Money: Our Society's Relationship to It, and "the Cults"

Money

The relationship to money in our society - Money and “the cults”

By Éric Bouzou - May 2009

While the economic crisis is adding itself to the financial crisis, it is instructive to grasp our relationship to money. Even incomplete, this understanding is certainly a good indicator of the state of our society, and the corresponding step back makes it possible to put into perspective the accusations concerning the relationship to money attributed to the “cults” in France:

“The parliamentarians, in their 1999 report entitled ‘The cults and money’, recalled that enrichment is one of the principal objectives of the cult movements”[1].

“The parliamentary report on The cults and money showed that the first necessity of a cultic organisation is to recruit the greatest possible number of followers, then to use its members for the realisation of a turnover”[2].

“Let us not forget that the money they [the cults] use to attain religious recognition is none other than what they extort from fragile, disoriented, indeed sometimes desperate people. This money amassed by dint of manipulation in no way honours the cause or the metaphysical ideal defended by these organisations”[3].

”(…) the cultic systems are often tempted, as we observe, to couple their activities of hold over individuals with various frauds intended to make the whole even more lucrative: illegal labour, tax fraud, fraud on various allowances and public aid in particular. It is a new axis of work for the mission in the years to come, with notably the prospect of an international conference on the theme ‘Dérives sectaires and financial circuits’“[4].

King money, sinew of globalisation, brake on mondialisation

Money is the sinew of war. This well-known adage has the merit of capturing in few words a large part of human affairs: killing one another over trifles most of the time, and more rarely for a noble cause, while spending a great deal of money and sundry resources.

One is forced to observe that money has gradually taken, over the centuries, an ever more central place in the activities of all citizens[5], whom some would today like to reduce to the state of compulsive consumers and merchandise at once (grey matter and labour are sold, the workforce is offshored if it is cheaper elsewhere, etc.).

In the rich countries, political discourse and even social discourse now express themselves very largely with the help of economic data. The human being disappears and gives way to quotas, indices, percentages. “Work more to earn more” becomes a watchword sufficient to serve as a vision of the future, and it is probable that this hammering of lapidary figures ends up making populations believe that the meaning of their life does indeed pass through the economy. When the human being and human relations are placed back at the centre of the discourse, it is very often a marketing tactic for “getting through” economic reforms, allegedly indispensable for the growth and progress of the community. In the discourse of the elite, the words “solidarity” and “unity” are never far from the words “business” and “profitability”.

For Emmanuel Todd: “‘Globalisation’ is the blind economic and financial mechanism whose negative effects we now feel. ‘Mondialisation’ is something much vaster and more diffuse, a mental opening of the planet’s cultures to one another, and this concept ought to keep a positive connotation”[6]. This globalisation, through the tensions it generates, seems indeed to be a brake on a harmonious mondialisation.

The financial and economic doctrine

Financial and economic jargon, esoteric to the layman, has nevertheless become familiar by dint of repetition. It is popularised to the point of caricature on the television news. Since it is, for many, reassuring and incomprehensible at once, the first reflex consists in handing oneself over to the “authorities” in the matter, in trusting those who know. But do they really know?

Following the financial deregulation of the 80s, most political and economic leaders asserted for decades the markets’ capacity for self-regulation, that they had to be left “free”, the sine qua non of world harmony. Once the financial crisis was acknowledged, many claimed not to have seen it coming. It would be more exact to say that almost nobody wanted to see it coming[7]. Reading the works of lucid economists (they exist), it appears that world finance rests above all not on economic laws but on certain traits of human character - confidence, but also others among the less glorious: greed, the competitive spirit. No need to come out of a business school: a few notions of psychology sufficed to predict that the financial discipline, in present conditions, had no chance of “self-regulating”[8]. Faced with the disaster, some nevertheless persisted in claiming that the reason for the collapse was an excess of regulation[9].

For Jean-Paul Gréau, the “neo-liberal vulgate” (the jargon) is diffused by “a veritable clergy, composed of institutional economists, banks, research bodies, [which] applies itself to spiriting away everything that could be called into question to enlighten political leaders and that fraction of opinion whose intellectual curiosity has not yet been discouraged”[10].

