Netherlands

Bilderberg, Beyond the Taboo

© Peter Edel, 2020

The Dutch King, the Prime Minister, and a Minister
associated themselves withan anti-democrat
who financed right-wing extremists.

At the beginning of June of this year, a tradition was missing: the Bilderberg conference. The annual gathering of the elite from politics, business, the media and science has been postponed for the time being. ‘The meeting 2020 is postponed’ read the short statement on the opening page of the official Bilderberg website. Probably has everything to do with the corona crisis; there are regular visitors who, given their age, certainly belong to the risk group. For example, the invariably present Henry Kissinger, who, at the age of 97, still carries around him his crimes during the Vietnam War.

If postponement leads to cancellation, it is the second time that a conference has been called off since Bilderberg started in 1954. The first time was in 1976, in the middle of the Lockheed bribe scandal in which then-chairman HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was deeply involved.

It looks like we will not hear about Bilderberg in the media this summer. Not a very big loss, because the reports about the infamous annual meeting generally amount to little, with one of the few exceptions in this century being an episode of Andere Tijden from 2003. Furthermore, the media limits itself to the observation that there are links between Bilderberg and the Dutch royal family, that the conference is veiled in secrecy, and that conspiracy theorists love it. The Dutch language area does not get to hear much more about it than that.

This is a taboo that also applies to politics. Parliamentary questions from 2008 by former Socialist Party Member of Parliament Harry Van Bommel about Bilderberg were recently labeled as a conspiracy theory, while what Van Bommel brought up referred to nothing conspiratorial. But whoever mentions Bilderberg is simply lumped together very quickly with conspiracy buffs. Then, what exactly is said, no longer matters.

This article ignores the taboo that rests on Bilderberg, without connecting in any way to the usual conspiracy theories in this area.

Cyber Industry

What is Bilderberg actually? The initiators wanted to give American and European representatives from politics, business, the media and academia the opportunity to exchange ideas as private citizens without having to fear that their opinions would be aired in public.

The premise implies secrecy, although something will be made public. Since 2000, Bilderberg has placed a list of invitees on its website and a list of the key topics to be discussed. Afterwards, however, nobody explains anything and you have to guess what was discussed.

What is striking on the list of participants is that nowadays the cyber industry has gained a firm foothold within Bilderberg. Last year in Montreux, this was also reflected in the discussion topics, such as The Weaponization of Social Media and Cyber Threats.

In 2019, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, CEO of Jigsaw, Google’s technology incubator, received an invitation. In addition, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of the artificial intelligence company Deepmind, were also invited. The same goes for LinkedIn and PayPal founder Reid Hoffman.

Another PayPal founder was also present last year: German-born American Peter Thiel. This article is mainly about this Bilderberger, billionaire, venture capitalist, libertarian and contrarian, because he is a prominent exponent of the cyber sector within Bilderberg, but also mainly because he stands head and shoulders above his cyber colleagues in terms of controversial antecedents.

Thiel is not just any Bilderberger either. He has been there for twelve years, an ‘honor’ that few have. You have to carry the name Oranje, Kissinger or Rockefeller for that (although that family has not been represented since the death of David Rockefeller in 2017). More tellingly, Thiel joined Bilderberg’s steering committee, which is an important position within the structure of the organization. In other words, Thiel belongs to the inner circle. As the name indicates, the steering committee determines the course of Bilderberg. It “assists” with tasks such as raising funds to make the conference possible, but especially also with the important selection of invitees.

Peter Thiel

After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, Peter Thiel invested in Facebook, where he also joined the board of directors. Around the same time he started Palantir. One of the branches of this company, Palantir Gotham, supplies software to security services with which large amounts of data and systems to which, for example, number plate and face recognition are linked. Palantir claims not only to be able to solve crimes, but even to predict them.

The downside is that, according to critics, Palantir’s collecting of personal data is on a shaky footing with the (human) right to privacy. In other words: when you drive under a traffic light in a city where Palantir provides services to the police, Thiel knows that.

In the US, Palantir also supplies software to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Thiel’s company thus commits itself to the raids by ICE on undocumented immigrants and to the human rights violations that accompany it, such cages as with locked-up children. This led to protests among some Palantir employees.

Like Bilderberg, Palantir is also surrounded by secrecy. This is evident from the collaboration that the company started in 2012 with the New Orleans Police. The mayor of this American city knew about it, but the city government was kept out, which led to criticism. Under pressure New Orleans ended its partnership with Palantir six years later.

Palantir is not only represented within Bilderberg by Peter Thiel. The CEO of Palantir, Thiel’s college friend Alex Karp, will also be there. And not only that, because like Thiel, Karp also joined the steering committee of Bilderberg.

