Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, then the second richest man in Britain said, "Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it all back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits."

Bank-Money cannot be the
grand unifying system of man's being.
Edward Ayoub

Usury is an important subject that should be studied because it affects each and every person on the planet today. We can ignore it as we would ignore the progress of cancer in our body, but ignorance will not stop us from suffering the evil results. Cancer kills individuals where as Usury has the power to destroy societies. Today the world is in the grip of an evil that has been condemned from the earliest recorded times but now the numbers, as we have seen, are in the trillions and climbing fast.

It is clear that the international banking insistence to demand interest on all the unproductive transaction they have made is eating out the marrow of many nations and even in the States we see clouds forming that are signalling the beginning of the end. Today in America we are seeing interest payments beginning to eat up a greater and greater percentage of other wealth in the community. In aggregate we have a 10 trillion GNP a year economy down in the debt hole to an estimated conservative figure of 32 trillion. The interest on such numbers is high even for such a vast economy, and just like third world countries, as the economy slows; it becomes increasing difficult to pay and the situation is only saved by the almost unlimited ability for the federal government to run huge deficits in the budget. In the worst case scenario, everyone will be ruined except those who lent; then these, having no more blood to suck, would die themselves, and then society will have completely collapsed. Capitalism concentrates wealth, i.e., it extracts it from the less wealthy working class and redistributes it to the wealthy capitalist class. This is largely due to the very nature of "usury." Many people properly denounce loans for interest as the principal economic scourge of civilization because through it the accumulation of wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.

Let me issue and control a nation's money
and I care not who writes its laws.
Mayer Rothchild

It is worthy to note that only in the last few centuries has usury become a "respectable" trade. During the middle ages only the Jews were allowed to lend money for interest for it was intensely condemned by the Holy Roman Catholic Church. The Encyclopedia Britannica spoke pointedly in the early nineteen hundreds in several editions about the intensity of negative feelings that most of Europe felt for the Bankers of the Middle Ages. "The numerous outbreaks against the Jews are directed, not against their creed, but against them as keen business men and extortionate money-lenders." It was said, "Their habits of lending money at usurious interest were found to demoralize the peasantry," and "The bitter feeling against them in Rumania is not so much due to religious fanaticism as to the fear that if given political and other rights they will gradually possess themselves of the whole soil.� It was feared by many that �if it were it not for the stringent laws which prevent them from owning land outside the towns, the soil would soon fall into the hand of the Jews.�

Stripping out the anti-Semitism we can see the parallels in today�s world where people of any religion, through control of money and banking, have concentrated both land and wealth to a level that should have been prevented. Though religious and cultural issues are obviously involved, perhaps a great part of the hate and truth of anti-Semitism is in reality an appropriate reaction to Usury. The Rothschild�s, made Jewish control of banking seem like the obvious conclusion to make and perhaps because of the central role of the Jews in money lending in the Middle Ages and after, when the rise of capitalism began its comet ride to its present levels, justifies part of the reaction against them. But today there are so many bankers and super wealthy non-Jewish people involved in this whole show that it is no longer appropriate to make it into a religious or race issue. Though money lending and Usury was happening way back in the times of Christ in the great temple in Jerusalem, perhaps part of the reason the wondering Jews took so much to commerce, trade and banking was because they were prohibited to own land and were prosecuted by the Church because Jesus and his family were Jewish. As the authors of Holy Blood Holy Grail showed in great detail, history takes on a completely different face when these above issues are penetrated.

World Psychology makes it clear that today the clearest most universal anti is anti Usury. It represents a unifying principle common to most of the major religions. Anti Usury is clearer than being anti capitalistic or against the prevailing form of globalization. It is one of the reasons that the left is unclear about economics. Today the basics of politics everywhere is to maintain the present system of Usury. Capitalism can evolve past it present ruinous way and survive without using the worlds masses as modern surfs. Ending interest payments everywhere simultaneously would be a true revolution suitable for sometime in the 21st century. It would be the one, which would make the most sense because debt has gone completely out of control. It has turned into an insane game but all the major players are still sitting at the table coughing up the interest payments. Today they are helped with loans to do that on which even more interest is expected to be paid. It really is totally devoid of logic and compassion. This issue and this issue alone could represent the entire story we saw in the movie the Matrix. Most of us are asleep and are kept as batteries feeding this world system of inconceivable wealth transfer into the hands of a few. Why did we even bother to get rid of the kings and nobility, the pharaohs and despots of the ages, only to replace them with men and women wearing different cloths?

