The containment of the technological project, bent as it is on hurtling the human race into yet darker domains of sociological quagmire, replete with the total breakdown of socio-economic and religious patterns that have sustained human communities for centuries, lies in the ability of men to first recognize the situation, and then act in a unified manner for the re-establishing of a dynamic, balanced and, subsequently, sane means of exchange that can facilitate the most basic of all human exchanges. That is the commercial intercourse of trade that has brought life to peoples and their societies from the time of man’s earliest records.
The exigency of this matter at hand could not be more apparent in the face of what is being toted as an all-out financial crisis requiring billions of dollars, billions of pounds and even more billions of euros and rupees, yen and whatever the utterly discredited political class of world leaders (a term used far too loosely) are able to throw at what they have now told us is our problem. By their congenital malfeasance the professional political cadre has acted in a completely obsequious manner before their masters, whose interests alone they serve. Banking practices have been de-regulated, and therefore any government restrictions to protect the public have been conveniently removed. World trade agreements protect rich developed countries whose economic survival depends on the continued exploitation of developing countries, otherwise rich in natural resources and abundant human potential, eager to work and produce, yet unable to ever reach the dinner table of the world’s abundance. Major corporations in the world’s richest countries are able to export not only capital but also jobs. After you have lost yours, where will you find it again?
We build the newest tallest glass and steel towers to reach up to the sky because we can, not because it is of any meaningful benefit to mankind. More accurately, while hardly ever grasped by the techno-wired yet ignorant mass educated tax paying debtor, it is that mega bucks need mega projects. Take note of the order present here. The spuriously created money precedes the projects. The fact that we can send a man to the moon while we are unwilling to take our fellow human beings out of a flooded shack in Khayelitsha or any of the vast sprawling slums now present in every part of the world, appears as a bi-product of the financial industry. They are treated as kind of toxic human waste on an IMF spreadsheet that needs to be disposed of as cheaply as possible. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the IMF and World Bank require, no, demand that the recipient State withdraws from its role in providing social welfare, public aid, even healthcare, education or transportation assistance, which must now revert to the private sector. A temporary but unfortunately (not for them) necessary shock (is it to the frontal lobes of the brain or to the balls?) which they say will bring in the long term a new balance and vitality to the economy. Twenty years on and the horrific hell of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School economic policies (known as neo liberal economic policy, Reaganomics, Thatcherism) have plunged the world’s poor into unimaginable hardship, spawning famines as well as economically motivated civil wars fought by proxy between industrial rivals while the spilling of African, Asian and Latin American blood becomes an ineluctable cost of doing business. Something akin to the sanitised term we have all learned from watching TV: collateral damage, the by-product of that most profitable of all global technological projects.
The technical project will be contained within the parameters of human needs, located in an environmentally balanced nomos precisely by limiting the non-located zone of global finance by removing false fiat currencies created out of nothing. The banks making it ex nihil by law! The fractional reserve system allows a private holding company (in the US it is deceptively and most erroneously named the Federal Reserve System) to rent out with interest 90% more than it actually holds in deposits. That is, a $100 in-bank amount becomes $1000, or nine hundred from nothing. Each time a lender lends out at the bank teller’s window and the borrower re-deposits his loan (your ordinary check) back into his local bank, it exponentially happens again and again, with more and more money being created until there are not even pieces of paper to account for it but only the now ridiculously astronomical numerical data flashing across a computer screen. In place of what can only been defined as a form of mass psychosis there is the beginning of a return to a bi-metal gold and silver currency that is, as all material matter is, limited, yet sufficient to meet all material human requirements for trade and commercial intercourse. In a world where all matter is, however quantifiably vast, finite, that there should operate a finance mechanism based on a limitless expansion of credit currency is not only contra naturum but certifiable in its suicidal madness. It is, even as the front page headlines of newspapers around the world are saying, A GLOBAL CRISIS DRIVEN BY GREED of unconscionable speculators and gamblers who, having lost their investor’s money (while all of the top directors and CEOs of the major lending and insurance companies that have declared bankruptcy had the visionary foresight to sell their stocks as early as 2006), have thrown the affair back into the hands of the ignominious politicians to provide a tax-payer bailout of the very Market they so emphatically insisted that government must stay out of to let business run.
Imam Malik ibn Anas, the great Muslim jurist who compiled the first formulation of Islamic Law in his master-work Al-Muwatta – two thirds of which pertains to matters of trade, commerce and other related matters of financial obligations – states that one cannot gain benefit by usury (riba) to the amount of one blade of grass. This is not poetry. This is a statement in law from which the science of the application of Shari’a, what is called fiqh, operates to derive rulings. This entire body of Islamic knowledge had been allowed to atrophy to the point of near extinction until recently being revived by a European Muslim activist some fifteen or so years ago. Very significantly there then followed a massive reactionary backlash of pseudo-scholarship, first from amongst Islamic Modernist Arabs, then other miscreants posing as scholars, to assure everyone that usury capitalism could be dressed up Islamically. They avoided the whole matter of an interest debt currency by emphasising that they were not trading in pig meat or alcohol. They used classical, authentic Islamic trading terms for modern financial instruments and banking ‘products’ that simply conceal interest debt and obfuscate the inherent nature of an entirely corrupt banking operation. Today you can find them cruising along Dubai’s Sunset Strip.
We can say that there is not one blade of grass more than there are blades of grass. That money should fecundate and breed more money is against nature and the very procreative process by which all life continues. To perpetuate a financial system based on an endless expansion of credit is against all the natural laws of existence and must by its very nature collapse. Those who practise this and gain benefit to the detriment of others, are criminals. This is the crime of the centuries and a case for the prosecution. What jury will convict on this evidence? It is against all races. It is the poisoned fruit of humanism. It is inhuman. For every single one who gains by this there are countless losers who suffer the effects of extreme hardship, poverty and the subsequent consequences that threaten our planet’s very existence.
Just recently I had the immense pleasure of meeting a Russian Muslim intellectual and lawyer from Moscow, Haroon Sidorov. He is the Amir of a burgeoning community of new Russian Muslims, along with some Central Asian Muslims living in Moscow. He told me that when rising oil prices started to put the Russian economy back on the rise – after the disastrous period precipitated by the notorious oligarchs who under the alcoholic Yeltsin where able to rob the wealth of Russia – the then President Putin said that this wealth should be re-invested in rebuilding infrastructure as well as expanding and modernising their agricultural and industrial sectors. Job creation and the spreading of prosperity from the influx of wealth from Russian oil and gas fields could not be a bad thing. Yet despite the strength and persuasive capabilities of the President the option to re-invest these profits into the wildly lucrative speculative economy proved far more attractive. Now Russia too is facing its own stock market credit crisis and financial sector bail-out.
Most interestingly and certainly challenging for us all, is that it is with the Muslims, a people for whom the very root of the syphilitic financial practices wreaking havoc today is forbidden by their Law, that the future health and recovery of world trade can be found.
Robert Luongo
