Ulster Says No- Abdassamad Clarke

“Usury I put down, as the great pivot of all their (the Irish people’s) disasters - the main and primary spring that sets on motion the whole machinery of Ireland’s calamities.” (Jeremiah O’Callaghan 1780 -1861)

Seeing Ulster hit the headlines again, one is revolted that the only thing offered its Catholics and Protestants is the severely over-rated virtue of ‘tolerance’ for each other. How about some facts that would make sense of their history, our history? For the truth is that Ulster straddles the fault-line whose recent shifts caused such tectonic shudders around the world: the great banking collapses of 2008 whose end we have by no means seen yet.

For the Northern Irish Protestant the date 1690 has an almost mythical status. At the Battle of the Boyne the Protestant King – William of Orange to history, King Billy to us – defeated the Catholic King James II, from which event stem many but not all of that province’s subsequent divisions. Never mind that the Vatican was lit in celebration of Billy’s victory and other inconvenient facts.

However, this date is certainly one of the most grave moments for all the world, even for people who have never heard of it. For prior to it the British throne and its people had been shaken by the Tudors’ (and all Europe’s) to-and-fro between Protestantism and Catholicism one of the main consequences of which was legislation governing interest rates, not only whether they went up or down but whether interest was charged at all, and the events of 1690 set the issue in stone. A major undercurrent of the Reformation had been the legalisation, in a Christian sense, of what had been the mortal sin of usury, a sin whose perpetrator would be refused the last rites and a Christian burial unless he repented and paid back all his ill-gotten gains. In essence Calvin legalised that sin in a modest sort of fashion, i.e. 4%, and subsequent controversy largely amounted to exactly what was the legal level of usury – sorry, I mean interest – to be?

Now we would have to be utterly naïve to interpret that event as Protestant usury fighting valiant and stalwart usury-free Catholicism, for under the Popes usury was illegal but widespread, and the interest-rate could be between 200% and 300%. The Medicis were bankers to the pope up to the point when they supplied the incumbent themselves. Well did Strathearn subtitle his magisterial history of the Medicis, “The Godfathers of the Renaissance,” for a very congenial bunch of thugs they were, but that seemed to be what the age required and supplied, and it was their uneasy consciences which led to their philanthropy which gave us the Renaissance and its dubious benefits.

Nevertheless, the transition from a basically underworld criminal usury to a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth Christian banking system was a staggering one, whose price we are still paying, and 1690 and the Battle of the Boyne were right there at the fulcrum of this event.

The extraordinary thing is that if you find an average history of William of Orange, it will not contain any of the following information:

1. He licensed the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, which has had an incredible impact on the world’s history, and which was the first ‘national’ bank in history, even though a private bank for most of its life.

2. He secured the first ‘national debt’ in history, i.e. rather than securing a loan for himself and undertaking to pay it off, the loan contract recognised that it might never be repaid, and that only the interest had to be serviced.

3. During his reign the first really significant paper money of modern history was issued by the Bank. I qualify it in that way, because a Swedish king temporarily issued paper money to fund a war, but withdrew it as soon as the war was over, and of course the Chinese had experimented with it at some point. The British experiment in paper money has never been withdrawn and indeed has gone on to spread paper all over the world.

What were the forces at work in this event? William was invited in by the British mercantile class who were appalled at the idea of any revocation of their recent privileges among which were the right to lend money at interest.

Perhaps the case has not been made fully for regarding this as a matter of some significance. So let us take a modest interest rate of say 6% and consider the circumstance of a single 1p invested at the birth of the Christian era, 2000 years ago, invested at compound interest. After two years it has become 1.12p. After 20 years 3.27p. After 200 years £1,151.26. After 2000 years it is :

£4,090,068,009,880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

This is what mathematicians call an exponential curve, i.e. one that shoots off the top edge of the paper very rapidly, and that is precisely where we are in history at the present. (Do not imagine that because compound interest is so dramatic we are endorsing interest per se. Interest is usury.)

So you can see that this process has the potential for making some people incalculably wealthy just as conversely it has the potential for impoverishing people, nations and the planet in ways previously never thought possible, since negative numbers, i.e. debts, grow at precisely the same exponential rate.

This is the issue that was fought over for so many centuries in Europe’s past. Not just the issue of Catholic and Protestant, but very fundamental matters of life beyond dogma and doctrine but which, nevertheless, grew out of that dogma and its becoming corrupted or ignored. Protestant banking grew directly out of Catholic banking, but whereas Cosimo de Medici had the good grace to have a guilty conscience the modern banker has no conscience whatsoever and doesn’t even know that he ought to have one or that he ever had one.