Economic theories are far from constituting an exact science. To arouse increased confidence, this rather soft science had to be “hardened” in a rational world. Patrick Moynot[11] shows how the creation of a Nobel prize in economics did the job, though that award was in principle reserved for a precise list of disciplines.

Nevertheless, despite the abundant mediatisation of the economic doxa and the reverence surrounding the Nobel laureates in economics - some of whom, apostles of an ultraliberalism, have very seriously disgraced themselves[12] -, the public’s “capital” of confidence in the people who “know” was seriously eroded once their bewilderment[13], affected or not, before the crisis was observed.

How much money?

Beyond a certain amount, figures no longer mean much to the common run of mortals, indeed to anyone; but precisely, by giving an idea of the enormity of the sums, it is easier to understand the various actors’ lack of mastery. Moreover, the relative proportions of these figures are instructive.

In his historical work on the inexorable ascent of money in society’s activity, Niall Ferguson[14] gives an assessment of the financial masses exchanged in the world in 2006. That year, total economic production is valued at 47,000 billion dollars. The capitalisation of the equity market[15] (the shares of French or foreign companies that anyone can buy) is valued at 51,000 billion dollars. The market in domestic and international bonds[16] (principally the money borrowed by States to finance their public spending) is valued at 68,000 billion dollars. The totality of derivative products[17], for its part, reaches 473,000 billion dollars. The fourth item cited, by far the largest, corresponds, in Jean-Paul Gréau’s[18] characterisation, to “an activity that consists exclusively in placing bets”. ”(…) The gaming table (…) widens ceaselessly, welcoming new operators who give themselves over to an orgy of reciprocal bets”. The economist specifies that this activity “decides the value of many goods”: currencies, oil, agricultural and industrial raw materials.

The greater part of the money exchanged in the world thus serves as stakes in a world casino, where the excesses committed led to the collapse of the financial system, to the hunger riots and to the economic crisis with its train of tensions and tragedies. For Emmanuel Todd, this unregulated “free trade” fosters hatred between peoples[19].

The money of war

Money is indeed still the sinew of war, an outlet for this hatred. In the national budgets of the year 2004, the world totalled 1,100 billion dollars in military spending, of which 623 billion for the United States alone[20].

These sums do not take account of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes[21] have made a thorough economic study of these conflicts, assessing the direct and indirect costs (in particular the care of the war wounded). They estimate that between 2,200 billion dollars (the optimistic scenario) and 5,000 billion dollars will have been spent by the USA alone on these conflicts, not counting the interest on the money borrowed to pay the military expenses. To these astronomical sums must be added the spending of other countries such as the United Kingdom. For the year 2008, the authors estimate[22] that the USA was spending 16 billion dollars each month on the war effort. This figure should be set beside the annual foreign aid of the United States to developing countries, which amounted to 25 billion dollars in 2008[23]. Two months of war represent more than the annual foreign aid of the world’s leading power. It is difficult to imagine what the world would be if all the money of war had been allocated to constructive international projects.

It goes without saying that the principal cost of war is the cost in human lives.

Enslavement by finance

The terms subprime[24], securitisation[25], leverage[26], tax havens[27], trader[28], bonuses and golden parachutes[29], abstruse but familiar, are now evocative of the excesses of a system become uncontrollable but “pervasive”.

If the “addiction” to financial practice no longer needs demonstrating where traders and other actors of the profession are concerned, an economist like Frédéric Lordon shows how this practice is more and more encouraged at the level of each citizen[30]. Invited to invest part of his income by buying pieces of his company, to secure his old age through pension funds, etc., he becomes an actor endorsing, in spite of himself, the system’s runaway acceleration.

