Newsletter No. 12 - June 2007
Links to other Newsletters can be found here.
CONTENTS
1. Gordon Brown: What will he do as Britain's new
PM?
2. US Monetary Reform - Richard
C. Cook's Emergency Program and the American
Monetary Institute
3. Quarterly Review Re-launched
4. "Who & What Is Peter
Cadogan?"
5. Book Reviews
(1) Renee-Marie Croose Parry with Kenneth Croose
Parry, THE POLITICAL NAME OF LOVE, New European
Publications, 2007, 366pp, £17.75, paperback.
(2)Michel Glautier, THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE:
Can a Caring Society Exist in a Market Economy?, Shepheard
Walwyn, 2007, 352pp, £19.95, hardback.
6. Book Notes
(1) William H. Martin and Sandra Mason, THE ART
OF OMAR KHAYYAM: Illustrating Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, I.
B. Tauris, 2007, 184pp, £39.50, hardback.
(2) Marion Body, THE FEVER OF DISCOVERY: The Story
of Matthew Flinders, who gave Australia her name, New
European Publications, 2006, 250pp, £15.00, hardback.
------------
1. GORDON BROWN - BRITAIN'S NEW PRIME MINISTER
Gordon Brown is expected to take over on 27th June.
What will he do about all the problems and unfinished
business left by Tony Blair? Will he make sweeping changes
in the Cabinet, and in the way British government policies
have been decided and implemented in the past ten years?
Will he be able to offer the prospect of an exciting
new start, admitting past failures under Tony Blair
for which he himself shared Cabinet responsibility?
That question could come up with particular force in
the sphere in which he has had special responsibility
as Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister).
That involves the government's operational policies for
managing the country's money supply, raising public revenue
(e.g. by taxation and borrowing), and spending the revenue
on public purposes. As at present carried out, those
three functions all have deeply perverse effects -
economic, social and environmental. They are discussed
in many items on this website.
Gordon Brown made a dramatic start ten years ago,
reforming the Bank of England, giving it operational
independence to control the money supply according to
the elected government's published objectives, and requiring
it to account to Parliament for how it performed. That
was a small step in the right direction.
Unfortunately he did not question, and so far as we
know has not yet questioned, the assumption that the
only important aspect of how the money supply is managed
is control of inflation - as if who creates new
money, whether as debt or not, and how it is
put into circulation, has no effect on economic efficiency,
social justice or environmental sustainability.
However, over the following few years Brown's pronouncements,
for example about an "enabling" economy and
the importance of "green" taxation,
occasionally gave hope that his initial reform might
be a first step in a more systematic, wider-ranging reform
programme, covering all three of the Treasury's main
operational responsibilities.
More recently other optimists may still have hoped
like me that, before launching such a historic programme
of democratic reform, Brown might be waitinguntil
he himself was in the top job and Blair no longer in
a position to interfere. But it takes a lot of optimism
to keep that flickering hope alive. For the time being
we have to take comfort from the fact that, as the following
item suggests, international awareness of the need for
money system reform is continuing to spread.
2. US MONETARY REFORM
"An
Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United
States" by Richard C. Cook was
published in Global
Research , 26 April 2007 and is a powerful
independent 12,000-word report. I commend it very warmly.
(It reached me via Finland, then New Zealand - thanks
to
Lars Österman
and
then Electronz Ezine, a regular source of useful
information and comment on monetary reform.)
The author worked for the Carter White House
and NASA, then spent 21 years with the U.S. Treasury
Department. His report explains why the U.S. financial
system headed by the Federal Reserve System has failed and
why only an emergency program of monetary reform can
address conditions which are leading to catastrophe.
The following quotations are tasters.
“'Dollar hegemony' has flooded the world with
U.S. currency, loans, or debt instruments to support
our fiscal and trade deficits, pay for our extraordinary
level of resource utilization, induce foreign governments
to purchase our armaments, ensure the allegiance of
their governing elites, and maintain their economies
in subservience through World Trade Organization and
International Monetary Fund trade and lending policies.
....
One thing is connected to another. A good investigator
always asks, "Who benefits?". The most salient
feature of our financial system is that the creation
of new purchasing power through credit - loans, mortgages,
credit cards, etc. - is controlled by private financial
institutions and, though regulated, works principally
for their profit. Because we are never taught about
alternative economic structures, we take this system
for granted. ....
But the system is man-made, with functions and effects
that can be measured and analyzed. The system was created
by historical forces, but if we want to, we can identify
these forces and change the system. What we have lacked
is the understanding of our possible choices, along with
the discernment and moral courage to act on our understanding. The
direction in which change must be sought is that of greater
economic democracy; that is, a higher degree of sharing
of the bounty of the earth by more people."
Spot on! His thinking appears to fit well with the
important reforms proposed by the American
Monetary Institute - click
here for
details of the legislation it proposes and its annual
conference in September.
3. QUARTERLY REVIEW - re-launched in
April 2007
The Quarterly Review was founded in 1809, to
act as a counterbalance to the Whiggish Edinburgh
Review. The founders included George Canning,
the poet Robert Southey and the poet and novelist Sir
Walter Scott. It soon became one of the most important
journals of the 19th Century. It
launched Jane Austen's career. Contributors included
the Duke of Wellington, Lord Salisbury, William Gladstone,
Matthew Arnold, and John Ruskin.
That old Quarterly Review ceased publication
in 1967. It has now been revived, with former
Conservative MP Sir Richard Body as Chairman of the
Editorial Board. The editor is Derek Turner. His first
editorial is titled " Radical Thinking for Challenging
Times".
One of the contributors to the first issue of the revived
QR is Peter Challen on "Economics - Time
for a Root and Branch Reform". Peter is an old
friend from the 1970s when he directed SLIM - the Church
of England's South London Industrial Mission. He sees
the underlying failings of the present system as "not
just to do with our culture and human nature, but fundamental
design flaws within our present money system". Four
factors in particular are to blame: "an unquestioning
acceptance of the present economic order"; "a
profound mal-distribution of land, assets, resources,
and knowledge"; "inordinate power given to
corporations which lack emotions, consciences, values
or ethics"; and "a deeply flawed bank credit
system".
For more about the new QR and to request a free copy
of its first issue, click
here. To contact Peter Challen, click
here or
email him.
4. "WHO & WHAT IS PETER CADOGAN?" is
a 15-page booklet written and published by Peter in January,
shortly before his 86th birthday.
Another old friend from 1970s London. He was then the
humanist minister in charge of the South Place Ethical
Society. He had just published "Direct Democracy",
which has been described
here as "a ground-breaking essay." Under his
auspices we held the first
Turning Point meeting on
29 November 1975.
This new booklet tells the story of his political
and intellectual journey and his reflections on
it. In 1956 he was cast out of the Communist Party
and twice declared by Moscow to be 'a main enemy of
the Soviet Union', then similarly expelled from active
membership of the Cambridge Labour Party, and subsequently
too from the Socialist Workers Party for the crime
of "talking to the capitalist press". Then
in the 1960s he played a central role in the Committee
of 100's Ban the Bomb campaign, and also as a supporter
of Biafran independence from Nigeria.
Some years later, "suddenly the penny dropped.
You can say No, No, No and Out, Out, Out till the cows
come home and it makes not a blind bit of difference.
... Protest is the wrong path. We
saw the biggest demo ever just before the Iraq war began.
It was treated with contempt by Bush and Blair".
His search for alternatives led him to
lament the "sad fate of anarchism in Britain", to
find that William Blake is "a philosopher, prophet
and artist who never let me down", that historical
idealism is the answer to historical materialism, and
that
"Today, we have no spiritual/political flame.
It is extinguished. It is up to us to relocate it and
re-ignite it".
His practical responses, with the Gandhi Foundation
and Northern Ireland as well as in London, have been
based on the critical importance of small groups.
His booklet provides a short but fascinating account
of movements for popular democracy in Britain,
particularly in the past 30 years, but going back to
the 17th-century Civil War between Parliament and the
Crown. He has offered to send a copy without charge
to anyone who asks for one. Email him
here.
Also see www.onwebsite.co.uk/PeterCadogan.html.
5. BOOK REVIEWS
(1) Renee-Marie Croose Parry with Kenneth Croose
Parry, THE POLITICAL NAME OF LOVE, New European
Publications, 2007, 366pp, £17.75, paperback.
You wonder what this book's title signifies? We will
come to it.
Renee-Marie and Kenneth are yet other old friends.
We worked together in 1970s London on initiatives like
PARLIGAES, the Parliamentary Group on Alternative Energy
Strategies, which she set up. Future Labour Party leaders
like Bryan Gould (now back in New Zealand) and the late
Robin Cook took part. It was one of several voluntary
organisations she set up in England.
After leaving London the Croose Parrys lived in Florida
for 20 years. Recently, no longer able to stand the
US under George W Bush, they have gone back to live
in Renee-Marie's native Bavaria, from which she had fled
Hitler's Germany in 1942.
