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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  Wednesday, 9 July 2014

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

“Listen to Pope Francis!” CEC issues Open Letter to the Catholic Church in Australia

On behalf of the Citizens Electoral Council, CEC National Secretary Craig Isherwood has just released “An Open Letter to the Catholic Church in Australia”. Under the title: “An Ecumenical Response to Evangelii Gaudium: Listen to Pope Francis!”, the open letter constitutes the entirety of the CEC’s latest New Citizen newspaper, printed in 200,000 copies.

Isherwood said today, “Evangelii Gaudium is a truly profound document. And it became clear to me during the months after Pope Francis released it on 26 November 2013 that most people, both Catholics and others, had overlooked the Pope’s insistence on the necessity to ‘draw practical conclusions’ regarding the present, speculation-centred international economy dominated by the City of London and Wall Street. Financial speculation has just hit $2 quadrillion in derivatives, against a real world GDP of a tiny fraction of that amount, and this bubble could blow out any day now.

“Pope Francis writes, ‘The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an imperial economy lacking a human purpose’, and ‘Such an economy kills’. Therefore, he demands, ‘We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market’. Rather, this problem must be ‘radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation…’, and ‘It is the responsibility of the State to safeguard and promote the common good’.”

Implications for Australia

Said Isherwood, “The Pope writes that the present global economic crisis ‘is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace’, and it is precisely those ideologies that underly both the recent savage Abbott/Hockey budget, and the entire disaster which free trade, privatisation, and deregulation have wrought upon Australia since their introduction under Hawke and Keating beginning in 1983, which both ‘major’ parties have proudly proclaimed as their ‘bipartisan economic consensus’ ever since.

“But I demonstrate in this Open Letter that the ideology of the ‘free market’ is wittingly Satanic in origin: that it was concocted by Bernard Mandeville, the early 18th-century Anglo-Dutch founder of the Satanic Hell-fire Clubs of Britain, and then simply copied by Adam Smith, Parson Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and the whole tribe of British imperial ‘classical economists’ such as John Maynard Keynes, ever since. Mandeville was also worshipped by the ‘Austrian School’ of economists centred in the British Crown-and City of London-sponsored Mont Pelerin Society and its leading think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs. It was the MPS/IEA which founded all of the economic rationalist think tanks in Australia such as the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies, the H.R. Nicholls Society, etc. These ‘free market’ think tanks are financed by the Big Four, Macquarie, and Big Business, which dominate their boards and dictate the outcome of their ‘studies’, whose intent—as in the recent Abbott/Hockey budget—is to draft new ways to loot the poor to aid the rich.”

Therefore, said Isherwood, “In response to the Pope’s demands for radical reform, I and the CEC in this Open Letter propose the only possible real-world solutions: that we must return to an economy regulated for the common good and anchored on a national bank, just like the First and Second National Banks of the young United States and our own Commonwealth Bank, modelled on them. And as a first step, we must do as U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s when he reined in the tyranny and looting of Wall Street with the Glass-Steagall Act to separate the ‘Too Big To Fail’ titans of that era, into honest, government-backed commercial banks, on the one hand, and, on the other, speculative investment banks which are left on their own to sink or swim. How else could you possibly rectify Australia’s present predicament, which boasts $135 trillion in speculative turnover versus a GDP of only $1.6 trillion?”

Isherwood concluded, “As I observed in the Open Letter, Pope Francis is an immensely loving pastor, but therefore a very tough one. He insists again and again throughout Evangelii Gaudium, that you personally act to overthrow the present London/Wall Street tyranny. As he put it in a recent interview, ‘politics is one of the more elevated forms of love, of charity. Why? Because it leads to the common good, and a person who, [despite] being able to do it, does not get involved in politics for the common good, is selfish; or that uses politics for their own good, is corrupt.’

“And that, of course, applies to all Australians—both Catholics and everyone else.”

Click here for the New Citizen containing the Open Letter, or here (PDF) for the same document in a letter format complete with explanatory notes and references.

Click here to receive a free copy of the New Citizen newspaper containing the Open Letter.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The ALP, Liberals and Greens are ganging up to make it harder for other parties to contest elections, by tripling the membership requirement. If you support the CEC’s ideas, it is time to act by joining as an Associate Member for 1 year, so the CEC can remain registered. Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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