It is by now public knowledge that the greater part of the money created is created in the form of credit, what some call “debt money”. It is therefore created out of nothing (ex nihilo) by private commercial banks, which ask interest for this ex nihilo creation. Once this mechanism is understood, it is easy to see that, globally, the money for the interest can only be created by more credit, therefore more debt. Maurice Allais[31] estimated already in 1998 that “the entire world economy rests today on gigantic pyramids of debt”. The payment of public debts and the corresponding interest enslaves all States, poor or rich[32]. A certain number of economists[33] and social actors[34] now contemplate giving the power of monetary creation back to civil society rather than leaving this privilege to private bodies[35].

The servicing of this endemic world debt obliges the various protagonists to launch themselves into a mad race of production/consumption, in pursuit of the sacrosanct growth index, with all the disastrous repercussions that this unbridled production/consumption has on the environment and on people’s health[36].

The mystification of the G20

The G20[37] (the group of the twenty richest countries, meeting in April 2009) was supposed to refound and moralise the financial system. Overall, the comments were positive[38]. Yet its outcome is distressing. The principal “result” obtained was to inject 1,100 billion dollars into the pipes for economic stimulus and the financial institutions[39]. Concerning the moralisation of the system, two lists of tax havens[40] (omitting the principal havens that are Hong Kong, Macao, the City of London, and Delaware in the USA) were published, which leave one perplexed as to their real effectiveness. No serious overhaul of the system looms on the horizon. As for the plan of Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary, supposed to clean up American finance, which dragged all the others into the abyss, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics 2008, comments on it thus: “All this is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a feeling of despair”[41].

Faced with the scale of the damage, the members of the G20 could first have chosen to place finance and the economy back at the service of the men and women of this planet by an official and solemn announcement. And to show that this was not a mere announcement effect, they could have opened the credit line and launched an international project to put an end to hunger in the world. The money needed to resolve this pandemic, which touches more than 800 million people, is estimated at 50 billion dollars[42]. Let us add that a billion other people live on less than 1 dollar a day[43].

We have not yet managed, nor have our elected leaders, to find fifty small billions to resolve the problem of world hunger, among the hundreds of thousands of billions of dollars circulating on planet finance!

This indictment does not aim to condemn money, the present means of exchange between men. Many, moreover, endorse the current financial system by mentioning the progress from which citizens across the world have benefited. We shall not deny that fact, but the reality today is that the roulette of the trading floors has run away with itself, with the croupiers’ assistance, and the game has become deleterious. Moreover, if progress cannot be denied, it accommodates itself to the most extreme precariousness of a good third of the world’s population, and increasingly takes on, in the rich countries, the look of a planned force-feeding of geese - this observation being made without forgetting that there also exist, unfortunately, in these rich countries, great pockets of poverty[44] and crying inequalities that ought to be reabsorbed[45]. The crisis of “faith” in this consumerist world is winning over a growing part of civil society. It is time to change worlds.

A little test for the MIVILUDES

From this overall picture of the world financial system, it would be interesting to make a synthesis to send to the MIVILUDES, without saying what it is about.

A system which:

• has infiltrated every sphere of power;
• controls and manipulates the media discourse concerning it;
• has developed a deceptive doctrine hammered daily into the citizens;
• enslaves its followers and, more and more, also all those forced to pass through its intermediary;
• exerts constant and exorbitant financial pressure on people;
• has to its debit thousands of daily victims, direct or indirect;
• etc.

There is no doubt that the MIVILUDES would conclude on a cultic activity to be placed urgently under surveillance. Indeed, some, familiarised with the anti-cult terminology by the action of the public authorities, have not hesitated to apply it to finance[46].

We do not endorse the notions of “cults” and “dérives sectaires” diffused by the interministerial mission, on the contrary, for they proceed not from an approach of knowledge but from a will to ostracise. This test makes it possible to illustrate once more the inapplicable character of the criteria of dérives sectaires.

And the cults, in all this?

Within the wider frame of the excesses of the financial system, the litany on the alleged depravity of the “cults” with regard to money is grotesque. It is a dishonest exercise in disinformation, in a society where money serves as oxygen, indeed as hallucinogen. “Cults” is understood in the sense, induced by the MIVILUDES and the anti-cult associations, of a vast, elusive and uncontrollable nebula, a den of proven or potential criminals, whose sole aim is said to be to enrich themselves on the backs of their followers. This “nebula” represents nearly 1% of the French population according to Georges Fenech[47], the current president of the interministerial mission.

