14 September 2008
In Surat al-Anbiya (21:44-45) Allah the Exalted declares:
No indeed! We have given these people enjoyment,
as We did their fathers,
until life seemed long and good to them.
Do they not see how We come to the land
eroding it from its extremities?
Or are they the victors?
Say: ‘I can only warn you through the Revelation.’
But the deaf cannot hear the call when they are warned.
The eroding of the coastlines is one of the effects of our analysed miasma. It is one of the indications of how the present world sickness is itself a defiance of the Divine Creator, may He be exalted, and the natural laws on which He has set up existence.
Certainly the present world system has given a smaller and smaller minority a life which has “seemed long and good to them.” Yet men today live inside a distorting psychosis.
The psychosis of numbers-wealth. This is the state of the one who thinks modern money exists. So, firstly, the need to grasp the nature of money, the non-existent nature of ‘money’ itself. Let us examine the structuration of currency.
The widow’s mite. The cent and the penny. Thus it begins with the poor. The decimal foundation of paper money. From 100 coins we reach a One-Something paper note. From there the ‘notes’ soon spiral from hundreds to thousands. As the system goes into action it begins to scoop up the world’s intrinsic value commodities, land and minerals. In order to acquire property and goods to the maximum, where once a hundred were needed, it then becomes a thousand. In our own lifetime a rich man was called a millionaire. Now he is a billionaire. National debts which were calculated in billions are now counted in trillions. The joked-of zillions are fast becoming the new reality.
This proliferation of money has three stages. A ‘local’ or national currency of paper-notes. They in turn are graded into tradable and non-tradable. The tradable can be used in the ‘world-market’ while the latter are blocked from any but local usage and exchange. This is the first stage. A new nation, like Croatia, is ‘granted’ its own currency.
The second stage is the arena in which the acquired wealth gained by the ‘money’ is so successful that the small base of a currency, merely national, is seen as hindering wealth expansion. Trading zones are united, so that what once were nations become trading-blocks with one new currency covering that of the new grouping. The model was the European Community which demanded the Euro. The similar models can be observed in South-East Asia and South America. Logic insists that the new syncretic “communities” merge finally into “the International Community”, already politically prepared for it, and named in media on a daily basis so that people believe it too exists.
The third stage is the acceptance of an anti-money. Since the money itself is non-existent it is only logical (if irrational!) that alongside money should exist an openly admitted anti-money. This in turn will provide a ‘proof’ that the primary money system is real by contrast with anti-money. Anti-money is a non-money system that is then given parity with “real” money. This non-money is debt. It then follows that debt can be bought and sold like “real” money.
It is not accidental that the two great financial institutions that are based on this anti-money, debt, have been given the names of a man and a woman. The ignorant masses are told that this non-money is in the hands of two nice homely peasants, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, somehow it is reassuring. The actual situation that now stands revealed is that should these two banking institutions crash, so enlaced are they with the ‘real’ money that the whole system itself would come crashing down. The masses have been told that all is well – the national government has “stepped in” to rescue everyone. This in turn is a further lie which reveals where power truly lies. The national money is in fact a private conglomerate of super-banks deceptively named “The Fed”.
To return to the legendary ‘currency’ – dollars, pounds, roubles, euros and so on.
From the widow’s cent to the dollar to the stocks and bonds and loans and debts and traded debt, at any stage it can clearly be demonstrated to be illusory. The total system is in constant expansion. Not only does it expand by its evolving instruments of exchange but it expands by an even further insanity. The money is false. It seems real as it is other than the admittedly false anti-money, debt. If the ignorant masses can buy all this why stop there? There is another crop of wealth to be harvested. Let us trade in what may happen as we have traded in what is happening. Let the monetarists trade on the future market, or as they call it, the futures market, to give it reality, as if each thing traded has its own reality.
A final word on the instrument of exchange, ‘money’.
It should be borne in mind that for over half a century the banking industry has gone to enormous trouble to promote the idea that robbing a bank was a way to acquire immediate wealth. A whole book could be written on the banking industry (industry?) and its exploitation of the movie industry helping it to advance a mythic conviction that banks were repositories of wealth. In film after film they have granted the movies access to great fortress-like banks which in turn become the arena for the bank-raid. The message is that the bank is the holder of vast wealth and it is unreachable.
