BASIC CCMJ – Christian Council for Monetary-Justice

We seek ways to communicate the significance of the five themes to structural issues of:
1. Land: – location benefit returned to the community that produced the surplus value measured as ‘rent’. 2.  Money: returned to being a public utility, free of usury ^[1], rather than continuing as so dangerous a source of private banking acquisition; and 3.  A basic means of livelihood for all – a universal basic income.We believe that:

• Money for Industry and commerce should be issued by elected national and possibly in some instances local government only, in amount appropriate to the goods and productive capacity which it represents.
• Such money should be interest-free but for genuine cost of administration
• Bank Loans should be limited to the actual assets held by Banks, i.e., the present practice of Banks “lending” say ten times their holdings should end.
• The National Debt, and local council debts, and many debts of firms and of persons are “phoney” to the degree that they relate to money created as above out of nothing by institutions which have gathered a private monopoly of credit creation.
• If the Banks have a monopoly of credit-creation and want more back than they create, in consequence of charging interest, they ask the impossible so that the public “debt” grows continually.
• The computerised “Global Money-Market” has acquired a momentum of its own, yet it is irrational and is damaging to the poorer nations that it exploits on our behalf.————————————————————————————————
  [1] ANN PETTIFOR ON USURY (from ‘The Coming First World Debt Crisis’ 2006 — p135]Usury is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the fact, or practice of lending money at interest; esp. in later use, the practice of charging excessive or illegal rates of interest for money on loan.”

  Anne suggests that this is a definition too narrowly framed, that it is vital for society to broaden the definition of usury, making it clear and explicit. She offers a revised definition to stimulate further debate: “Usury is the practice of exalting money values over human and environmental values; of creating money at no cost and lending at rates of interest intended, not to foster and maintain humanity or the ecosystem; but to  a) accumulate reserves of unearned income;
  b) extract wealth from the productive sector in a manner that is parasitic:  c) extract wealth from those from those who lack at wealth (the asset-less); and d) make a claim on the future.”