It is accepted that every infraction of the law must be sanctioned by the courts. Nevertheless, our own research on the question has led us to the conclusion that these infractions are rare within the spiritual minorities. The MIVILUDES and certain parliamentarians, relayed by the media, claim the contrary, but without supplying statistics based on credible and verifiable enquiries, and without a comparative study of the situation in the rest of society.

The spiritual minorities need, like all the other organisations in our society, financial resources in order to exist, even minimal ones. These resources are made up, depending on the case, of subscriptions, donations, patronage, sales of courses, lectures, publications, sundry “spiritual products”. These practices have nothing abnormal about them, so what exactly is being held against them?

The financial resources of the spiritual minorities are a priori frowned upon

“France is hostile to a group charging for its so-called religious services,” remarks the sociologist Nathalie Luca[48]. This sociological datum should nevertheless not lead to an “institutionalisation” of that hostility, as is the case in France.

In 1999, three years after the release of the 1996 report on the cults, the parliamentarians continued their enterprise of denigrating the spiritual minorities by publishing a second, indigent report: “The cults and money”[49]. The successive reports of the MILS and then the MIVILUDES have not failed to evoke systematically the alleged perversion of the “cults” with regard to money (see the citations in the introduction). According to Hervé Duray, the State action directed against spiritual minorities, with the objective of taxing hand-to-hand gifts, imperils freedom of association[50].

Certain spiritual groups have a number of members sufficient to give them a financial footing. Many, on the contrary, have very limited resources. Most use these resources to develop what gives meaning to the group’s life. Casting doubt on these people without precise facts is not acceptable. The hypocrisy that consists in admitting, indeed claiming, sufficient means of operation in every sector of society except for the spiritual minorities is not admissible. Moreover, nobody concerns themselves with the bank accounts of the “recognised” religions.

Might the financial “asceticism” demanded of them be an unconscious demand for a counterpart to the debauchery observed in the rest of society, or is it just a stratagem for cutting off the livelihood of groups that disturb?

The spiritual minorities are the false noses of commercial enterprises enriching themselves on the backs of their followers

This pejorative and globalising assertion, used to denigrate the activities (or even simply the subscriptions) that allow spiritual groups to earn money, is another way of denying them the right to exist. To file these minorities arbitrarily in the great sack of the “cults” that want to enrich themselves by “infiltrating companies” or on the backs of their members is unfounded. Most of the people who deliver services or teachings are only earning their living honestly. If some enrich themselves, let us recall that, independently of the moral assessment each person may make of that attitude, enrichment is not an offence in our mercantile society, if it is legal. To suggest by rumour that it is, in a general way, illegal in the “cults” is a discriminatory and defamatory attitude.

A certain number of spiritual minorities exalt personal success, which often goes hand in hand with social and economic success. Each person will judge, by personal criteria, whether or not they are receptive to this type of approach, even if it means criticising it within the framework of a democratic debate, but in no way is it legitimate to condemn these groups in the public square.

Most of the spiritual minorities are associations under the 1901 law. The scant means of many of them lead them to use the voluntary work of their members. If this practice must be strictly framed by the law, it is not a specificity of these groups but a generalised mode of operation of associations of every kind.

The spiritual minorities swindle their “clients” by practising mental manipulation.

The assessment of a spiritual journey that leads a citizen to follow a teaching or to acquire “spiritual goods” (immaterial or material) must respect the adversarial principle, without systematically de-responsibilising the disappointed beneficiary or “buyer” by transforming him into a victim.

In this respect, the banalisation in the media and, by way of consequence, in opinion, following the MIVILUDES’s action, of the notion of mental hold is worrying. It is a genuine abuse, since it makes it possible to classify, without any other form of proof, the members of the spiritual minorities into two categories: the manipulators and the manipulated. The sociologist Brian Wilson (whose work is mocked by the MIVILUDES[51]) has shown that the testimonies of apostates, considering themselves victims or persuaded by anti-cult associations to present themselves as victims of manipulation, must be considered with much circumspection. In any event, recent scientific research has shown that the approaches to persuasion used in certain spiritual groups are in no way different from the techniques banalised in our society[52]. Moreover, nobody seems unduly moved by the ever more sophisticated research carried out on “marketing” techniques[53].

