Textbooks generally divide Government powers into three: The legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.
The legitimate and sovereign government of any free country must possess the power to enact laws to regulate relationships between citizens, and between citizens and established bodies, without having to ask permission from a foreign authority. This is is how legislative power is exercised.
Likewise, the government of a sovereign country must be able to administer the nation in conformity with its laws and its constitution, without having to submit its actions to a foreign government for approval. This is how executive power is exercised.
Finally, the government of a sovereign country must have the power to enforce the laws of the country, to prosecute and condemn those who transgress them, to pass judgement upon matters of litigation between citizens throughout that country, without having to await authorization to do so from a foreign government. This is how judiciary power is exercised.
If these three powers — the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary — make up the greater powers of any sovereign government, there is another power, not labelled as such, but which exceeds these three powers, and which dominates governments.
This superpower, which does not derive its authority from constitutions and which, in exercising its power, shows no more remorse than a thief would, is the monetary power.
The monetary power is not the money that you may have in your wallet. It is not the stocks nor the bonds that you may have in your portfolio. It is not the taxes that the governments of the three levels — local, provincial, federal — take from you, without ever being satisfied. It is not the wage increases unionized workers demand and for which they go on strikes. Not even the industrial dividends that some socialists would like to see taken away from capitalists and distributed to wage-earners, without having measured how insignificant the share each one would get from these dividends. Nor is monetary power what some governments call inflation, and what some employees call a rise in the cost of living, to which both governments and trade unions contribute freely, the former by increasing taxes, the latter by their demands for wage or salary increases.
No, all of the above is small stuff compared to the stature and the power of the superpower that we are denouncing, this power that can make our lives “hard, cruel, and relentless”, in the words of Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno. It can even make life totally impossible, as clearly expressed by Pius XI in the same encyclical:
“This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will.”
These harsh words may seem excessive to those who are unaware of the role of money and credit in economic life and who are also unaware of the control to which money and credit are subjected. But the Pope did in no way exaggerate.
Let us first recall that financial credit has the same virtues as currency in economic life. One buys materials, services, work, products, with cheques — which simply transfer figures from one account to another in bank ledgers — as well as with coins or paper money which go from a client's hand to the local merchant's hand in local trade. It is ledger money that creates most of the economic life, accounting for more than 80 percent of the country's financial operations in commerce and industry. The word “money” can therefore be used to designate both forms of means of payment.
Having said this, let us see whether money has such a considerable role in economic life, and whether the control of it truly leads to the superpower that the Pope and that we attribute to it.
Whatever the conditions of economic life in past centuries might have been, it is undeniable that today, money (or credit) is essential to keep in motion the multiple-source production required by the private or public needs of the population. Money is also essential in allowing this production to meet the needs it is meant to satisfy.
Without money to pay for materials and labour, the best entrepreneur must stop producing, and the supplier of materials will have to reduce his own production accordingly. The employees of both these employers will suffer, their needs remaining unmet while other producers remain with unsold products. And this goes on and on. Entire populations have suffered in this way.
The same applies to public undertakings. Public needs may be pressing, well felt, well expressed and well understood by public administrations. But if these public administrations are without money, or lack sufficient money, projects must wait.
What is lacking under such conditions? Materials? Manpower? Competence? Nothing of the sort. Money alone is lacking, financial credit, the “lifeblood of the economic body”. Let the blood flow, and the economic body will function again. If it is a long time in returning, businessmen will lose their businesses, owners their properties. Families will lose their daily bread, the health or even the lives of their children, and often peace within the family is lost also.
But what can we do? Is this not an inevitable situation that one must fatally endure? — Not at all. If blood is lacking in the economic body, it is because it was removed. And if it returns, it is because it is re-injected.
Extracting and injecting blood are not spontaneous operations. And It is the controllers, the controllers of money and credit, who can “restrict or distribute it as they please... grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production." We need their consent to live. The Pope was right.
In his Encyclical Letter, the Pope did not explain the mechanism of extraction and injection of this blood, nor did he define concrete ways to remove the economic body from the control of these bad surgeons. This was not his duty. His duty was to denounce and condemn a dictatorship, the source of incalculable woes for society, for families, for the people, not only in a material sense, but by creating unwarranted difficulties in the pursuit, for all souls, of a destiny which must be theirs for all eternity. And the Pope said what he had to say. Alas, little sttention was paid to his words, and the dictatorship he denounced has since, further consolidated its position. The relief that the Pope's words might have caused, was allowed only to maintain a power in place which effects had become so obvious that they could hardly be concealed.
The sudden return of a blood flow, in an economic body which had been almost entirely deprived of it for many years, could not but impress even those who knew nothing about its mechanism. This jolt occurred in September of 1939. The day before, an economic body deprived of blood paralyzed all developed countries. The declaration of war, to which these same countries would participate, suddenly brought all the blood, all the money, all the financial credit these nations would need during six years, enrolling all of their human and material resources.
Monetary power is the power of issuing the nation's money and credit; the power of setting conditions to the placing into circulation of this money and credit; the power to determine how long this money will be in circulation; the power of demanding the return of money under preset conditions under threat of confiscation of goods that are the fruit of the labour of those being subjected to confiscation; the power of bringing governments into subjection, by fixing for they too, the conditions of its release and of its return, by demanding as a guarantee the power that all governments have of taxing their citizens.
But this financial credit, this money, is the permission to set in motion the production capacity, not of the controllers, but of the country's population. The controllers of money and credit do not cause a single stalk of wheat to grow, do not produce one pair of shoes, do not manufacture a single brick, do not dig a single mine shaft, do not pave one square inch of road. It is the country's population who does all this. And it is therefore the owner of this real credit. But to be able to use it, one needs the approval of the controllers of money, of the financial credit, which is nothing more than the registering in the banks' ledger of figures that represent the value of the nation's real credit.