Startups

Peter Thiel, who may have taken refuge in New Zealand during the corona crisis, provided grants to numerous startups through his Founders Fund. They are usually in the cyber sector, but not always. Thiel, for example, donated seven million dollars to a project that was to lead to the development of a drug against herpes. He also came under fire because the project ignored the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) guidelines for experiments with newly developed drugs. Thiel responded in a typical way: he opened an attack on the FDA.

Actually, more money went from Thiel to startups with a questionable character. Such as to Tlon, the producer of the computer program Urbit. Tlon was founded by Curtis Yarvin, who is not only a software developer, but also became known as the founder of the philosophy behind the far-right movements neo-reactionism and dark enlightenment. Through his website Unqualified Reservations Yarvin thus gained influence in general on the more developed circles within the far right in the US and in particular on the Alt Techies within the underbelly of Silicon Valley.

Neoreactionism

Yarvin’s neo-reactionism is equivalent to reactionism covered with a bit of cyber sauce. He rejects the ideas of equality, human rights and democracy arising from enlightenment thinking. He preferred to see the world return to the pre-enlightenment situation. Including feudalism and monarchism, on the understanding that Yarvin would prefer to draw the new monarchs from the ranks of CEOs of tech giants. He would also prefer to place the administration of the US in the hands of a CEO, a principle that he attaches rather incoherently to the ancient form of government cameralism.

Yarvin’s neo-reactionism shows affinity with traditionalism, such as that of the Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin. The latter harks back to the Italian traditionalist and ‘super fascist’ Julius Evola, whose thoughts can be found back in Yarvin. In addition, neoreactionism is a form of palingenesis (rebirth), the harking back to the glory of a bygone era, which is considered an aspect of fascism by political theorist Roger Griffin.

Yarvin’s views are shocking. The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik failed, according to Yarvin, because his attack was “insufficient to liberate Norway from European communism.” Apparently, the 77 murders on Breivik’s conscience did not go far enough for Yarvin.

The Education of a Libertarian

In Thiel’s defense, it could be argued that he only decided to subsidize Yarvin because Tlon / Urbit is innovative in internet technology. However, relations between Thiel and Yarvin go further than a business relationship. Plus, Yarvin isn’t the only cyber-fascist to receive funding from Thiels Founder Fund. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute received money from the same direction when the transhumanist and eugenicist Michael Anissimov was the media director there. The same goes for Patri Friedman (the grandson of economist Milton Friedman) of the Seasteading Institute. Anissimov and Friedman, like Curtis Yarvin, are known as neo-reactionaries.

It may go too far to call Thiel himself a neo-reactionary, but there is certainly an ideological affinity. For example, in The Education of a Libertarian, like Yarvin, he spoke out against democracy. “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”, he wrote in 2009, the year after his first appearance at Bilderberg. He never rescinded it.

Like Yarvin, Thiel sees CEOs, especially CEOs of tech companies, as the new monarchs. He said said: “We just do not call them monarchies in public, anything that’s not democracy makes people feel uncomfortable.”

The Diversity Myth

Another unpleasant fact about Thiel is his co-authorship of the book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, published in 2016, in which multicultural policy of universities was criticized and date rape en passant was dismissed as “belated regret”. It took twenty years, but unlike his aversion to democracy in The Education of a Libertarian, he did come back to this idea in 2016.

Thiel did so in a statement sent to Forbes. “Rape in all forms is a crime” he wrote. He also expressed regret about insensitive, crudely argued statements in the book. But as Forbes‘ Ryan Mac put it, Thiel was vague about exactly what he meant by that. Mac did not explicitly blame Thiel for rejecting the 1996 criticism of multicultural policies.

Trump

Peter Thiel is good friends with US President Donald Trump. He donated $1.25 million to his election fund and was later also part of Trump’s Transition Team. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Trump is “the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy.”

Especially given Trump’s weakness with regard to the corona crisis, his re-election is no longer as self-evident as previously assumed. However, Thiel has deployed a new weapon to support his friend in the White House: HHS Protect Now, software developed by Palantir that could efficiently map the spread of the coronavirus.

It is unclear exactly how it works, so the mystery surrounding Palantir also remains here. Partly because of this, it is necessary to wait and see whether conditions regarding privacy will be respected. There is certainly concern about this in the American media.

Confrontations

Last year at the Bilderberg conference there were also guests of a completely different order from Peter Thiel. Such as the American historian Timothy D. Snyder, who specializes not only in the Nazi Holocaust, but also in Eastern Europe. The fact that he was invited must have had everything to do with the discussion theme Russia, although he is also known for his heavy criticism of Donald Trump.