Could a citizen sue a political party whose ideology he no longer shares, though he dedicated himself to it body and soul for years, as a volunteer, under the “friendly pressure” of the staff, paying an annual subscription he now considers abusive and devoting many days to spreading that ideology? Could he claim to have been subjected to a mental hold and invoke the About-Picard law[54] against that party?

Synthesis

The expression “The cults and money”, like most of those containing the word “cult”, is an amalgam that must be denounced. This expression is the representation of a “non-problem”, to take up a now famous formula[55].

The spiritual minorities in France, in their great majority, take part in the building of a more fraternal world, because they put the human person and his development at the centre of their activity and of life in society.

Eric Bouzou was born in 1958. He is an engineer. His technical career has been punctuated by encounters with people who bring alive the spiritual dimension of man. His interest in the defence of spiritual freedom led him to commit himself actively to the work of the CICNS.

[1] 2007 MIVILUDES report, p. 16, miviludes.gouv.fr (source). See also our commentary on the report (source).

[2] 2008 MIVILUDES report, p. 139, miviludes.gouv.fr (source). See also our commentary on the report (source).

[3] Ibid., p. 188, extract from a question to the government by the deputy Jean-Pierre Kucheida.

[4] Ibid., p. 168.

[5] Niall Ferguson (Professor of history at Harvard), The Ascent of Money - A financial history of the world, The Penguin Press; in this work, describing the inexorable ascent of money in society’s activity, Niall Ferguson illustrates in particular how war has often been an opportunity for financial innovation.

[6] Emmanuel Todd, Après la démocratie, Éditions Gallimard; p. 51.

[7] See the work of Frédéric Lordon (economist, research director at the CNRS): Jusqu’à quand? - Pour en finir avec les crises financières, Éditions Raisons d’agir; p. 8: “There is something more spectacular than the events themselves: the astonishment of those who comment on them. Obviously, most have communed for two decades without the slightest reservation in the credo of deregulated markets. And without the slightest learning effect either. For the crises, practical and repeated refutations of the pretension of the financial markets, have not been lacking! Since deregulation has been on the rails, it will have been impossible to go on average more than two and a half years without passing through a major shock (…)”.

[8] Ibid., p. 20: “Competition (allied with greed) is the force par excellence of blindness to risk and of collective runaway.”

[9] Economists like Élie Cohen and Pascal Salin, regularly invited onto television sets (the programme C dans l’air, France 5, for example), have made such statements.

[10] Expression and citation drawn from the work of Jean-Luc Gréau (economist and former expert to the Medef): La trahison des économistes, Éditions Gallimard; p. 1.

[11] Patrick Moynot, Nobel d’économie: coup de maître, lemonde.fr (source); he writes: “At the time [of Alfred Nobel], the idea of dressing economics up with the qualifier ‘science’ would have occurred to no one. That was, moreover, the case for most fields of investigation which even today one only consents to call sciences when speaking of them in the plural: the human sciences. (…) So long as economics had not emancipated itself from politics, it could not claim scientific authority. The latter, like all authority, proceeds from a legitimation: by peers, in the scientific publications where each cites his neighbour in a great movement of self-legitimation; by the media and opinion, often on the occasion of the publication of experimental results; by political power, finally, which demands the enlightened advice of those supposed to know. Now, the Nobel prize has this fabulous property that it concentrates the whole process into one action, one place and one instant. The aura of scientificity it procures is prodigious. The symbolic capital of the prize has become colossal. The authority it confers on the distinguished scholar proceeds at once from scientific recognition, from glorification in the eyes of opinion and from political ennoblement. The economists were not mistaken about it, seizing the unique occasion that presented itself to them at the end of 1968. (…) The prize would indeed be awarded in the same conditions, at the end of a selection process respecting the same rules, and the refinement would be pushed to the point of conforming to the same protocol, heavy, outdated and sometimes surreal, as that of the other Nobel prizes. But this one would bear the name of ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’, and the prize money would be paid by the Bank of Sweden, and not by the Nobel Foundation. A detail, you will say.”

[12] Frédéric Lordon, op. cit.; p. 55: “Also Nobelised, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, (…) luxury employees, the least one could say, of the hedge fund LTCM, which they would very academically lead to bankruptcy in 1998.”

[13] Cécile Prudhomme, La BCE rechigne encore à explorer des voies inédites: “Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), unveiled, on Thursday 5 March, an unprecedented monetary weapon: ‘touching wood’”, lemonde.fr (source).

[14] Niall Ferguson, op. cit., p. 4.

[15] A share (in British English: share, in American English: stock) is a title of ownership issued by a joint-stock company. It confers on its holder the ownership of part of the capital, with the associated rights: to intervene in the management of the company and to draw from it an income called a dividend, fr.wikipedia.org (source).

[16] Bond: a security representing, unlike shares, a share of the debt of a company, the State, or local authorities, edubourse.com (source).

[17] Frédéric Lordon, op. cit., p. 176: “The essential part of the financial proliferation came from the derivatives compartment. Although still disputed by those who, wanting to save all the acquisitions of finance, will never yield to the evidence, their contribution to financial instability has become patent. (…) The great characteristic of transactions in derivatives (whatever the market) is in fact the following: bearing on promises to sell or to buy, therefore to receive or to pay, at a certain maturity, they do not in principle require an immediate outlay of funds at the moment they are concluded. Operators thus commit themselves, in a way, uncovered, in the sense that they are held to no contribution of their own funds (or indeed of funds at all!) at the moment the contract is made.” See also an example of a derivatives transaction at this address: 3trois3.com (source).

[18] Jean-Luc Gréau, op. cit.: p. 152.

[19] “Unregulated free trade fosters hatred between peoples as surely as totalitarian autarky,” according to Emmanuel Todd. Emmanuel Todd, op. cit.; p. 153.

[20] Globalsecurity.org (source).

[21] Joseph E. Stiglitz (Nobel Prize in Economics), Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War - the true cost of the Iraq conflict; p. 130.

[22] Ibid., p. 9.

[23] Globalissues.org (source).

[24] Subprime: the American term designating risky mortgage loans in the United States. These loans, transformed into financial products by the technique of securitisation, proved insolvent, making the corresponding financial products toxic. They are at the origin of the financial crisis of 2007.

[25] Securitisation: see note 10, p. 144: “It consists in cutting up loans, as one cuts a fabric into small strips, into debt securities that can subsequently be bought, in variable quantities, by investment funds.”

[26] Frédéric Lordon, op. cit., p. 30 and p. 176 for a description of the devastating effects of leverage: “The multiplication of profitability obtained by recourse to indebtedness in the financing of investments.”

[27] See in particular the France 3 magazine: Crise financière: les secrets des banques françaises, Pièces à Conviction no. 71 - Wednesday 17 December 2008. According to this report, 50% of commercial flows pass through the tax havens and 2/3 of speculative funds are present in the tax havens. Listen in particular to the distinctly embarrassed and confused reply of the managing director of BNP when asked why his bank is established in Jersey, france3.fr (source).

[28] Trader: the English term designating a market operator. The most mediatised in France is Jérôme Kerviel, who lost his bank, Société Générale, 4.9 billion euros.

[29] Niall Ferguson, op. cit., p. 1: “Now let us compare the situation of Mr Average with that of Lloyd Blankfein, chief at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. In 2007 he received 68.5 million dollars in salary, bonuses and stock options, an increase of 25% on the previous year” (CICNS translation). See among others an article in Le Monde by Marie de Vergès, 21,346 euros an hour… for the boss of Porsche: “the six members of the management board of the German sports-car maker pocketed 143.5 million euros, up 27% on the year, according to the activity report published Wednesday 26 November”, lemonde.fr (source). See Le Parisien for a French example, leparisien.fr (source).