The banker's pen which agrees to or refuses to give to individuals, to corporations, to governments, the right to mobilize the skills, the good will, the nation's natural resources, that pen commands; it grants or refuses; it sets conditions on the permissions it grants; it drives to indebtedness those, individuals or governments, to whom credit is granted. This pen acts like a scepter in the hands of a superpower, the monetary power.
Ten years of economic paralysis: No government thought itself capable of putting an end to it. War is declared: The financial permits to produce, to draft, to destroy and to kill, suddenly appear overnight.
Ten parliamentary sessions in Ottawa — each lasting several months — were unable to find a solution to the anti-natural crisis which was starving and depriving entire families in front of unsold products and the possibility to offer a lot more.
But a so-called six-day emergency session, from September 7 to 13, 1939, was all it took to decide to enter head first into a war which would cost billions. A quick and unanimous decision was taken. A minister from Mackenzie King's Cabinet, J. H. Harris, spoke with all the eloquence he could muster: “Canada,” he proclaimed, “has its eyes glued on this House. Therefore, are we not obliged to see to it that there be within this House a unity of action and of thoughts? The reason is evident; Christianity, democracy, and personal freedom are at stake.”
Christianity and personal freedom had not seemed at stake, neeither to him nor to the Government to which he belonged, all those years during which time Canadian families were destroyed by being unable to bring bread to the household; during which time young people were taking refuge in concentration camps — also called work camps — in order to get a meager ration in return for their total servitude; during which time men exiled themselves in the woods; during which time unemployed able-bodied men roamed from one town to the next; while others sought shelter in shacks that they built out of pieces of sheet metal or tar paper atop Montreal's City dump...
And what did Christianity and personal freedom gain from a war that divided Germany into pieces, while placing a part of it, as well as ten other entire Christian countries, under the yoke of the Communist bloodthirsty Stalin?
But Harris and the others knew that going to war was the condition that would allow the returning to the economic body of the blood controlled by the superpower, the monetary power.
There is no worse tyranny than that of the monetary power: A tyranny which makes itself felt in all homes, in all institutions, in all public administrations, in all governments.
And from whence does this superpower hold its authority? The three other governmental powers hold their authority from their country's Constitution. But what Constitution has managed to give a superpower the right to hold governments under its control?
The fact that this same situation exists in all developed countries does not justify this monstrosity. It only goes to show that the superpower of money and credit holds all the civilized world in its tentacles. This makes it all the more diabolical.
A diabolical power, but one that has surrounded itself with an aura of sacredness, to the extent where the causes of our economic and social woes are sought for everywhere, except in the operation of the money and credit system. Searching elsewhere is allowed. But hands off, if you dare look at the monetary and credit system, even the hands of sovereign governments.
It took the light shed by Social Credit which originated with a genius, C. H. Douglas, to dispel this aura, and to unmask a tyranny that is in no way sacred. And it took Social Credit apostles to spread this light. But how many minds who ought to be the most able to understand, the most able to distinguish between a system of domination anfor their own private interests!
The implementation of Social Credit — which we will not explain here, the “Michael” Journal having done so many times in the past and planning to do so again in the future — would destroy this superpower, the scourge of humanity.
What is needed instead is a monetary power, established by constitution or by law, in order to turn the monetary system into a system at the service of the community, as are the other three services mentioned above.
A monetary power exercised by an organism analogous to the judiciary system, staffed with qualified accountants instead of judges. Accountants who would, the way judges do, accomplish their function independently of the politicians in power. They would base their operations — additions, subtractions, or rules of three — upon statistics over which they have no say; upon the statements of what is produced and consumed in the country, the result of the free activities of free producers in answering to the orders freely expressed by free consumers. This means that money and credit would be nothing more than the faithful reflection, the written expression of economic realities.
It is the law constituting such a monetary power that would determine this end as being the end of the organism thus established. The organism would supply the necessary financial credits to the people so that they may order from the country's production capacity the goods they need. And since the individuals and families know best what they need, the monetary organism would be held, by its very constitution, to supply each individual, and thereby each family, with the income needed to order the goods needed to maintain a decent standard of living. Social Credit calls this a dividend to each citizen, regardless of one's status as employed or unemployed in production.
The same monetary organism would supply the producers with the financial credits required to mobilize the country's production capacity, in answering to the orders thus expressed by the consumers. For public needs as well as for private needs.
If the pen of an usurped superpower is able to accept or to refuse to create, at the whim of this tyrant, the financial credit based on the nation's real credit, then surely the pen of a constitutional monetary authority must be just as capable of issuing the financial credit needed for the population's use, for the use of all members of society. This end would be specified by law.
There would no longer be purely financial obstacles. Contracting debts towards foreign financiers for things that we can make in our own country; this absurdity would no longer exist. Prices that go up when production becomes easier and more plentiful; this contradiction would cease to exist in a monetary system held, by law, to make the financial aspects of the economy the exact reflection of reality. The search to create new jobs when machinery replaces men on the production line; this absurd policy would be relegated to a past history of subjection to a monster. The astronomical waste due to the production of things that are of no use to the normal needs of people, for the sole purpose of creating jobs, would be banned for its lack of responsibility towards the generations who must follow us.
And a thousand other things would ensue from the establishment of a monetary power "at the service of", and from the disappearance of the unbearable rule that insists upon linking income solely to employment, when the first effect of progress should be to free man from economic tasks, allowing him to devote his time to less materialistic activities better suited to his personal development.
(first published in the January, 1970 issue of the Vers Demain Journal.)
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