By inviting Snyder, the steering committee planted the seeds for a fierce confrontation with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who was there last year in Montreux, but especially with Thiel. We will probably never know whether that confrontation really happened due to the proverbial secrecy surrounding Bilderberg, but the author of this article would have liked to have been there …

Also because another confrontation was lurking in 2019. Thiel is nowadays not welcome at Google, which fielded last year, as previously described, a number of representatives to Bilderberg. A month after the conference, Thiel accused Google of being infiltrated by Chinese military.

“How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated Manhattan Project for AI?” he said. By Manhattan Project for AI, he referred to the artificial intelligence-focused company Deepmind, which was founded by the aforementioned Mustafa Süleyman and was acquired by Google in 2014 – although Thiel himself also invested in it.

China was also one of the key topics at Bilderberg last year. Also keep in mind the trade war that Thiel’s friend Trump unleashed against China.

Facebook / Cambridge Analytica

Back to Timothy Snyder. In one of his videos on YouTube, he calls the image of Donald Trump as a successful businessman a myth. The fact that this image could nevertheless arise, according to Snyder, is mainly due to a lot of Russian money and efforts on social media, such as via Facebook.

Facebook was at the center of the 2018 scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica (CA), the British / American data mining company that used data on many millions of Facebook users to influence both the British Brexit referendum in 2016 and the US Presidential election of the same year.

The outrage over CA’s manipulations was enormous. And that did not decrease after Netflix released the documentary The Great Hack about it. Andrew Adonis a member of the British House of Lords on behalf of Labor, who was also present at Bilderberg last year, made no bones about it: “Cambridge Analytica was hired to wage a giant, illegal ‘psy-ops’ campaign for the 2016 (Brexit) referendum & it’s amazing there haven’t yet been more prosecutions.”

Wylie

Peter Thiel knows CA’s primary financier, Trump and Brexit supporter Robert Mercer. In any case, reports appeared that he wanted to start a conservative news channel with Mercer. However, it is mainly Palantir that linked Thiel to CA.

This is how it emerges in the book Mindf*ck by former CA employee and later whistleblower Christopher Wylie. According to Wylie, the contacts between CA and Palantir came about at the initiative of an intern who worked at Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), the company from which CA originated. This Sophie Schmidt is the daughter of the former CEO of Google and last year Bilderberger, Eric Schmidt.

Wylie learned from his boss at CA, Alexander Nix, that Palantir had access to data on millions of US citizens. Equally interesting is that Palantir employee Alfredas Chmieliauskas joined CA to work on the development of the This Is Your Digital Life app, a personality test aimed solely at harvesting data about Facebook users. Thiels Palantir initially denied any connection, but later admitted that Chmieliauskas worked for CA.

Russia

There are also the Russian connections that can be made from CA. Steve Bannon is the former strategist of Donald Trump, editor of the far-right website Breitbart, alleged contact of Thiel-subsidized Curtis Yarvin, and co-founder of CA. Bannon showed his respect for the aforementioned Alexander Dugin, the Russian ultra-nationalist who has a lot of influence within the Kremlin and on the Russian armed forces.

Bannon and Dugin disagree when it comes to capitalism, for example, but the differences between them virtually disappear in light of the shared tendency to traditionalism; the traditionalism that Curtis Yarvin is also familiar with. According to The Nation, Bannon and Dugin had a secret meeting in 2018.

The information collected by CA about Facebook users also went to Russia, according to Christopher Wylie. CA employee Alexander Kogan, who, like Palantir employee Alfredas Chmieliauskas, was involved in the app that harvested data from Facebook users, was also working on a Russian-funded study into ‘Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks.’ At the time, Kogan was affiliated with the University of Cambridge, but also with the University of Saint Petersburg.

CA also hired US political consultant Sam Patten. At the time, Patten was working with the Russian Konstantin Kilimnik, a former agent of the Russian intelligence service GRU. According to Wylie, Patten insisted that he had not transferred information from CA to Kilimnik. But Kilimnik got information about election polls in the US anyway, even if it came from Donald Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort. Sam Patten and Konstantin Kilimnik worked in Ukraine for Manafort, which, as is known in the US, was sentenced to imprisonment, among other things for illegal services to the pro-Russian Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych.

Facebook / Milner

Also, in the CA manipulations so essential to Facebook, one can note a Russian connection. In 2009, Russian / Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner invested many millions in Facebook, where Peter Thiel was already on the supervisory board at that time.

After the Paradise Papers were unveiled, it turned out that this investment had traveled a complicated route, but initially came from Gazprom, the Russian energy company in which the Russian state has a majority stake. In 2009 relations between the US and Russia were still different than they are today, but it was inevitable that Gazprom’s investment in Facebook through Milner received attention after the Russian manipulations in the US of 2016 came to light.

Yuri Milner also invested in Cadre, a company co-founded by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law who, as we saw earlier, was also present at Bilderberg last year. Other investors in Cadre besides Milner include Goldman Sachs, George Soros (odd given his aversion to Trump) and Peter Thiel.

The connection with Russian interests that Peter Thiel acquired through the contacts between Palantir, CA and Facebook is a bit contrary to Bilderberg’s traditional Transatlantic orientation.

Personal capacity

In short, during last year’s Bilderberg conference, HRH Willem Alexander, Prime Minister Rutte and Minister Kaag, associated themselves with someone whose company was guilty of human rights violations, financed right-wing extremists, considered freedom incompatible with democracy, criticized multicultural policies and who also had a whiff of vodka.

The King, Prime Minister and Minister were at Bilderberg in their personal capacity but how much difference does that really make? Is there no problem when they become personally associated with an anti-democratic element?

If such a thing had happened at another meeting, the Netherlands would probably have been too small, but when it takes place at Bilderberg, no journalist makes a point of it – although the question is how many Dutch journalists fully understand the connections outlined above . . .

Nor did the political world get excited about it. Perhaps for the same reason, although according to an anonymous source well known in political The Hague, it is possible that a presence at Bilderberg here is regarded as the icing on the cake of a political career. In other words, according to this source, there are MPs who are reluctant to criticize Bilderberg because they secretly hope to be invited themselves. The fact that Member of Parliament on behalf of Groen Links Kathalijne Buitenweg was one of the participants of Bilderberg last year is one of the indications that this does not only apply to right-wing politicians.

So probably there will not be a Bilderberg in 2020. And its absence creates space to think carefully about this tradition of conferences.

This article has been brought to the attention of the Bilderberg media team before publication, with an offer to include a possible response. However, they waived that.

Source

This article was originally published in Dutch by Peter Edel on the Belgian on-line site De Wereld Morgen (The World Tomorrow) titled “Bilderberg: voorbij het taboe!” on 15 June 2020. Google was so kind to translate it into English with final edits by Govert Schuller. All done with the permission of the author.

Peter Edel is a Dutch analyst and investigative journalist from Amsterdam. He is the author of De Schaduw van de Ster (The Shadow of the Star, 2002); Banvloek (Anathema, 2003); and De diepte van de Bosporus, een politieke biografie van Turkije (The Depth of the Bosporus: A political biography of Turkey, 2011).

Dutch Report on Money and Debt and its Reception by Ons Geld

On January 17, 2019, a research institute of the Dutch government, The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), offered its report on banking and money-creation to the Dutch government [1]. The report was commissioned by the government after a motion in the Dutch parliament in March 2016 during a debate, which itself was triggered by a citizen’s initiative organized by the Dutch monetary reform organization Ons Geld (Our Money)[2].

The Report

The 301-page report is titled “Money and Debt: The Public Role of Banks” and was accompanied with a 15-page synopsis [3]. An English translation is forthcoming. In its own words the scope of the report was thus:

In this report we discuss how money-creation works; how the context of money-creation has changed; and which problems the current system has. We investigate to what extent a public money system – as proposed among others by Ons Geld – can provide a solution. Finally we make recommendations to reform our system (Synopsis, 5; translated from Dutch original).

This article will give a summary of all these points as presented in the synopsis and also a summery of the official response by Ons Geld. How this report came about you can read here [5].

Money-creation

In the section “How money-creation Works” the authors explain the manner by which money is created and enters the economy. One of their findings is that 93% of the Dutch money stock is created as debt when banks originate loans and 7% of the money stock consists of cash in the form of coins and paper money. The Dutch named the non-cash part of the money supply “giraal geld”, which would loosely translate as “check money” and is usually named in English bankmoney or debt money. Because of this money-creating role by banks “money, debt and banks are in the current system very closely entangled”. But, though banks do create the bulk of the money supply, they cannot just do so without some restraints, of which the authors identify three: 1) The demand for money by businesses and individuals; 2) risk assessments by banks; and 3) monetary policies set by central banks.

