From ‘The Production of Money’, by Ann Pettifor

Keynes was ruthless in his approach to the subordination of the finance sector to the interests of wider society and actively campaigned for the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. He regarded the love of money for its own sake as ‘a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a kind of shudder to the specialist in mental diseases’.

Q. What do we all hope for?

A. Three goals:

• Economic prosperity
• Financial stability
• Social justice

The author suggests this can only be achieved if we:

Bring offshore capital back onshore

And to do that we should ban lobbyists, who argue otherwise, from Wall Street and the City of London. They have brought us to this perilous edge which even all politicians of various denominations choose not to recognise.

Ann Pettifor:

The Bretton Woods era (1945–71) was a time during which the private banking and finance sector acted as servant to and not master of the economy. Thanks largely to John Maynard Keynes’s theories, his understanding of the monetary system, and to the implementation of his monetary policies during this period, the financial system was made to work largely in the interests of wider society.

But since then the international expanse of offshore banking has become sufficiently complicated to require enablers (lawyers and bankers) to assist those with legitimate and illegitimate requirements. There are agents who offer such services to this lucrative market. Here is an example:

https://internationalwealth.info/en/offshores/offshore-islands-countries-territories-and-lists/

Why do people want to keep their money offshore?

The above website answers:

Freedom to do business in a secure judicial system, without being bothered, and maintaining your right to privacy are probably the main reasons why people go offshore today.

Pettifor recommends bringing offshore back onshore using capitol control which results in keeping interest rates:

low across the spectrum of lending – essential to the health and prosperity of any economy

And is

essential to the management of toxic emissions and the ecosystem

And this last quote particularly intrigues me. Surely we should all become familiar with the work of Ann Pettifor who has a body of work worth highlighting as our planet and all forms of life are under so much duress from human activity.

Ann Pettifor explains how the wealth generated could have benefited all those who gave their labour, but instead was stolen by the few:

However from the 1960s onwards, private wealth, led largely by private bankers, in collusion with elected politicians, began again to wrest control of the monetary system away from the regulatory democracy of governments. Today the global economy is effectively governed by a small number of actors based in private global banks and other financial institutions. They manage the system in their own vested interests to the detriment of wider society. In the absence of any real political challenge from society, private wealth owners have used the public infrastructure of money, and their power over private money production, to amass astounding amounts of wealth.

And here below, published in The Conversation on 15th March, 2023, an interesting article suggesting central banks are responsible for inflation, written by Richard Werner, University of Winchester:

https://theconversation.com/why-central-banks-are-too-powerful-and-have-created-our-inflation-crisis-by-the-banking-expert-who-pioneered-quantitative-easing-201158

And back to Ann Pettifor, something most of are acutely aware of in this troubled world, the subject of USURY:

Usury is today widely accepted as normal in western economies whose monetary systems have been weakened by the parasitic grasp of finance capital, and enfeebled by heavy burdens of debt. This acceptance blinds society to the way in which usury exacerbates the destructive extraction of assets from the earth.

America has produced great minds who have worked tirelessly to improve the lot of those finding themselves in poverty. Ralph Nader, in his March 27th In the Public Interest Newsletter, tells us of one such great thinker:

Edgar Cahn redoubled his creative efforts as the leading hands-on jurisprudential thinker, writer, advocate and organizer. His deep knowledge of poverty relief programs led to his revolutionary thinking about making these programs work much better. In his seminal book – “No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative” (2000), he showed that helping the poor with public support had to be connected to empowering the poor to improving these programs, policies and delivery, as well as moving on the pathways to self-sustaining livelihoods.

One of his initiatives was based on questioning the monopoly position of the dollar or similar foreign currency. Why not, he asked, establish in communities around the world “Time Dollar Programs” where the currency is in hours volunteered between people helping each other?

A simple example follows: an elderly couple tutors a high school student in physics in return for an equal number of hours by the student mowing their lawns and weeding their garden. No money changes hands, only hours of time.

Edgar Cahn – Making the Law Serve and Empower the People, 27th March, 2023 from Ralph Nader In the Public Interest newsletter