Civilization cannot encompass
unlimited accumulation of capital.

But creating a world government is necessary to do this because if you kill the monetary system of old you have to have a new one waiting instantly in the wings and that can be done by government and probably is already planned by the American government on the behalf of itself in an economic emergency. But one country cannot do that for another and we saw what happened to Argentina partially in response to it�s pegging its own currency to the dollar. Note that you can cancel the interest payment component of loans without canceling the principle. We do not have to totally destroy the wealthiest percent or two of humanity, but they certainly do not need all their wealth nor should they keep it all. They are going to loose it anyway sooner or later, making it sooner would soften the blow of the collective effects of the system.

The whole system of Usury invariably usurps, exploits, and destroys the foundations of what constitutes natural and healthy environmental and social systems. It is a threat to civilization ever bit as dangerous as us losing the ice caps at the poles. Is it possible to put the bad genie back in its bottle? Part of the answer is that humanity must come to recognize that there are processes, technologies, and institutions of our own making which are inherently anti-social and anti-ecological. Yet it seems that for many reasons these processes, institutions and people that are behind them have a death grip on civilization and thus a collapse will have to happen the hard way. Perhaps before we fall too far down the tubes with this all, before what is happening in Argentina and other parts of the globe spreads to all corners of the earth, humans will unplug from this ruinous system and rise up to create something more intelligent. Again and again we come back to the fact that we usually learn the hard way and this is incredibly sad because we can clearly see the massive suffering that is spreading. Though the media protects us from most of it, from the deeply personal level of the suffering, because for sure the wealthy who sit at the very top of all of this own and control the media, it all leaks through anyway and we are in mass sensing that something is wrong. Since the 11th of September we have had our attention diverted with the War on Terrorism and more recently with the situation with Iraq and North Korea. The nineties were boom years only because of the trillions that were lent and borrowed. Now the central banks have lowered interest rates to the floor hoping to stimulate even more borrowing, and they were successful up to a point. That point is ending and that is what many of us are sensing.

Economics strikes a deep cord in each and every one of us because it reflects on basic life activities. People are concerned for it is personal and no matter what our leaders do, no matter what wars they might seek to fight, the fundamentals of the system go on taking us all on a ride to ruin. In Venezuela they are now fighting an economic war that might spread in the not too distant future. There the capital class is throwing its weight against the government, which is of the left. The picture is anything but pretty and the effect is being paid by the interconnected world because of rising oil prices. Argentina�s collapse did not affect the world so much so it was allowed to fall quietly and the suffering there pretty much ignored by the press and the world�s population.

But presently we are still hooked and going deeper into the dark night of unfair economics which will be greatly facilitated as we move further away from cash and even the use of checks and further into the use of electronic digital banking with our computers and the universal use of ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines). When and if we ever reach 100% of all transactions processed in this manner, the cashless society will have been reached and the bankers will have arrived in paradise. The cashless society will be the ultimate instrument in social control; no more tax evasion, no more "extra money on the side", no existence outside the system. It seems like we will be saved from this fate simply because the debt overhang will fall like an avalanche first. When and if we get to build from the ground up again we should remember some of America�s founding fathers advice and create a system that furthers economic health without compromising the very integrity of intelligent civilized life.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...www.google.com

**don** · July 03, 2011, 11:40 AM

Re: Usury

1234

**Verrocchio** · July 03, 2011, 02:26 PM

Re: Usury

You control the debt; you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes?

Hahaha! But no joke, really!

Announcement

Usury

Usury

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment