There they were in London’s Hyde Park yesterday; some forty-five thousand of them.

The Big IF, a coalition including Unicef, Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid had organised the rally “Enough Food for Everyone IF” …

People at the event in Hyde Park laid a striking feature of plastic flowers to symbolize the millions of young people who die each year from malnutrition.

Philanthropist Bill Gates and others addressed the crowd or sang to them. Apparently more money will help fix the problem – certainly NOT stopping the 0.1% from stealing the peoples’ land and rents. That’s not on.

Over at Westminster $4.15 billion was pledged to tackle malnutrition and poverty.

There’s another rally next weekend in Belfast.

It’s amazing how many people will turn out for extravaganzas pointing to the results of the 0.1% running amok, The Big If, Live Aid, etc., but I guess it does keep the big charities running …  If only they wanted to really stop the cause of poverty and dispossession.

Meanwhile, people pragmatically wanting to put an end to poverty–by ending taxation and making the 0.1% pay the rent for the natural resources they deny to the dispossessed–continue to hold their meetings in a telephone booth.

Paradoxically, it seems you can get the numbers up for anything except the remedy.

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

Just look at all the spruikers coming out of the woodwork to advise how there’s big money to be made out of all the Fed’s quantitative easing before the market tanks. Gee, thanks, guys! As the world disappears down the plug-hole, I find this very comforting, very helpful.

I caught Geraldine Doogue interviewing Steve Bibb and Ivan O’Mahoney about their book Great Southern Land this morning.  “Do we really know our land?” she asked towards the end of the interview.

No, Geraldine, we don’t know our land.  If we really knew it like the aboriginal people knew it we’d base our revenue system on it, because this would reconcile people with the land – the way the aborigine was spiritually reconciled with it.

We do not know our land because we’ve come to believe it’s a commodity to be bought and sold, not rented. All longstanding and successful civilisations knew land is common and cannot be ‘owned’, except in the Middle English sense of the word ‘ow(er)ner’: he who owes the rent.

Seizing, buying and selling land in perpetuity was the wrongful act undertaken by all colonial powers in dispossessing the original inhabitants from the lands they had long possessed, hunted and husbanded, turning their native lands into a commodity that could be bought and sold came at a damning cost to their long held rituals and beliefs. They became lost souls.

Who are the wise? Those who prop up an errant financial system and encourage share markets as our civilisation disappears down the gurgler, or those whom we have egregiously tried to separate from their great Truth?

It’s not drawing too long a bow to argue the rent of land to be paid into the public purse is the missing reconciliatory clause for the preamble to the Australian Constitution. (The Americans back-slid on the point; their founding fathers–being predominantly big land owners–replaced it with the near-meaningless clause, “the pursuit of happiness”.)

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

In “The Traumatised Society” Fred Harrison details how property rights were reconfigured by the 0.1% to include land as private property – instead of being exclusively possessed by the occupier on the payment of the land’s rent.

This amounts to institutionalising cheating, which makes a relatively few people rich at the expense of the vast majority, by channelling land rents to banks and the wealthy.

The now commonplace acceptance of land as private property, instead of common property, acts to delimit the area of public policy reform to those things which fail to confront the social ills such as we are now experiencing as a result of misguided land management. Therefore there can be no effective remedy.

Harrison offers the thoroughgoing explanation of the world financial situation that has gone missing in all the analyses of the commentariat.

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

Talking about blaming governments, I’m reminded of the two-part documentary series on ABC1 Whitlam: The Power and the Passion which ended last Sunday.

It was pretty good as far as it went. Many of the personalities and details were there, but one overpowering fact went missing. Why?  Nobody knew about it?  We all forgot? Written out of history by the powers that be, maybe?

The main reason the Whitlam Government became so unpopular has apparently been ‘forgotten’. Was it the Khemlani affair? Nup. It was that Gough Whitlam happened to be in government when the greatest real estate bubble in history (to that point at least) burst.

Lots of people were carrying big mortgages, and it hurt. They, and businesses, all got very grumpy as unemployment increased and, as usual, instead of blaming themselves for assisting to inflate the bubble, they blamed the incumbent government for all their financial woes.

The real estate bubble caused strife all around the globe: the whole world went into recession but, if we were believe the documentary on Whitlam’s ineptness, maybe it was the Whitlam government which generated it?

Did we hear one word about the real estate bubble in Whitlam: The Power and the Passion? No. We did hear of the OPEC oil crisis, however, but the real estate bubble had vanished.

Real estate bubbles usually do become invisible as time passes. How come?  When Australia’s delayed recession eventually sets in, it will most likely be ascribed to the decline in our iron ore trade with China – despite the trillions invested in Australia’s real estate bubble dwarfing our booming mining industry.

I remember pointing to the 1972 world real estate bubble on the Longwaves list in the late 1990s.  “No, that’s not right. The early-70s recession was a result of the OPEC crisis, because there was absolutely no real estate bubble, at least in the US ”, came a rejoinder.

Lucky I’d kept a copy of Time 1 Oct 1973 about the astronomical land price bubble?

Governments may be ineffective, but it is WE who generate our own problems by not challenging the 0.1%. We’ve just got to learn to admit it.

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

Why attack governments?

It is surely we who allow the 0.1% to get obscenely rich at our expense?

Why don’t we accept the responsibility to change the rules of the rent-seeking game?

Are we so stupid we don’t see how they do it?  Surely not!

Stop the 0.1% stealing our land and natural resource rents–the social surplus–now.

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You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

Every now and then I’ll give a short insight from Fred Harrison’s great new book “The Traumatised Society”.

Fred Harrison is a seer. Unlike many of us, he is unable to deny what his knowledge, experience and common sense tell him is true in matters of economics.

Consequently, all of Harrison’s forecasts regarding the timing of economic collapses since he published “The Power in the Land” in 1983 have proven correct.  Regardless, politicians such as Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and David Cameron have preferred to remain in denial about them. This denial has proven to be to the world’s increasing financial and social distress.

That’s our problem. Unlike Harrison, policy makers and politicians remain wilfully unconvinced of the premise that private capture of the social surplus is destructive: that rent-seeking is cheating.

Why don’t I start at the end, at the epilogue of “The Traumatised Society”, to show Harrison sees war must be the inevitable outcome of all this institutionalised cheating?

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

There was a good vibe amongst the attendance at the official opening of Prosper Australia’s new headquarters at 22 Punch Lane Melbourne on Friday night.

In welcoming attendees, president Andy Moore alluded to Geoff Mulgan’s powerful critique of what currently passes for public policy.  (I was struck by the extent to which it accords with Fred Harrison’s “The Traumatised Society”.)  The president’s enthusiasm sent an additional shot of inspiration for economic reform through attendees!

Prosper Australia campaign manager David Collyer proposed challenges he’ll be putting to federal politicians before the election on 14 September.

The Land Values Research Group’s director Dr Gavin Putland argued Prosper isn’t offering a new tax. Rather, it’s a tax-replacement rent.

After Prosper Australia’s new logo and webpage had been unveiled to members, project coordinator Karl Fitzgerald presented the winter edition of PROGRESS which is devoted to his thoroughgoing assessment of the total resource rents of Australia. Even though it demonstrates I had double-counted some aspects of land rent in my own assessment, Fitzgerald’s excellent update of the late Tony O’Brien’s work nevertheless still proves economic rent is sufficient to abolish all the disastrous taxes that have delivered us to this sad point in history.

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

In The Corruption of Economics, Mason Gaffney provided chapter and verse for the manner in which the study of economics had to be recast in order to hide the disastrous role played by private rent seeking. Neoclassical economics had arrived, magically transforming land into capital.

Michael Hudson, one of the few economists to have forecast the global financial collapse, explained in The Bubble and Beyond how banking, finance and real estate had been co-opted to feed this parasitical process, overtaking and rendering real wealth creation obsolete.

Now comes Fred Harrison’s The Traumatised Society. It amounts to an urgent call to retrieve society’s surplus if we are to survive this damning period of institutionalised cheating.

The superbly referenced and eminently quotable book is the most important work of non-fiction in the last sixty years. It is a reference for leaders of politics, religion and science if Western civilisation is to recover its position and survive. Harrison’s confronting challenge is that bleak.

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“In my judgement, Western civilisation has reached the tipping point. The tools to rescue the West are available, but they are not discussed by those who are supposed to be the guardians of the public’s welfare. The trauma that afflicts their societies embraces them as victims, distracting them from the root cause of crises.”

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.

You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.