From Florida they visited Cuba regularly (they still
do), got to know Cuba well, and came to admire deeply
the way the Cuban people and their leader Fidel Castro
dealt with the country's problems - mostly imposed
by the United States. Alison and I have very good memories
of a conference in Havana in February 1997 on "Medio
Ambiente y Sociedad" ("Environment and Society")
in which Renee-Marie invited us to speak and which enabled
us to visit other parts of Cuba too.
Their book is about Cuba, and is "dedicated to
the Cuban people in recognition of their valour and the
wisdom of their leaders". It is in three parts.
The first (73 pages) is on "The United States and
the World". It has seven chapters, the first of
which deals with "American Ideology and the Arrogance
of Power" - so setting one of the book's main
themes.
The second part (111 pages) is on "Cuba and
the United States". The last of its twelve
chapters concludes with the following words of Fidel
Castro.
"This small and blockaded Third World country,
against which the United States has used all its resources
in terms of subversion, destabilisation, sabotage, pirate
attacks, hundreds of plots to assassinate the Revolution's
leaders, a dirty war, economic warfare, biological warfare,
a military invasion using personnel recruited, paid,
supplied, escorted by US naval units and directed by
US government, and ultimately the very real threat of
nuclear extermination, has succeeded in honourably withstanding
all of the blows dealt to it by the greatest superpower
in history .. .".
The third part (the longest at 124 pages) is on "Cuba
and the Future of History". The first of its
eight chapters is on "Fidel and Religion - and
the Christian-Marxist Dialogue". It focuses on
the Christian-Marxist rapprochement arising from dialogue
between Castro and Frei Betto, the Dominican worker-priest
from Brazil. (Frei Betto's affirmation that "El
Socialismo es el Nombre Politico del Amor" - "Socialism
is the Political Name of Love" - explains
the book's title.)
That rapprochement echoed a European development in
the 1950s-'60s. Renee-Marie, with the Teilhard Centre
for the Future of Man in London, then helped to bring
together the thinking of the Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin - on the evolutionary process as the development
of consciousness - with the "alternative" Marxist
thinking of Roger Garaudy.
Subjects of subsequent chapters include eco-socialism,
justice, authenticity, evolution and the phenomenon of
love, and Cuba as the "Noah's Ark to save the Human
Future". They end with "The Development
of Consciousness and Cuba's Significance for the Human
Future" and a final conclusion that:
"In an age when the direction of social evolution
in capitalist countries is being dictated by the all-encompassing
media and advertising industries, creating appetites
for the trivial, the superfluous and the extravagant,
Cuba stands as a beacon between the rich world scrambling
to have more and the Third World struggling to survive,
lighting up the way to Eutopia - the good place".
One may have some reservations, for example about continuing
to think of the future in terms of conflict between abstractions
like "capitalism" and "socialism",
or placing too much reliance on the achievements and
wisdom of one person like Fidel Castro, however outstanding.
But it should undoubtedly be read and kept for reference
by anyone who is interested in a thoroughly documented
account of the US's superpower role in the world,
or of what has been happening in Cuba since 1959,
or in an understanding of human evolution giving hope that
it will not continue to be shaped by an urge to dominate
and exploit.
To order a copy click
here.
(2) Michel Glautier, THE
SOCIAL CONSCIENCE: Can a Caring Society Exist in
a Market Economy?, Shepheard
Walwyn, 2007, 352pp, £19.95, hardback.
This book asks two main questions - (1) as above, Can
a caring society exist in a market economy? and
(2) Is a market economy sustainable that denies
man's fundamental nature? The answer it gives to
both questions is basically No. The rule of law must
intervene in favour of social justice "as the
embodiment of the Social Conscience, acting by defining
rights and duties in the broader context of a humane
society".
The issues discussed include
- the social effects of globalisation
- rapid scientific and technological changes and
their impact on society worldwide
- moral values, family values and shareholder
value
- problems of identity and social cohesion
- the role of education in a society that seems
to have lost a sense of purpose and direction
- a market economy with a value system that affronts
the Social Conscience
- freedom that rejects authority and is surrendered
to permissiveness
- widespread loss of confidence in government.
Not surprisingly, Glautier's book makes some points
in common with the Croose Parry book (see above). For
example in the Introduction he asks
"Are we in control of our destiny or at the mercy
of forces beyond our control? Certainly, as the world
gets smaller with the globalisation of the market economy,
there is a risk that welfare policies will have lower
priority than profit-making. The concentration of
economic and hence military power in the hands of one
nation that dictates its law to the rest of the world
and takes as bounty a wholly disproportionate percentage
of all its natural resources for its own excessive consumption,
may be seen as an alarming portent of a new form of
oppression".