The truth is that it is empty. The billions are not in the vaults. Just as when the French Revolutionaries broke into the Bastille to free its prisoners, they discovered only a handful, so today the bank raider will find only a handful of deposit boxes with some jewellery and bonds. The Bastille was the symbolic power institution of a political power system, so today the Bank is the symbolic power institution of an economic power system.
Where has all the money gone? What is in the till and in the pocket and under the bed and in the bank is simply loose change. Yet the secret of the financial system is beginning to leak out as its institutions, one by one, are going to the wall.
“In today’s trading on the New York Stock Exchange in one hour ten billion dollars were wiped off share prices.”
Where did they go? Who took them? Why were they handed over? Now what are they going to do?
Look at the reality of money.
France’s Societé Generale have posted a 7.1 billion quarterly loss. One trader alone, Jerome Kerviel, is accused of “losing” 4.9 billion. A very intelligent and poised banker, he has declared “I will not be the scapegoat!”
Lehman posted a 3.9 billion loss for the third quarter. Lehman plan to spin off about $30 billion of problematic assets into a separate company – the “bad” bank which would be owned by Lehman shareholders alongside their “good” bank.
Fannie Mae posted a quarterly loss of $2.3 billion. As a result of its having no prospect of recovery, it has been ‘nationalised’. This was the second intervention, the first being the rescue of Bear Stearns investment bank. Freddie Mac in turn posted a quarterly loss of $2 billion, and has gone the way of Fannie Mae into State take-over.
Freddie Mac with celebrities like Magic Johnson runs a “Hoops for the Homeless” basketball tournament to raise charity for the homeless. It is heartening to know!
So where have all the billions gone? In the words of Shakespeare: “Nothing will come to nothing.”
Just before the second Iraq War, Dr Shalabi, fascinated by the work of Hajj ‘Umar Vadillo in the matter of the gold Islamic Dinar, invited him to meet and explain his position. They met at the headquarters of Dr Shalabi’s credit card operation which covered the whole of the Middle East. He confirmed that Hajj ‘Umar’s analysis of capitalist monetarism was correct. “Come,” he said, “Let me show you.”
He led Hajj ‘Umar into a room banked with computers, busy passing information. He paused in front of two screens. “Look!” On one screen Cartier’s in Monte Carlo were requesting authorisation to sell an expensive piece of jewellery to a client from Jordan. “Now, watch carefully,” he said. The credit-card authority identified the buyer’s account. The credit-card company confirmed purchase authorisation. “Now look!” The two screens flickered – the transfer was made. In the flash between the two screens Dr Shalabi declared: “There! That’s money!”
In Surat al-A’raf (7:115-116):
They said, ‘Musa, will you throw first
or shall we be the ones to throw?’
He said, ‘You throw.’ And when they threw,
they cast a spell on the people’s eyes
and caused them to feel great fear of them.
They produced an extremely powerful magic.
At the beginning of the analysis came recognition that between the money and the thing a dynamic energy flow moved the thing – changed ownership. As the money increased the owners diminished. The propulsion was of its nature designed to transfer the things to new ownership. The owners in turn by necessity would then in a crude financial Darwinism take from each other –a “survival of the richest” doctrine. Everything in the end was going to be owned by one, after the prior elite handful had destroyed each other bar the winner. Globalisation of things meant, in fact, an ultimate minimalist ownership. This is what Proudhon meant when he declared, “Property is theft.”
It is now necessary to ask, “What is the nature of this fluid power that dynamises activity between money and thing?” For example, it would appear to be magic which stimulates the supine tissue with weakened nerves. On examination one discovers that it is not magic but the application of an energy field. Once it is understood that this field consists of electric current the matter becomes clear.
The force that activates ‘money’ into moving thing, that is, change ownership, once understood, suggests to us the cure is possible.
The dynamic of the money-movement-thing linkage can be identified. It is called Usury.
