Frances Hutchinson’s article echoes my own experience and knowledge of the history of the fight for reform of the money system, so fully documented in Steven Zarlenga’s book, The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of money – the Story of Power (2002).

At a fringe meeting at the Green Party Spring Conference I produced a draft copy of an expanded version I am planning to produce, of the booklet I wrote for its Economics Policy Working Group, Where’s the Money to Come From?

This booklet has had a generally good reception, wherever it has been offered. (Its original text can be found on the internet at www.sustecweb.co.uk/past/sustec82/index.htm#eleven)

I asked for the email addresses of any who were prepared to comment or amend/improve it, to offer to the Group as an update, and if this was not accepted, then to publish it in my own name, independently. I then emailed them a .pdf of the draft. So far, I have had no response, but with the local elections intervening, this is not surprising. I will shortly email a reminder to them!

If any other readers would like to participate, please email me to forward this file to you.

I hope I have found articles to interest you all. I am grateful to Frank Taylor and Frances Hutchinson for offering their articles, and I am again indebted to William Krehm and Economic Reform for much of the content. May I repeat my request to others to contribute material?

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From Whitmill’s World, in The Guardian Political Review, Spring 2006:

In an article on liquidity in the Sunday Telegraph of 30 April 2006, Roger Bootle, managing director of Capital Economics and economic adviser to Deloitte wrote

ISLAMIC BANKING - telling it as it is

A letter from Tarek El Diwany appeared in the Financial Times of 13 July 2006 and it said, inter alia, Today, those who wish to make a living from lending money are adopting the same approach to defeat the usury prohibition in Islam. Combining Islamically permissible contracts to produce interest-bearing loans has become the specialism that is 'Islamic banking". The fact that some leading Islamic scholars are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give religious judgments by the very institutions whose products they are judging is, to say the least, a conflict of interest. But the problems run deeper than this. Even if 98 out of 100 scholars judge that a product is prohibited, an Islamic bank can employ the two who permit it. In effect, the banks are able to choose the rules of the game while telling everyone else that they are only following scholarly advice.

Charles Moore writing a column in The Spectator - 6 May 2006 - said, inter alia

The late, moderate Muslim leader Zaki Badawai was ... "worried by the fact that the Western entry into Islamic banking gives special privileges to Muslim scholars whose views may be dubious. For banking instruments to be declared Sharia-compliant they have to be minutely examined for long periods by these scholars, some of whom get paid more than £500,000 [$1,500,000] a year for the privilege. Many of those sitting on the Sharia boards of Western banks are members of extreme sects, such as the Wahabis who dominate Saudi Arabia. Western capitalism therefore pays them well to extend their control over the lives of Muslims in the West."

www.democrats.org.nz

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Power has moved into the hands of hugely powerful agencies. These multinational agencies are varied and diffuse, without any apparent unifying structure, without any central organisation or single leadership, without any declared plan or strategy for domination, without relying on any formal transfer of power or political or legal intervention, and without any founding document or constitution, yet they operate on a truly international scale arid exercise both economic and political power that dwarfs that of most national political institutions.

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