Global Vision 2000 and the Universal Peace Federation jointly organised, on July 13th 2009 an emergency seminar in the House of Lords in Westminster to examine the underlying causes of the financial and economic crisis and the need for a paradigm shift to restore stability, prosperity, justice and peace. The seminar shed light on the terrifying nature of the death spiral of the global debt based financial and economic system and the ruinous path towards servitude and serfdom. There were parliamentary, interfaith, monetary and fiscal reform perspectives shared and brought to bear in terms of alternative radical holistic solutions offering suffering humanity hope and salvation. This event took place when Parliament is at it’s lowest ebb and it’s image has been tarnished. The event affirmed grassroot coalitions facing the urgent need for civic society to champion the values of public service and the common good and claim Westminster as the people’s shared political space. Speakers gave clear evidence of the ‘grand canyon’ between officials who imagine green shoots of recovery and the common experiences in our communities. The financial crisis has revealed an economic crisis now manifesting as a full blown political crisis. The future is viewed with fear rather than hope and the hatred of the stranger stalks the land. We are now seeing the rise of political extremism which threatens the peace and unity of the country. The way the mainstream media and political elite was reacting was deplored as well as the taking of remedial action but failing abjectly to address the underlying forces. There is a need to review and redesign a fairer, just and sustainable global financial and economic system that empowers the world’s poorest billions to emerge from desperate poverty and facilitate global peace; helping both wealthy and poor to lead full and healthy lives. In offering different proposals for change this seminar moved us all in the direction of a socially and ethically based mind-set, a new paradigm and the nature of the system that could implement it.

The seminar aimed to address the following issues: Are we witnessing a ‘L shaped’ Great Depression rather than a ‘V shaped recession’? Do we need regulation, reform or revolution? How can monetary, fiscal and economic justice advocates connect with the people and political system? How can people power and national sovereignty be secured against the global financial oligarchy? How can the UK deliver on it’s commitments on MDG? What does the City of London need to do to be the leader in global finance? Is Islamic finance a Trojan horse or Panacea? What type of paradigm shift is required?

How do we overcome the difficult first task, that of receiving a hearing from public leaders in order to enter an inclusive dialogue. There is a need for a radical shift in awareness, through a clear, short message, that will give people confidence to say, “No. This is wrong, we will no longer accept it. That was the key point of the day; short, crisp pamphlets. Not heavy books.”

Co-convenor Robin Marsh Secretary General, Universal Peace Federation UK – welcomed us with a plea to bear in mind the intensity and ubiquity of suffering around the globe. Co-convenor Moeen Yaseen Managing Director Global Vision 2000 – emphasised the challenge before us as outlined above. Canon Peter Challen: Chairman, Christian Council for Monetary Justice, – singled out key words Exploitation and Exponential growth as lying behind our now evident mistakes. All traditions of good faith cried out against this grave distortion of natural law. Other speakers to follow will clarify means by which we must de-commoditise these three fundamental subjects. He addressed the theme of the philosophical and theological imperative of the importance of loving the ceaseless creativity of natural law, and the universal injunction to love our neighbours, which form the integral context and the grounded spring of all ‘good faith’. Vested interests are exploiting others and the balance of the planet’s ceaseless creativity. Exploitation is now endemic. It denies our ‘prior unity’ and let’s ‘tribalism.’ Vested interests destroy the balance of universal laws. We are complicit in their persuasive influence. They must be exposed and ended. Exponential growth is wreaking disaster on the carrying capacity of this fragile planet. It must be acknowledged in all its appearances and ended. Balanced sustainability must be the premise determining all our contributions to creativity. As a stand-in for Bishop Peter Selby, author of the newly reprinted ‘Grace and Mortgage – the language of faith and the debt of the world’. That book offers a profound philosophical and theological understanding of how deeply embedded in our society Mammon has become. Not by mistake Mammon is the name of a greek God. In a recent lecture entitled ‘Mammon’s Revenge’, he underlined what I am trying to say now in a brief comment. In two editions of a video entitled ‘Money as Debt {II]’, now circulating globally, there is a deep study of a global economy gone awry with ‘Five Fraudulent Acts’ inclusive of violations of common law, common sense, natural justice! On July 7th there appeared a new Papal encyclical, also now circulating globally, Caritas in Veritate – Charity in Truth. It is a searching call for the globalisation of inclusive justice as the societal expression of love. It calls the world back to a balanced economy that works for everyone and protects the earth. We need to build on its ubiquitous availability and appeal. 3 fundamental mistakes have been made. We have made three subjects in our effective global housekeeping, land, labour and money into commodities that can be traded with disregard to inclusive justice. We are facing systemic dysfunction of a massive order, unlike anything that has gone before which requires a systemic response. We seek a new paradigm – a shift of mind systemic and holistic in its range, that awakens us to reach beyond our complicit servitude to embedded monopolies of land, labour and money. A simple three tier drive to a new paradigm – an understanding that every act affecting the global economy must be measured for its intimate, its corporately complex, and its global impact. Without that constant process of audit, vested interests will always arise and self-serve. The healing of many wounds in society and environment is at the expense of the neglect of rectifying the underlying driving forces, the monopolies of land and asset ownership, corporate personhood, and the commercial supply of new money. We are all curators we are all complicit in a profoundly unjust system, we are all contributors to change. As ‘jobbing economists’ on this fragile planet we must know and challenge the facts of our terrible mistakes, many inherited deeply and legally within the system, many aggravated by our own pursuit of vested interests at the expense of the inclusive justice that works for everyone and protects the earth. A call for a modern crusade was made to do all you can to tackle exploitation of people and planet. Do alll you can to tackle exponential growth leading us like lemmings to the cliff. The key lies in a publicly created money supply distributed into social infrastructure and wider capital ownership, moving our investments towards productiveness and not insensitive speculation.

