Social Credit is back

The Social Credit Movement has its roots in aftermath of the Great War when Clifford Hugh Douglas, a Scottish engineer, published his major work, "Economic Democracy" in 1919.
Douglas' ideas about the equitable distribution of a nation's wealth came to fore during the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash in 1929 where a great number of people sank into poverty in spite of the fact that there was not a shortage of goods and services available. The slogan "poverty amidst plenty" described the situation well.
Social Credit seeks to eliminate an artificially created shortage in purchasing power by exercising the sovereign right of a nation to issue its own money and credit without borrowing it from anybody.
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Friday, February 19, 2010

What is Social Credit ?

The essence of the Social Credit Message is that we, the people, own the wealth we have created over many generations and we will not allow self appointed minority groups to take it away from us.

Access to that wealth, in modern society, is gained by the use of money and credit.
Therefore it is crucial that control of that money and credit remains in the hands of the people, and is not given to, or appropriated by, any special interest groups.
This principle is already embedded in the Canadian Constitution Act, but it is not being carried out by our parliament in Ottawa, even though it has the power to go ahead and do this as per Section 91 of the Constitution Act.
In Alberta, and Canada generally, public ownership of public utilities has been progressively transferred to privately owned corporations, many of whom are foreign owned.
Just like we have been deprived of the right to create our own money and credit, we have lost ownership rights of utilities such as communications and effective control of power generation and distribution, both of whom are vital to the health of a community.

Our elected representatives in both Edmonton and Ottawa have become the servants of large private corporations and are enacting legislation and laws to work in their favor, against our interests. Candidates with the best financial backing and media coverage invariably win elections, because most people are not engaged in the political process and are consequently prone to being manipulated.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Privatizing Profit and Socializing Debt

The saga of Bill 50 continues. This bill, which has now become a law created by our elected representatives in the Alberta Legislature, including MLA Ty Lund in the Rocky constituency, effectively bypasses the technical skills of the Alberta Utilities Commission, and puts a $15 billion government spending decision in the hands of politicians with direct links to Alberta’s energy industry, based on advice from people with a vested interest in seeing the project go ahead as soon as possible. Major electricity transmission lines are planned for construction across Alberta, ostensibly for the benefit of Albertans in order to avoid electricity blackouts.

However, electricity industry insiders are challenging this assertion, saying that local electricity generation, close to major population centers, could easily pick up the extra load on the system in the future. The argument is that the proposed transmission lines are really there to be used for electricity exports to the United States.

Now, this is where it gets interesting: Alberta’s electricity consumers will be required to pay for the new transmission lines by way of a surcharge on their electricity bills while the power companies get to use the new energy highway to export their energy to the US. By all accounts a freebee for them at our expense.

To sum it up: We are being had. Our politicians have cozied up with major energy companies at our expense. They are privatizing profits and socializing debt.


But the problem runs deeper than that. It applies equally to the financial world which is the epicenter of political power. Over the last number of years money has been enticed into the speculative economy, away from the productive economy, on the promise of quick gains. The result is now facing us starkly: A shortage of money and credit in the productive economy, with industry and commerce slowing down and shedding jobs.

That was exactly what happened after the stock market crash in 1929 and for the very same reasons: Highly leveraged debt created by speculative activities in the financial world. Then the straw house came tumbling down, bringing with it the Great Depression. Our politicians on the federal level have progressively facilitated these speculative activities in our financial system, enabling the migration of money from the commercial banking system, that has served us well, into the hands of financial manipulators working for so called “investment banks”.

William Aberhart and his incoming Social Credit Government in Alberta inherited a bankrupt province in 1935 and he and his team did the best they could to salvage the pieces and rebuild the province. This work has largely been forgotten by the present generation of Albertans.

With conditions now closely resembling those of the early thirties, it is time to take another look at Social Credit and see what it has to offer Albertans.