I am hopeful that a read of excerpts (scroll down) from the book will impel more people to the book.
It is well written, well laid out, an easy read – – 148 pages. The sources are foot-noted through the Endnotes. It is highly important. You will learn a lot. Many thanks to Joyce Nelson for her efforts on behalf of all Canadians.
How to obtain the book?
I checked my local bookstore. None of their distributors carries “Beyond Banksters”.
I called the Library. And have been advised to submit an online form to request the addition of this “item” to the Library’s collection. From their supplier, the book will arrive “shelf ready”. The Library is able to order directly from the publisher, too. (Update: my local library now has copies, and a waiting list to read Banksters.)
To order the book ($20 plus shipping), go to: https://watershedsentinel.ca/beyond-banksters/
Joyce Nelson drives home the significance to Canadians of the lawsuit over the Bank of Canada. If we understand it, in the context of things explained by John Perkins (New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2016), you will know why the Liberal Government’s construction of the CIB (Canadian Infrastructure Bank) needs to be stopped.
The Bank of Canada is publicly owned. Its mandate, by law, is to lend money to the Federal and other Governments in Canada at close to zero interest rates, for the construction of infrastructure. For 35 years it operated that way (beginning in 1938), beneficially for Canadians. Canadians are not the only country in which citizens are fighting to keep and maintain control of their central bank, information in Beyond Banksters.
The CIB will (intentionally) accelerate the flow of tax money into the hands of the international cartel. The last thing they want is for public money to finance infrastructure – – we are scheduled to purchase more than $180 billion dollars’ worth, according to Government of Canada website. I have to keep reminding myself: that is 180 with 9 zeros behind it.
How will it work? How will we pay? . . . excerpt from cover letter sent with a copy of Banksters to some attendees, FCM (Federation of Cdn Municipalities) Conference, June 1 to 4, in Ottawa.
How do we obtain the $180 billion?
- Sell off public assets to generate some cash (sell the profitable ones, for far less than they’re worth)
- Form “partnerships” to build some of the infrastructure (when you do that, the Government completely relinquishes its ability to regulate)
- Use debt for the remainder, financed/directed by the international banking cartel (we’ll be paying high interest rates, with “servicing” charges on top of that)
- While remembering HOW MANY people we have to spread the costs over. (And the fact that many corporations and wealthy people use offshore tax havens; while the CRA twiddles its thumbs and hums and haws.) Note that the amount of money we are talking about is large in the U.S. with its ten times more people than Canada.
- It is a recipe for creating a continuous flow of money into the hands of the uber wealthy. Canadians will never be able to pay enough taxes to get ahead of the debt.
- To me personally, the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) has to be torpedoed. We already have an Infrastructure Bank and it’s called the Bank of Canada. THE EXISTING LAW mandates it to lend money at very low interest, to governments in Canada. The author of Beyond Banksters, Joyce Nelson, has done a fine job of documenting how, in Orwellian fashion, its duty under the Law has been usurped.
- “Beyond Banksters” offers an ALTERNATIVE. We do not have to be stupid dupes.
I placed INSERTS in the copies of Banksters I distributed. We lived in Halifax-Dartmouth, N.S., arriving 2 years after the “new bridge” over the Harbour opened. See the INSERT. Two bridges over the Harbour, construction costs of $42 million. The amount of money owed by citizens reached almost 3 times that amount in 20 some years. Citizens never stop paying; tolls go up. It’s a bad deal. Now imagine $180 billion in construction costs.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Nelson uses the Canada Summit 2014: Confronting the Big Questions, as the entry point to Beyond Banksters. She was curious.
From the Introduction to “Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism“:
EXCERPTS
Page 1:
The panel that really caught my eye was one called “The Global Banking Picture,” because it was addressing questions like this:
“What should be the role of the Bank of Canada going forward in the post-Mark Carney era?”
(INSERT: Carney is former head of the Bank of Canada, currently the Governor of the Bank of England, one-time employee of Goldman Sachs, respected in spite of the latter)
I knew that the Bank of Canada is our central bank and it is publicly owned, so it struck me as odd that the four panelists scheduled to discuss this question were from the Desjardins Group, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank of Tokyo Canada, and JP Morgan Chase Canada.
The simple questions that crossed my mind at the time were:
Why are private investment bankers and the IMF discussing the future of the Bank of Canada?
Isn’t that something that should be addressed by Members of Parliament and all Canadians, rather than the banksters?
I also noticed that the promotional material for the 2014 Summit was telling people that “Canada’s stable macroeconomic environment and sound monetary policy allowed it to emerge from the global financial crisis barely scathed.”
But economist David Macdonald had revealed in 2012 that there had been “secret bank bailouts” of Canada’s top six banks amounting to at least $108 billion and likely as much as $114 billion between September 2008 and July 2010.
Page 2:
Macdonald’s report, published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, disproved “the repeated claims that Canadian banks did not receive massive government support during the recent financial meltdown. Nothing could be further from the truth, he wrote.