Lord King as host for the seminar, reminded us of the detail of our distorted economies, nationally and globally, and pressed us to attend to the proposals to be offered to meet the challenge we face. Lord Ahmed wished the seminar well and underlined the urgency of our getting the message of monetary and fiscal reform across to Parliamentarians. Kelvin Hopkins MP spelt out the almost total loss of a vision of inclusive justice and the cost of not restoring a moral base to political economy.

Anne Belsey of the Money Reform Party took us to the grass roots task of communication, illustrating, from her own diligence in the work of the Money Reform Party, the fundamental issue of talking in our communities, with a clear, succinct message, of the need and the process for money reform, as a basic contribution to generating the critical mass we must build to seek effective change.

Daud Pidcock of Global Vision 2000 – brandishing ‘The Crash of 2008’ a revisiting today of a study of ‘people versus the banks’ by Swann, he spoke as a scholar long probing the history of the abuse of money [‘lethal tender’!] as a driver of the disintegration of society, presented evidence we cannot ignore of the need and difficulty of restoring state transparent responsibility for the money supply. ‘We’ve endured iron, stone and the lash, but the hardest to endure is debt’ We must restore the effect of the Jubilee practised for since 2500 BC in Babylonia; explode the myth of the Bank of England being a nationalised bank; expand the M0 supply for community ends.

David Triggs of the Coalition for Economic Justice and Executive chair, Henry George Foundation, informed us eloquently and passionately of the need for genuine capture and distribution of the accumulated value of land springing from our co-operative activities over time. He stressed the need to rediscover the natural law that governs the prospects of all life on earth as the basis for our paradigm shift of ordinate significance and to translate this into the economic means of collecting the community’s value for the community, combating the erosion of justice by grossly distorted property rights. Fight against nature and it will punish you. Work in harmony and it will reward. Water runs down hill!. Such a fact cannot be fought or legislated against; it just is. Economics, the production and distribution of wealth for all is intimately part of nature and thrives only by its rules.

Dr. Adrian Wrigley, Systemic Fiscal Reform Group, emphasised the systemic nature of economic disorder and the systemic response we need to make. He contrasted the countries where revenue was based in the collection and fair distribution of community value with those that taxed people’s productiveness, the former producing more just and stable societies. The old paradigm of ‘absolute resource ownership’ must give way to the new mindset that could be triggered by a’ debt for tax’ swop. Land must be restored to the factors of economic productiveness and the great monopolies [land, water, intellectual property etc.] ended. He explored the history of economic society through the ages and found we had known the solution for millennia. Tax and regulation are smokescreens. What matters is the funding source, that of the largest monopolies, land and money. Avoid this melancholy proof and expect inevitable meltdown. Scholars back to Confucious are unanimous on free access to nature’s gifts unless that access causes harm or exclusion through exploitation or exponential extraction, in which case the victim must be compensated. Civilisation flourishes under these conditions. The paradigm under which presently we suffer took over at the beginning of the 20th century when nature was cut out of the analysis. We don’t need a new paradigm, we need to re-instate the old one. Leaders need to read history and start thinking deeply and stop rebutting the well informed public. Free market capitalism is the best approach but of the Eastern not Western variety!

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed: Director, Institute for Policy Research and Development, Provided further scholarly evidence of the fundamental change of perception required if we are to replace exploitative structures with those creating inclusive justice. New structures founded on only productiveness, not speculation; on the ending of wage slavery, and the interest free funding sustainable growth must be designed.