[30] Frédéric Lordon, Fonds de pension, piège à cons? - Mirage de la démocratie actionnariale, Éditions Raisons d’agir; p. 12: “One will be surprised to see how far this project of a shareholder democracy can go, replica and perhaps substitute of political democracy, with its assemblies, its stock-market education intended to train citizen-shareholders, and its social bond reconstructed around shared financial interests.”

[31] Maurice Allais (Nobel laureate in economics), fauxmonnayeurs.org (source).

[32] See on this subject the work of André-Jacques Holbecq and Philippe Derudder, La dette publique, une affaire rentable - A qui profite le système? Éditions Yves Michel; p. 71: “In total, between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 2006, we paid 1,142 billion euros in interest. The debt, for its part, increased by 913 billion euros. During those twenty-six years, if we had not had to borrow those 913 billion on the money markets, that is to say if we had been able to create our own money, to do exactly what the private banks have the right to do, if we had not abandoned to the banks’ profit our right of seigniorage, that is to say the benefit, in the form of interest, of monetary creation, the debt, which stood at 229 billion euros at the beginning of 1980, would be non-existent today.”

[33] See in particular the site of James Robertson. See also Frédéric Lordon’s article: Pour un système socialisé du crédit, blog.mondediplo.net (source).

[34] See in particular the work of Philippe Derudder, Rendre la création monétaire à la société civile - Vers une économie au service de l’homme et de la planète, Éditions Yves Michel.

[35] See among others notes 6, 7, 10, 41 for a set of measures their authors think necessary to refound the financial and economic system.

[36] See for example the notion of humanity’s ecological footprint: “According to the WWF’s ‘Living Planet Report 2008’, humanity’s global ecological footprint has doubled over the last 35 years, and exceeds the Earth’s biological capacities by 30%. Dividing the planet’s productive surfaces equitably, we all theoretically have a right to 2.1 hectares to satisfy our needs. Yet humanity consumes on average 2.7 per inhabitant, and the footprint per person of high-income countries is nearly 3 times higher than that of low-income countries”, wwf.fr (source).

[37] fr.wikipedia.org (source); “The Group of 20 (or G20) is an economic forum created in 1999, after the succession of financial crises in the 1990s. It aims to foster international consultation, integrating the principle of a broadened dialogue taking account of the growing economic weight of a certain number of countries.”

[38] Le Monde - 2 April 2009 (source).

[39] lemonde.fr with AFP and Reuters (source).

[40] Challenges.fr (source).

[41] Paul Jorion’s blog, pauljorion.com (source).

[42] Budget estimated by a collective of organisations fighting world hunger, alliancetoendhunger.org (source).

[43] Alterpresse (source).

[44] See for example the observatory of inequalities, “France counts between 4 and 8 million poor people”, the poverty threshold being defined as half the median income, inegalites.fr (source).

[45] See for example the Cotis report on the sharing of profits within French companies, net-iris.fr (source). See also Frédéric Lordon’s article, Bonus et primes: le (résistible) chantage des « compétents », blog.mondediplo.net (source).

[46] See our article on the diffusion of the anti-cult terminology to every sector of society (source).

[47] See our press release (source).

[48] Le Monde (source).

[49] See our commentary on the 1999 parliamentary report “The cults and money” (source).

[50] See for example Hervé Duray’s comment on the proceedings brought by the State against the Jehovah’s Witnesses concerning the taxation of hand-to-hand gifts. According to him, these proceedings imperil freedom of association (source).

[51] MIVILUDES 2008, op. cit., p. 53.

[52] See our dossier on mental manipulation (source).

[53] See for example the article by Marie Bénilde, Scanner les cerveaux pour mieux vendre, monde-diplomatique.fr (source).

[54] See a commentary on the genesis of the About-Picard law by the sociologist Patrice Rolland (source) and a commentary on the legislative text by Me Pérollier, lawyer (source).

[55] See the declaration of Emmanuelle Mignon, former chief of staff of Nicolas Sarkozy: “the cults are a non-problem” (source).