5/1/2008 9:21 AM

A democrat for Social Credit warns that history continues to repeat.

"Individual killing is murder. Collective and wholesale murder is dignified by the name of war. The cause of war is economic. Men (and women) do not want to fight but they will fight if they believe that otherwise they will starve."

Those words were penned by C H Douglas in 1931 at the height of the ‘Great Depression’. The experts and politicians at that time were all saying the solution to the crisis was to “work harder, produce more and consume less”. That depression was typified by high unemployment, farms going out of cultivation and produce being destroyed because it couldn't be sold. 

The present crisis features low unemployment, arable land being converted to bio fuel production and food becoming too expensive for a significant segment of the population to buy what they need. Remarkably the solution being put forward by John Key and Michael Cullen is again to “work harder, produce more and consume less”.

I dare to suggest that C H Douglas was correct in his analysis in the 1920s that a monetary system built on a foundation of interest bearing debt would suffer repeated periods of 'adjustment' to the detriment of the majority of people. Nearly half the global community or around 3 billion people subsist on less than 2 dollars per day, about 1 billion on less than 1 dollar per day.

How many more decades of periodic 'adjustments' and wars conducted to justify the continuation of weapons based injections of debt as purchasing power, into the economies of 'wealthy' nations such as the US, will future generations have to suffer before money is restored to its rightful role as a facilitating mechanism rather than abused as a speculative tool for the greedy and privileged.

When C H Douglas wrote Social Credit in the 1920s he warned of the 'money power' misusing their monopoly of debt creation to gain advantage and privilege within the economic system. 

Recently Economics Professor Joe Stiglitz confirmed Douglas when he wrote "The finance ministers and central bankers are really owned by Wall Street and the financial markets - and the financial markets are at the root of the problem."

Prof Joe Stiglitz stated that policy makers are unwilling to confront fundamental problems with the philosophy they have pursued for over two decades. "It is all based on a simplistic ideology," he said. "What these leaders are finding is that the heroes of the past 20 years have been the financial market wizards and all of a sudden it's so obvious that the emperor has no clothes. The lionising of the money men was ideology and special interests, cloaked in ideology."

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