Ian Parker-Joseph: Leader, Libertarian Party, explored the creative tension to be found between a global consciousness of our interdependence and the nurture in freedom of the rich diversity of local communities. He viewed business systems of increasing complexity governing our lives in ways the classic economists could never have envisaged. Entire industries collapse without anything tangible ever disrupting supply chains and nations fall bankrupt on the “market confidence” of Wall Street traders. We live in a world of inconceivable numbers and we live in blissful ignorance of business and financial practices we never knew existed… until they go spectacularly wrong. No government can ever control an economy. All those who have sought to do so have destroyed it. Thanks to globalisation and the internet we are inextricably linked and we cannot pretend otherwise. Systems of whatever type, inevitably fail… be they computer systems, regulatory systems or currency systems. This presents the immediate reality that if we use only one system then when it fails, we all fail. And we all fail at the same time. Undeterred by this reality it has not prevented our leaders from seeking to standardise, make uniform and equalise our systems. In global banking we have witnessed institutional schizophrenia whereby one regulator does not know what the other is doing or even what it is for, and our politicians do not know the extent of their powers or to whom the real power belongs. What we saw last year was the culmination of national, regional and global government intervening in things they do not understand and cannot control.

The oft quoted cause of this crisis is “irresponsible lending” and “excessive risk” by “greedy bankers”. But that is only half way to the truth. The credit crunch is a failure of global regulation as a tool, leading to the construction of castles on a foundation of jelly, such international regulation is now wholly discredited. Risk is its own regulator when governments do not seek to meddle, and had we retained control of our own regulation, the crisis here need not have hit us as hard as it did.

We are all aware of the disposal of the assets that US banks were legally obliged to create under the Community Reinvestment Act, creating loans worth more than their balance sheets. This put a direct freeze on interbank lending. This subsequent freeze in capital flow sent shockwaves through the markets resulting in instant paralysis. Subsequently we were forced by circumstance to take a leap of faith that bailouts would restore market confidence and jumpstart interbank lending. Among all the talk of “green shoots of recovery” the fear is that we will enter a double dip recession. The contraction of the job market further could lead to bigger credit defaults, not least on credit card debt which is now outstripping our GDP. Our present administration has taken it upon itself to bailout everything that so much as squeaks. This is a path to economic suicide. Present policy is predicated on the idea that a debt based economy is sustainable and desirable. It is not. UK Plc needs to be producing and exporting, earning money from overseas.The Domestic Economy needs to be stimulated from the bottom up not the top down. Economies are sustained by the ability of the purchasing public to earn, save and spend, consuming the products that the factories produce.Put simply it is not capitalism that has failed, it is creditism. Capitalism was designed to work on capital, but it has been distorted and altered to rely on credit, spend now pay later.It is that this debt based economic model that has now found its way into every layer of society from consumer, retailer, producer to government, all totally reliant upon credit, is the primary reason why a single system failure, in this case interbank lending, stopped everything dead in its tracks. Having sold off our gold reserves, raided our pension funds and squandered the money, there was nothing to fall back on, and we have allowed the backbone of the country, the wealth creators, the small to medium enterprise to be drowned in a sea of compliance, regulation and taxes which are crippling our ability to compete, and consequently we have a shrinking productive sector in a country that is spending ever more. Nations, markets and individuals are stronger through diversity than homogenised cultures, regulatory systems and governments.With this in mind we must reform to ensure our money is real and that our future is built on more than just an I.O.U note to the world bank. Real Money, not borrowings, is the core of the economy. It belongs to those to earn and spend it, the wealth creators, not merely to those who currently create money or manage it.

Total Reform of the monetary system, I propose Three planks – Sterling, Sovereign and Free Banking

Firstly, we will return the sovereignty of our national currency—pounds Sterling—to the Crown, removing the privilege of creating money from the private banking industry, with new Sterling being created, debt-free, by the government, and thence spent into the broader economy. The amount of Sterling in circulation will be prevented from being expanded through FRB, stopping bank generated inflationary spirals developing, and keeping the value of your savings safe.

Secondly, we will create a new currency, pounds Sovereign, to be 100% backed by gold. Still vital for international trade, a gold-backed currency will be immensely strong, and help protect the UK from the storms and squalls that sometimes rip through international markets. This kind of currency will also attract investment from overseas into the UK.

Thirdly, allow for the creation of free banks. Free Banks would be completely free of any government interference or regulation. If these prove popular with the market—the citizens of our nation—they will grow and prosper, choosing to embrace FRB if it wished with their own currencies (HSBC peso or Natwest dollars) possibly supplanting Sterling as the primary means of exchange on a day-to-day basis. I believe that the proposals outlined above are sound and necessary. Our existing banking system has been creaking from one crisis to the next over many years, and has only remained unchallenged because of the enormous influence that those who most benefit from it, the private bankers, wield over our elected politicians.