Similarly he regards Love as a moral value,
defined as a sympathetic awareness of another or others.
He sees it as the main motivation in the creation of
harmonious relationships and as an essential feature
of the Social Conscience.
He sees the market economy "as an endless process
of destruction and re-creation" and the conflict
between wisdom and wealth as "a moral conflict
in which the Social Conscience holds the moral high
ground and wealth, through money, controls the
market economy".
He suggests that, "by prescribing and requiring
the observance of religious rules from which moral values
are derived, religion has provided the rules that act
as the basis of... the Social Conscience", and that "the
past, present and the future [are] linked together through
the influence that the Social Conscience bears
on succeeding events. It acts as a prism for an understanding
of the past and of the present and is visionary in
the anticipation of the future".
There will be much of interest here, especially to
academics, on a wide range of topics including: policy
objectives for a caring society; empowering a caring
society; the implications for education; market behaviour;
accounting, accountability and shareholder value; the
State, society and government; citizenship and the
democratic deficit; authority and freedom; conflict resolution
and crime control; and the views on these topics of Plato,
Aristotle and other philosophers, theologians and thinkers
after them.
My main reservation arises perhaps because I
conform too closely to Ralph Waldo Emerson's perception
that "The English mind turns every abstraction it
can receive into a portable utensil, or a working institution". I
can't help looking for practical explanations - practical
in the sense that they can help us to see answers
to the question, What should we do?
So I find myself less interested in discussion and
definition of the abstractions involved. I want to ask
questions like:
- WHY does such a clear conflict between
market values and human values exist? How has
it come about?
- HOW do today's institutions help to keep
it going? and
- WHAT therefore should we do to put it
right?
I want answers like:
- WHY? Because powerful and wealthy people
and nations have developed the money system in the
past in order to serve their own interests, and that
is how it still works - not to meet the needs of
all citizens in today's more democratic world.
- HOW? The conflict is kept going today by
the systematically perverse effects of the way governments
handle their own operational responsibilities for money
and finance - i.e. money supply, public revenue,
and public spending, and the corresponding arrangements
at the international level.
- WHAT SHOULD WE DO? We must now reshape
this manmade system to serve the interests of all
citizens fairly and efficiently, and
- here are detailed actions that will be needed.
6. BOOK NOTES (Although the two following books
are not directly connected with this website's main concerns,
I hope some readers may be interested to know of them.)
(1) William H. Martin and Sandra Mason, THE ART
OF OMAR KHAYYAM: Illustrating Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, I.
B. Tauris, 2007, 184pp, £39.50, hardback.
Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat" is one of the
best known of all poems, and probably the most
widely illustrated of all literary works. This is the
first serious attempt to examine the illustrated editions
in detail.
It is a beautiful and fascinating book, the
fruit of a great labour of love in Bill and Sandra's
retirement as Leisure Consultants. They too are other
good friends from the 1970s.
For further details about the book and Omar Khayyam click
here.
For availability in North America click
here.
For Bill and Sandra's continuing concern with Leisure click
here.
(2) Marion Body, THE FEVER OF DISCOVERY: The Story
of Matthew Flinders, who gave Australia her name, New
European Publications, 2006, 250pp, £15.00, hardback.
For ordering details click
here.
Matthew Flinders was born in 1774 and died 40 years
later in 1814. Against competition from Napoleon's France,
he was first to circumnavigate the continent of Australia,
chart its coastline, and give it its name.
It is a moving story - among other things for his
short life; for the constant mutual affection in
letters between him and his wife during his long
absence between their marriage in 1801 and his
return to England in 1810 less than 4 years before
his death; and for his splendid 14-page tribute
to Trim, his cat companion at sea, "the best
and most illustrious of his race", who "terminated
his useful career by an untimely death, being devoured
by the Catophagi" of Mauritius.
Reading about his lengthy enforced stay in Mauritius
as a prisoner of the French governor on his way back
from Australia, and about the local French families who
befriended him there, reminded me of the sense of
historical romance for the "Ile de France" which
I felt in the 1950s on visits from the Colonial Office
in London, 150 years after Matthew Flinders' time.
James
Robertson
7th June 2007
The Old Bakehouse, Cholsey
Oxon OX10 9NU, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1491 652346
e-mail: james@jamesrobertson.com
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