Leader: John
C. Turmel (turmel@ncf.ca or johnturmel@yahoo.com)
Web
Site: http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/abprogs.htm
Platform: Party
Programs
Candidates: None
listed as of April 25, 2004. Party founder John
C. Turmel holds the Guinness Book of Records record
for having contested the greatest number of elections.
The party web site does not indicate whether Turmel
will run in 2004, or whether the party will be
running any other candidates. It would appear doubtful,
however: the party has all the look and feel of
a party of one: John Turmel.
Political
Mission: According
to the party web site, John Turmel seeks to abolish the
charging of interest on loans, and to replace
the current monetary system with a Local
Employment Trading System ("LETS")
system. In recent years, he has also opposed
marijuana prohibition, though the party was founded
primarily upon goals of monetary and banking
reform.
Arguably
anti-bank, the party leader is designated to be
John C. Turmel, who calls himself "the engineer" (thus
his trademark "the engineer" helmet,
in which he is depicted above). For over a decade,
John Turmel has used USENET and other means to
distribute his "engineer's" analysis of
the money supply. His conclusion, in effect, is
that, by charging interest on the credit that they
loan to people, Canada's chartered banks intentionally
create a shortage of dollars. In essence, he argues
that the number of dollars in circulation at any
point in time is insufficient to pay back both
the outstanding principle plus the interest owing
upon that principle. The supposed motive of the
banks: to create a situation in which borrowers
default on their loans and thereby lose their collateral
(property) to the banks...thus the anti-bank sentiment
generated by Turmel's analysis.
It is
true that, at a fixed point in time,
there is more money owing than exists. This is not
a revelation by Turmel, but a universally appreciated
fact among economists. The principal oversights in
Turmel's analysis, are that it essentially assumes
(a) that banks continually decrease the supply of
dollars, and/or that (b) banks are not a part of
the economy. Assumption (b) suggests that it is as
if banks come from another planet to lend money to
people, and return at a later date demanding that all of
it be paid back to them simultaneously,
causing the elimination of the money supply, defaults
on loans, and the seizure of assets. However, the
supply of credit has tended to increase, not decrease,
over time: though credit is destroyed by the repayment
of principal, banks tend to create and lend out at
least as much new credit as is repaid and destroyed.
Moreover banks are very much a part of the economy:
they spend the interest payments they receive back
into the economy rather than somehow making it disappear
into a black hole. That money continues to flow in
and out of banks, such that even a single dollar
can be used to pay an infinite amount of interest, over
time. Thus, the idea that the charging of
interest causes a shortage of dollars
- the very assumption that underlies the Abolitionist
Party's reason for being - is entirely false.
That
said, Turmel's anti-interest message has attracted
the interest of some who oppose the charging of interest
for reasons other than Turmel's analysis.
Some have been attracted to Turmel's message because
they object to the charging of interest for other
reasons, including religious ones, but feel the need
for a secular argument to further a religiously-motivated
political agenda. Specifically, some believe that
the charging of interest is evil. Indeed, the Christian
bible speaks out against "usury" and, equating
the charging of interest with "usury",
the Abolitionist Party itself refers to the practice
of charging interest as "usury" (for a
time, at least, the party's phone number was "1-800-NO-USURY").
Again, banks and bankers end up on the defensive,
effectively being accused of being in an evil business.
For those who feel their religious objections will
not resonate with a majority of the public, Turmel's
analysis provides another, secular, reason to fight
for the abolition of interest.
Arguably
in an attempt to win political support, in recent
years, Turmel has sought to build an alliance with
the very religious, but aging, "White Beret" Social
Credit movement in Quebec. Founded by Louis Even
in the 1930s, the White Berets are a Christian anti-interest
movement founded upon the "Social Credit" monetary
and banking ideas of British Major Clifford Hugh
Douglas (the full text of Douglas' book, "Social
Credit", is available for free, online, here
at Mondo Politico: click
here to start reading it). Turmel has argued that
the LETS system he advocates is an anti-usury form
of the Social Credit system, and that it follows
from the ideas of Louis Even. Even published a "comic
book" called "The
Money Myth Exploded", which - by means of
fictional story set on "Salvation Island" -
sets out his ideas concerning money, banking and
the charging of interest. Turmel's implicit assumptions
- that the money supply is decreased over time by
bankers and/or that bankers will require all outstanding
debt and interest to be repaid simultaneously - can
be found to have originated in Even's booklet. Turmel
has indirectly acknowledged this by his praise of
Louis Even and the White Berets in Quebec (praise
which it appears, on the basis of e-mails
reproduced by Turmel on the world wide web, is
not reciprocated by the White Berets):
"Louis
Even's Salvation Island comic book was about castaways
who allowed a banker to start a bank whose interest
charges eventually got them all into impossible
debt. Then one day, a Social Credit manual washes
ashore and they realize that he hadn't printed
the interest and there was no way they could repay
it. Look for the page where one of them is explaining
on the blackboard how they all owed 108 but they
were all given only 100. My grandfather, Socred
Adelard Turmel, was quite convinced that Louis
Even was right that interest was theft because "money
has no babies." This is a major tenet of Quebec
Social Credit. I realize that Quebec Social Credit
as taught by the Michael Fighting White Berets
from Rougemont Quebec has always provided a superior
grasp of the problem that most other Social Crediters
who think that interest is okay may never get..."
- John
Turmel, quoting himself from 1992,
at http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/ryan1.htm.
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