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[Solve_et_Coagula]

The Money and Debt “Monster” –
Man-Made and therefore Tamable
Why the freedom to transfer capital funds ought to be limited again

16 AUGUST 2010
From Zurich (Switzerland)

Now and then it is worthwhile to read a book a second time, in particular if it contains texts, whose basis are real historical events placed in an unusual context. Precisely in times like these, when the media are full of comments on the vast financial and economic crises, when trillions of money supplies for major bank bailouts are blithely printed and then saddled on the taxpayer; when states face bankruptcy, because they cannot master their debts any longer; when an immense inflation is imminent and it is again the population that will suffer as a result of it; in times in which, under the cover of “freedom” to transfer capital funds, money must be regarded as a new weapon of mass destruction, in which the greed seems boundless, in which newspapers are full of the problem of interest and compound interest, in which even the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” – usually not averse to banks – uses the term “monster” to describe the financial markets and the debt problem; in times like these books can sharpen the senses and enable a view on the general context, which might get lost in the daily routine.

The mainstream media report on the “debt monster” or on the “markets”, which will not appreciate this and that, or they talk about anonymous “investors”, who withdraw from markets, or about “fund streams which could flow off”, or even about “hedge funds that bet against currencies” etc. If they do so, the reader of such formulations is left behind feeling powerless, resigning to an apparently inevitable fate. What can the common man do about that?

It is exactly this purposeful degrading of the citizen’s position that one of the above mentioned books turns to. It is the thriller “Die blaue Liste” (The Blue List) by Wolfgang Schorlau.* The author takes his readers back into the time of the German reunification, when – after Detlev Carsten Rohwedder’s death – the transitional privatization agency sold off the complete national wealth of the GDR citizens to west companies at dumping prices. It was the time, when the co-operatives’ principle and the Catholic social teachings with its combination and reconciliation of work and capital were trampled on. It is most exciting to read, how the author succeeds in presenting the “third way” between planned economy and mere capitalism: it is the co-operative principle which implements the Catholic social teachings and thus forms a counterpart to the TINA ideology (There Is No Alternative). According to this ideology, there is no alternative to privatization and globalization, to deregulation and the homo oeconomicus. The co-operative beginnings will be reported on in further articles; in order to illuminate today’s situation, a “small colloquium in monetary theory” is given in the book. In it we learn, how absurd, abstract and inhuman the ideology of freedom of capital transfer is.

Continue to read and download the pdf (1 MB) here:
http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/CC_2010_12.pdf

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