Social Credit Views

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• Comment Link Sunday, 11 February 2018 21:59 posted by Martin Ant

  The Douglas Movement bases its educational activities on two fundamental propositions, the one being technical and the other political. The first is that the financial system automatically causes a shortage of purchasing power. The second is that something called the Money Monopoly exists, and that the people at the head of it are deliberately preventing the public from getting to understand that this is so. The Douglas advocate, insofar as he is able to make contact with the public, is called upon to explain the “how”? of the technical proposition, and the “who”? of the political one. “Give us a reason –give us a name”, cry the multitudes, oblivious of the fact that in the first place they are without a background which would make the reason intelligible to them; and that, in the second, no direct evidence can be brought against any person at all. “Show us a sign”, cried the multitudes of old, “that the words you speak are true”; and they were told that they were not going to be given a sign –that if they could not feel the power of the truth in the words spoken, no sign would communicate that feeling.
  
  It is true that the reason is intelligibly communicable, but only to those who are patient enough to undergo the discipline of systematic research. But to the Douglas advocate the task of contacting such people and persuading them, in an atmosphere of mass-incredulity, to assume the antecedent possibility of the proposition being true (without which assumption who is going to spend time on study?) comes as near to being insuperable as any task that can be conceived. The masses, when they demand a reason, are demanding something which is really a substitute of reasoning –something which commands conviction without demanding thought. This is because they have trained to expect instruction in that form, and because it has always been possible for them to get it in that form in respect of the policies and programmes of which political parties have strewn about for them to wrangle over. Little pieces of irreconcilable truths is all they want, and it is all that they have been allowed to have. And, mentally disarmed as they have become by this armoury of heterogeneous convictions about trivialities, they yet expect, mostly subconsciously, to understand the financial technique for economic synthesis and political reconciliation merely by inspecting an article in a newspaper or hearing a speech in a meeting-place.
  
  Source: Arthur Brenton, The New Age, Vol. LIV. No. 19. Thursday March 8, 1934.
• Comment Link Sunday, 11 February 2018 21:59 posted by Martin Ant

  The Mortgage Stranglehold
  
  Before proceeding to explain to you in more detail the nature of this Acts, the present position of them, their objective and the probable trend of developments in connection with them, I think it desirable to give you a brief picture of the situation as we see it, and as I think we see it correctly.
  
  In the first place, there exits, specifically in Alberta, but to a greater or less extent all over the world, a condition of affairs, the understanding of which is absolutely essential to any grasp of world politics today. It can briefly be expressed by saying that a Government –no matter whether it is a so-called sovereign government, or whether its sovereignty is disputed, as in the case of Alberta– is regarded by the Plutocracy, by which I mean the money-lending interest, and not necessarily the rich men, primarily as the administration of an estate to be mortgaged up to the hilt, the mortgages to be created by the lending, to the population of the estate, of its own credit at the highest possible return of interest.
  
  It is essential also to realise that the primary objective of this policy is not merely, and certainly not in any realistic sense, the acquirement of monetary wealth by the plutocrats through the machinery of the banks, mortgage companies, and insurance companies which are their agencies. Though in comparison with the rest of the population these men are immensely rich, their scale of personal luxury could in many cases be maintained upon an income of extremely modest proportions, and their immense reserves are used to perpetuate the system and to finance the wars which are the outcome of it.
  
  
  The Threat of Grinding Toil
  
  With a full appreciation of the gravity of what I am saying, I am convinced that in the case of the ring of international financers who control the system, the conscious objective is to keep the great mass of the population in fear of poverty and loss of social position; by I which I do not necessarily mean in lack of physical necessities, but I do mean that it is intended that they should be kept in constant insecurity and under the threat of grinding toil, even though that toil is not demanded by anything realistic in the situation. In the main this is accomplished by immense misdirection of production effort –redundant factories, “Public Works”, “Fashions”, etc. –anything but wanted consumers’ goods.
  
  I can imagine that anyone unfamiliar with the techniques of the debt-creating system with which we all exist, might say that this is merely a wild assertion incapable of proof. On the contrary, it is capable of the simplest possible proof, and arises from the following propositions:
  
  (a) Modern life and work cannot be carried on without the use of money;
  
  (b) All money comes into existence as a debt from the community to the money-creating agencies;
  
  (c) The debtor is the servant of the lender until his debt is paid;
  
  (d) The debts owing by the community to the money-lending agencies are increasing in geometrical ratio, and could never possibly be paid off, since the amount of money in existence at any time in the possession of the community is only a microscopic fraction of the debts held against them by the money-lending agencies.
  
  The proposition which is put forward by the Government, who act as spokesman for the money-lending agencies, is that capacity to pay should be the measure of a debtor´s liability, which means that everything that he does not require for a bare existence should be at the service of the lender.
  
  There is another point which is frequently misunderstood, and which I should like to make to you, since it is vital in a consideration of the remedial steps which can be taken in connection with the situation, and that is that, although the debts owed by the community to the money-lending agencies are assuming astronomical proportions, they are quite small in comparison with the real wealth of the community measured in the same units.
  
  
  Alberta´s Real Wealth is £ 46,200,000,000
  
  Perhaps an instance of this in connection with the Province of Alberta may be illuminating. A very conservative and detailed estimate, which has been made at my suggestion, of the capital wealth of Alberta at the present time, places that wealth at the astounding figure of forty-six thousand, two hundred million sterling, or over £ 50,000 for every man, woman, and child in the Province.
  
  As you probably know, the population of Alberta, men, women and children, is about three-quarters of a million, little more than half of Northern Ireland in an area 50 times as large, and the greater part of this population, which might be supposed to be the titular proprietor of the Province of Alberta, on the assumption that the citizens of a country are the owners of it, which is of course not true, are for the most part in a state, not merely of grinding poverty, but hopeless debt.
  
  I am not saying that there is £ 50,000 potentially in the pockets of every man and woman in Alberta, but the debts of the population amount to about £ 400 a head; nevertheless, all their debts together do not present a hundredth part of the capital wealth of Alberta; but since they are money debts, and the wealth in Alberta is real wealth, and not money wealth, civilised life in Alberta is becoming impossible. This is the picture that I want you to bear in mind as a background to anything I may have to say.
  
  Source: Clifford Hugh Douglas, ‘Your War in Alberta’, Social Credit Supplement, December 10, 1937.