Macdonald delivered some shocking figures: for example, while TD Bank was receiving $26 billion dollars in taxpayer money, “Ed Clark of TD had his overall compensation raised from $11.1 million to $15.2 million” per year. But as one reporter noted at the time, “To some extent the report and the rebuttal to it are a matter of how the facts are interpreted. Where Macdonald says ‘bailout’, a finance ministry official says ‘liquidity support’.
(INSERT: Nelson names her favourite economists – – likes people who explain things without jargon. . . and names others who can cut through bafflegarb terms like “liquidity support.”)
What some of those writers and others are now warning about is neofeudalism and the rise of an elite class of multi-millionaire financiers and billionaires.
Page 3: Neofeudalism
. . . notes that income inequality in Canada is not yet as extreme as elsewhere, but we are relentlessly moving in the same direction.
In fact, a 2005 report by banking giant Citigroup had already identified Canada as a “plutonomy” – a country with “massive income and wealth inequality,” where “the rich are likely to keep getting even richer.”
A massive part of the problem is what’s called “sovereign debt,” the debt that national governments owe because of their borrowing from private lenders – even though they have the power to issue the national money supply themselves. Mystified by the bank lobbyists and right-wing economists, misinformed legislators (or outright collaborators) have saddled their nations with so much needless debt that their people are enslaved by it.
As Ellen Brown explains, sovereign debt around the globe “has ballooned from $89 trillion to $100 trillion just since 2008. Squeezed governments have been driven to radical austerity measures, privatizing public assets, slashing public services, and downsizing work forces in a futile attempt to balance national budgets. But the debt overhang just continues to grow.”
Judy Kennedy has observed, “When people are held hostage financially they can be easily controlled. Public programs can be eliminated, services cut, and the economy downgraded while billions are siphoned through the banks to the 1%.” That kind of financial hostage-taking also induces governments to ruin the environment, sacrificing whole regions mainly to benefit the oligarchs. George Monbiot states that the many environmental crises we face “cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilisation against plutocracy.”
Page 4:
. . . (. . . Brexit). “A government oppressed by ‘sovereign debt’ is not really sovereign. A sovereign government has the power to issue money and need not go into debt at all. But EU member governments have lost that sovereign power. They are unable to issue their own money or borrow money issued by their own central banks.” Thus, EU members are forced to borrow from private investment banks and increase their ever-ballooning sovereign debt.
As a result, almost without anyone noticing, banks have become far, far more than banks. By using all that compound interest paid to them by governments, they are literally buying up everything that can return a profit. Matt Taibbi wrote in 2014, “Today banks like Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel, and…aluminum.” . . .
(INSERT: what the banks don’t own, other transnational corporations own. It is folly to turn water into a commodity like oil, like other “resources”, to be owned and sold by corporations. In 2014 Canadian exports of bottled water were more than $168 million. The title of this short article understates the situation. Ag Canada isn’t just “promoting”. You might look at the Comments on the posting: 2017-04-30 Agriculture Canada promotes bottled water exports to China.
Back to Beyond Banksters:)
“Break up the banks,” said Bernie Sanders, and millions agreed. The need to scale back the power of the banks has become obvious.
That’s where Canada is in a unique position: we still have a publicly-owned central bank, the Bank of Canada (BOC), which has the power to issue money and near-zero interest loans to our federal and provincial governments without incurring debt to private lenders. Indeed, the BOC did that successfully for 35 years, from 1938 to 1974 – within the memory of living Canadians – while transforming the country in positive ways.
The Bank of Canada Lawsuit
In part, this book is about the ongoing lawsuit launched by the Toronto-based Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) seeking to require the BOC to return to its original mandate.
Page 5:
COMER’s Herb Wiseman calls the BOC “part of the Civil Commons” which has been “appropriated by the financial elite” to run up huge “sovereign debt and deficits since 1974”. . . .
. . . the undermining and appropriation of the Bank of Canada “far and away the biggest, most outrageous fraud ever perpetrated on the Canadian people.”
Beyond Banksters explores how that appropriation happened, and how the BOC lawsuit is now being undermined by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. That government is planning to greatly increase Canada’s sovereign debt through $120 billion in infrastructure spending, with the money borrowed from investors by a new Canada Infrastructure Bank.
. . . (more details)
also explores . . . various ways in which people resist the “postmodern serfdom” being imposed on societies everywhere. COMER and its lawsuit are inspiring many around the world to take back their governments’ monetary powers.
Pages 9 – 12:
Chapter 1, “The Bank of Canada Lawsuit”
(Sandra speaking: You can read Ch. 1 online. The article by Nelson is the first chapter of the book. A straight- forward, important, short and informative read:
link https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/bank-of-canada-lawsuit/
Over the nine months up to September 2016, the online article “was read by more than 151,000 people” – “suggesting that there may be interest out there in learning more about these issues.”)
Chapter 2, The Rise of the Overlords
(Sandra speaking: I am not going to type all this chapter (8 pages)! not that it isn’t important. It is.)