That battle of the Boyne was won by Billy, the bankers’ cipher. The Bank of England was established with a loan to the nation, not the King, of £1,200,000 at 6% interest. That was lent in REAL money, i.e. gold. But that loan to the nation was regarded as an asset, and thus the Bank was allowed to lend precisely the same sum to the nation again, i.e. to individuals, at the same rate of interest, but this time as the new paper money.

But why did Billy agree to this deal? He was over a barrel. The British are islanders with a longstanding antipathy to people on the ‘continent’. The British have never been ‘Europeans’ in any acceptable sense of the term, or at least have never included themselves among them. The traditional dislike for a usurper of the throne fighting the rightful monarch was thus made all the stronger by the fact that he was extremely foreign. The merchants tried to get around this by making his wife, James’s daughter Mary, co-monarch: William and Mary.

However, in order to fight a costly war against James and his powerful French backers, William would ordinarily have had to have raised a usurious loan (that was a given at most epochs in history), fought his war and repaid the loan from the spoils of war and the taxes extorted from the conquered and, if necessary, from his subjects. But this war was not going to have much in the way of spoils, and there was nothing more to extort from the Irish, and his subjects were not going to look more kindly on a foreigner who took them off to war to fight the rightful king, if he subsequently taxed them heavily. The deal with the bank was very simple: don’t bother to repay the loan. Simply service the interest on it. For ever. Therefore, rather than the repayment with interest ordinarily demanded, there was the much more reasonable 6% service charge. No one really liked it, but it was bearable.

It would grow from that £1,200,000 to somewhere between £697.5 billion at the end of 2008 or £4 trillion (according to John Redwood1) or an in-between figure of an “unprecedented £2.2 trillion – just under 150% of gross domestic product”2. What is staggering is not the size of the debt but that we consider such matters normal. It is said that Japan’s situation is much worse, which ought, in their thinking, to make ours bearable.

And the interest: “The cost of paying interest on the government’s debt is very high. In 2008 debt interest payments will be £31 billion a year (est. 2.5% of GDP). In 2009, they will be £35 billion (similar to defence budget).”3

But there is a real danger in all of this that we consider the scale of the matter the issue, the very size of the national debt the matter to hand, rather than the fact of the national debt. The truth is that we are in the situation we are because we have accepted the fact of the national debt,4 and thus we are facing a national debt of the size we are, because, as we have indicated with our compound interest example, that is the nature of the usurious loan. It has nowhere to go but up. It is impossible for it not to increase. And history has borne this out in every age and in every country on the planet. This trend has never been reversed except for short periods of time after which it has resumed its inevitable upwards climb. This is the nature of the beast we have unleashed.

The beast cannot be tamed, and like any vicious mad dog, it must be put down, for this current crisis is not just one in a cycle, so that we can compare it to the 30’s and finally admit that it is as bad as or possibly even worse than the 30’s. It is nothing to do with mismanagement and corruption and bonuses, for that would imply that there is such a thing as well managed banking and honest banking, something which all of the establishment commentators are desperately trying to establish. The fact is that as peoples we have been taken for a ride by what is little more than a mafia, something that is actually much more sinister and ruthless than the mafia, and we refuse to see it, because they have grown so effective at imitating elderly bishops or fuddy-duddy members of the aristocracy, because they can buy anything and anybody since we are so simple minded that we will accept a bit of paper with numbers and lots of zeros on it and because they own the ‘printing presses‘ (of course money is now largely digital).

Now, in all the quite substantial critique that exists in literature and around the Internet of this matter, the dominant response is that we should ourselves – or the state as our surrogate – take this dreadful power of interest-yielding and interest-demanding credit from the bankers. But a tremendously sharp blade is going to kill someone no matter in whose hand it lies, and we have seen that this mechanism is inexorable. We have no choice but to put an end to it. For that to happen, we must see that it is much deeper than a simple economic matter.

The great poet Ezra Pound who fought over the matter of usury all his life, memorably said at the end of his life, “re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”5 This is far from being an acceptance of interest-banking, but rather Pound’s profound perception of the deep deep roots of this matter: the sickness of avarice or greed, a two dimensional condition the least of which is the desire for stuff, and the more serious and intractable aspect of which is the need for rank, social standing and all the paraphernalia of status. To that we would add another motor sickness: anxiety over provision. These twin psychological illnesses are the motors that drive this insane economic system which, in Cobbett’s memorable words, “…has produced what the world never saw before; starvation in the midst of abundance,”6 and we are blind to see it because we are driven by the same sicknesses as the bankers. That is the root cause of the entire affair, because a clique of psychotic bankers have no power to do anything whatsoever without our complicity. We are the criminals and we are the usurers who are destroying the planet.

-Abdassamad Clarke