Friday 31 December 2010
Wednesday 29 December 2010
Tuesday 28 December 2010
Monday 27 December 2010
Saturday 25 December 2010
Capitalism - A Love Story
An interesting movie by Michael Moore chronicling the US banking bailout and the end result of decades spent pursuing the Capitalist economic model.
Wednesday 22 December 2010
'Debt' Card Overdrive??
Current US Population = 310,957,000
Direct mail offers for new credit cards in the third quarter of 2010 to US consumers = 1.2 Billion
Now do you get an idea of the scale of the 'DEBT' card industry in the US?
Tuesday 21 December 2010
Monday 20 December 2010
Sunday 19 December 2010
Saturday 18 December 2010
Usury Free Week - A Canadian Initiative
This sixth annual UsuryFree Week will celebrate a series of events that will take place at various locations in Ontario (and elsewhere) to promote awareness about the design flaw of 'usury' and the many problems that are associated with 'usury,' thereby directly and/or indirectly relating it to violence, war, poverty, scarcity and lack while offering solution-oriented ideas that will lead to usuryfree living.
Friday 17 December 2010
Pay up or go to jail, tax debtors told
When you're sorting out how to pay back your debts, you need to identify the most important ones. These are called your 'priority debts' and they should be settled first.
As the article below illustrates, the consequences of not keeping up to date with your priority debts can be severe.
Our invaluable guide - how to escape the student debt trap
A very well written and informative article from the Daily Mail providing an insight into the debt situation faced by students - particularly relevant given the recent riots over tuition fees
Prof. Elizabeth Warren on the current financial climate
We need someone like Professor Elizabeth Warren here in the UK, she is doing an admirable job defending the rights of American citizens against the predatory practices of many financial institutions.
Listen to Congressman Barney Frank at 6.10secs into this video clip........nice to see that some politicians will stand up against such injustices!!
Thursday 16 December 2010
The Problem With Interest - by Tarek el-Diwany
From the article - The same government that could not find the £40 million necessary to fund a 2.5% pay-rise for the British police in 2007 can suddenly find more than £200 billion to save the British banking system, courtesy of the Bank of England printing press. Some of us ask why, if the Bank of England can create £200 billion of new money to save the banking system, it cannot also create another £170 billion to pay off the budget deficit? We are told that such action would cause rampant inflation and that we have no alternative but to cut the budget. So the priorities are clear. We can risk inflation to save bankers, but not to save public sector services and the most needy members of our society.
Comments on the banking system
"The Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing".
Statement of William Paterson, first Director of the Bank of England, upon receiving the Charter of the Bank in 1694: quoted in Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley, MacMillan New York (1966)
The unlimited emission of bank paper has banished all specie .... private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us.
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Wayles Eppes on June 1813, Jefferson, Writings (1984) New York: Literary Classics of the United States
And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Taylor 28 May 1816, Writings (1984) New York: Literary Classics of the United States
The distress and alarm which pervaded and agitated the whole country when the Bank of the United States waged war upon the people in order to compel them to submit to its demands cannot yet be forgotten. The ruthless and unsparing temper with which whole cities and communities were oppressed, individuals impoverished and ruined, and a scene of cheerful prosperity suddenly changed into one of gloom and despondency ought to be indelibly impressed on the memory of the people of the United States. If such was its power in time of peace, what would it have been in a season of war, with an enemy at your doors? No nation but the free men of the United States could have come out victorious from such a contest; yet, if you had not conquered, the government would have passed from the hands of the many to the few, and this organised money power, from its secret conclave, would have dictated the choice of your highest officials and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their own wishes.
President Andrew Jackson, Address to the American people, 4 March 1837, recorded in Richardson's Messages, volume 4, p. 1532
The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of the consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges ... money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.
President Abraham Lincoln, Senate Document 23 1865
I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks or the Bank of England can create and destroy money.
Post-war Banking Policy, p. 93 (1928) William Heinemann, by Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer of Great Britain, later Chairman of Midland Bank
In the abstract it is absurd and monstrous for society to pay the commercial banking system interest for multiplying severalfold the quantity of the medium of exchange when a) a public agency could do it all at negligible cost, b) there is no sense in having it done at all, since the effect is merely to raise the price level, and c) important evils result, notably the frightful instability of the whole economic system.
Saturday Review of Literature, p. 732 (1927), Frank Knight
By allowing private mints to spring up, Parliament has fundamentally and perhaps irretrievably betrayed democracy. Before the War it was customary even in the works of apparently respectable economists to find absolutely dishonest hair-splitting distinctions between the invisible money so created and paper notes. The latter were really money and the former was not! In fact the reader can always tell in such standard works on the subject when he is approaching the fishy part of the business. The essential fact, the creation of new money, becomes obscured in a cloud of anticipatory justification and special pleading.
The Role of Money (1933), Frederick Soddy, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Despite the accusations of neo-imperialism leveled at the IMF and the World Bank, in the same way that a country's domestic banking system is carried out with apparently scrupulous honesty, the financial conduct of the IMF and World Bank appears above reproach. If a nation borrows, it must repay. Naturally! What other conclusion can there be? The true injustice of the IMF and World Bank only become apparent when the fraudulent nature of these 'loans' is understood, and how they relate to the debt-based banking system ... It is an injustice amounting to international slavery and extortion; it is an aggressive injustice, involving the subjugation of whole nations and their sovereign peoples, operated on a scale that exceeds the total of all the more obvious efforts at dominance by individual nations indulging in warfare over the centuries.
The Grip of Death (1998), Michael Rowbotham
Wednesday 15 December 2010
Untitled
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Tuesday 14 December 2010
What Islam says about Riba - Dr Zakir Naik
This is a little taster to the lengthier explanation in 'Interest Free Economy' also by Dr Zakir Naik
Monday 13 December 2010
Banks asked to slash credit cards’ annual interest rates
An interesting article indicating the extent to which interest based credit card transactions have captured a foot hold even in Saudi Arabia.
The final paragraph is particularly interesting, indicating comparable figures in the more cosmopolitan UAE