Page 15:
. . . economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman … believed that “free markets” are efficient, rational and fair and should be self-regulating with no government interference. This neoliberal economic policy aimed for unregulated (liberalized) “free markets,” reduced …regulation, cutbacks to social programs, … mass privatization of state assets, and free trade.
Naomi Klein’s … The Shock Doctrine … provides the best history of the “Chicago Boys” in action, starting with the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and Pinochet’s adoption of Friedman’s economic model, which spread (along with corporate and state terror) to Argentina in 1976 and then throughout Latin America’s Southern Cone.
Before he was killed by the Argentina junta, journalist Rodolfo Walsh called the economic model imposed on his country “planned misery,” throwing tens of millions of people into extreme poverty virtually overnight. Economist Michel Chossudovsky, who was teaching in Chile in 1973 has written, “From one day to the next, an entire country was precipitated into abysmal poverty,” and in less than a year, “eighty-five per cent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line. Chossudovsky saw the same “Chicago School” model imposed “in country after country.” His 1997 book, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, was one of the first to expose the workings of Friedman’s economic model.
Page 19: The Debt Trap
John Perkins’ book
INSERT: Nelson writes about the original book published in 2004. Important companion to Beyond Banksters, developments in the decade since 2004 – – Excerpts from The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2016. Perkins spells out: the strategies aimed at developing countries in aid of corporate America are now wheeled and aimed back at the developed countries.
Ch. 34, New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins, 2016.
By clicking on the small grey words “John Perkins” (category) at the top of this posting, you generate a summary list of postings about Perkins. There are at two or three videos.
John Perkins’ book shocked readers into realizing just how finance capital had indebted and terrorized the Third World since the late 1960s. Perkins described a system by which consultants like himself were sent to Third World governments to convince their leaders to take on huge debts for building massive infrastructure projects. While the loans came from the World Bank, the IMF, US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other lending institutions overseen by the BIS (Bank of International Settlements), the money went directly to the big engineering, construction and consulting companies . . . Perkins admits that he and other economic hit men cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars in order to enrich U.S. corporations.
Chillingly, Perkins revealed . . . (INSERT: recorded in other postings on this blog) …
This was the “big project paradigm” for development, aligned with Milton Friedman’s economic model, that took hold in the 1970s and was virtually forced onto poor countries, preventing their governments from devoting funds to poverty reduction, land reform, social services, import substitution (i.e. local production and manufacturing), and other measures that would benefit their own population.
(INSERT: “Globalization” was sold as beneficial and inevitable. In the New Confessions, Perkins describes how that system is now turned back on itself, on the developed countries (the U.S.). Nelson says the resources of the world privatized. I add we, the serfs, provide the labor and ha! ha! we pay the taxes to pay the bills submitted to “our” government, by the corporate owners. Nice racket they have going!)
Chapter 3. A 21st Century Trojan Horse
Page 23 end – 24:
(Sigh . . . I need to reach the end of typing . . .
Meanwhile, the powers-that-be seem intent on confusing Canadians. (about the COMER lawsuit, and about the Bank of Canada with statements to erode the belief (true) that it is a central bank, publicly owned by Canadians, with the mandate to lend to governments in Canada at near-zero interest rates; compounding interest is not a factor.)
Serendipity! (Sandra speaking) On the Sunday Edition, April 23rd, CBC Radio, I heard the interview of Dominic Barton, appointed by Finance Minister Morneau to head the Advisory Committee on Economic Growth to the Government. I had never heard of the guy, or his business. But was alarmed and disturbed by what he was saying. Well I was actually kind of freaked out and alerted a few people to the interview.
I had come across and bought this book, “Beyond Banksters”, a few weeks earlier.
This same Sunday of the Barton interview, evening reading, I started Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism. There, in Chapters 4 and 5 – – all about Dominic Barton. I had more reason than I had known to be alarmed and disturbed!
Subsequently sent an email to the Sunday Edition, suggesting that they have Joyce Nelson and/or John Perkins on to rebut Barton.
I tuned in on the April 30th Sunday Edition. Host Michael Enright read responses to the Barton interview. Normally there is input representing oppositional points-of-view. Not this time. Bless Canadians! Every one of the viewpoints was different and well stated; ALL challenged Barton’s viewpoint. I wonder whether he will be back, as was promised in the first (April 23rd) interview!
Page 25:
Excerpts in a separate listing. Introduce you to names Canadians should know. If you think the CIB is in trustworthy hands, you are very wrong! Click on
Chapter 4. The “New Economy Czar”, page 37
Maybe I will have time later to type more excerpts. I hope the preceding will lead to the sale of more copies of Joyce’s book. It is extremely valuable to Canadians (and to others).
Chapter 5, The Turn-Around Specialist, page 45
NOTE: We have shared information on the Bank of Canada (COMER) Lawsuit earlier. In the Index to Banksters and Fraudsters, find them under “COMER”. (Or enter “Galati” (the lawyer who argued the case) in the search button on top right of this blog.)