BillBoard
2nd July 2011, 05:26 PM
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.com/search?q=cache:p51vbaSuom0J:www.worldpsychology.in fo/World%2520Psychology/VirtualPsyFiles/nova_pagina_41.htm+usury+collapse+dollar&cd=25&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
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.
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