Context

As far as the “Changed Context of money-creation” is concerned the authors identified three developments: 1) the shift from using cash to check money (after World War II just above half was check money); 2) the disappearance of public payment and savings options (the public Postbank was privatized and became part of ING); and 3) there was a shift from a “diverse banking landscape” to one in which there are only three big, uniform banks. The effect of these shifts was that 1) bank money became less prone to be changed into cash; 2) the necessary amount of prudent bank reserves diminished; and 3) banks acquired an implicit, public guarantee against insolvency. The overall effect was that “the brakes on money-creation” lessened and the risk of asset bubbles, inflation and economic crises heightened.

Core Problems

The report indicates “Two Core Problems” with the current Dutch money system: 1) The large amount and volatility of debt creates instability and economic crises; and 2) the balance between private and public interests became skewered. The banking sector became more important and powerful in the economy and the government became more important in the banking sector by guaranteeing and bailing out banks in crisis, with both tendencies leading to a “sort of semi-public” banking sector. This section ended with a call for “a good balance between public and private interests” (Synopsis, 8).

Public Money Proposal

In the section “The Public Money System as Solution” the report addressed the proposal offered by the Dutch monetary reform organization Ons Geld (Our Money), which proposal was inspired by the 1930 Chicago Plan and has now many variants developed in other countries like Iceland, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Their synopsis is as follows:

These proposals differ in effect, but they essentially always come down to breaking the close link between money and debt. The current banking landscape would be split into a payment sector and a financing sector. In the payment sector money is held in accounts directly at the central bank or with payment banks where all deposits are 100% covered with central bank reserves. New money can only be created by the central bank. New money comes into the economy through government spending, loans or possibly direct transfers to citizens. In addition, it is possible that new money is used to reduce taxes or to pay off the public debt. In the financing sector, banks first have to raise money before they can provide loans. They can therefore not create new money. People lending money to these financing banks can also suffer losses and they can not reclaim their money at any time. How this financing sector should function exactly differs from one proposal to another (Synopsis, 9).

Though they find the wish to separate payments from financing to be “understandable”, the authors think that it also creates many new uncertainties. Their barrage of questions range from whether the central bank would be able to withstand public pressure; to whether they could prevent money-creation to get out of hand; to whether there would be enough credit to finance real estate; to whether a shadow finance system can be devised by the banks, effectively canceling the reform; to whether the government will really let banks fail. “What looks good on the drawing board can become something quite different in practice”. Together with the fact that such a system has never been tried out, the authors think it is hard to establish whether the new system might function better than the current one. And finally it is uncertain how such a system will fare during the transition period after introduction, and in the context of substantial international economic interdependence.

In its conclusion on a public money system the reports states that,

The WRR considers the transition to a public money system an unsuitable experiment with the monetary-financial system, the backbone of the economy (Synopsis, 10).

Recommendations

Apart from the negative conclusion about an alternative money system the report does provide four recommendations to change the balance between private and public interests: 1) Promote diversity in the financial sector; 2) limit the prolific growth of debt; 3) be better prepared for the next crisis; and 4) solidify the public dimension of banks.

Diversity is important for increased choice and better prices for consumers; increased stability of the sector; and better guidance of credit allocation. A possibility is to have a public or private bank solely dedicated to payments and savings or even the introduction of “digital central bank money”, all of which would have a disciplining effect on the banking sector and diminish their dominance. And their dominance, the authors observe, should be actively weakened by the government through different regulatory measures.

In order to diminish the growth of debt–which the authors deem important for stability, fast recuperation after crises, and balanced economic growth–macro-prudential policies have to be introduced to handle systemic risks. Some tax changes would be necessary and also the behavior of other parts in the economy (pension funds and the real estate market) will have to be regulated to manage debt levels.

Because instability is inherent in the current system, preparations for future crises are important to diminish its effects and enable fast recuperation. Financial risks will have to be spread in a more balanced manner from debtors to creditors; banks might be obligated to recapitalize; and besides the lowering of interests and the buying of bonds maybe more controversial monetary measures by the central bank will have to be applied like the monetization of government debt.

As there exists an unavoidable tension within banks between their private activities and public functions, the latter should be better “anchored’, i.e. the public interest should get “a more robust place” in the system through, for example, an advisory council; increased choice; an alternative payment system; and more publicly responsive regulators.

Conclusion

The report’s final word is a call for several balances: 1) a balance between regulation and freedom in private money-creation; and 2) a balance between private and public interests. “The prudent guidance of money and debt is a permanent task” (Synopsis, 13).

Reception by Ons Geld

Ons Geld published an official response to the report [4]. They especially appreciated three issues which the report addressed: 1) The call to study possible economic scenario’s and alternative money systems; 2) the possibility of a “secure harbor” for one’s money in the form of a “digital safe” to store one’s digital cash; and 3) the report’s starting point with the problematic entanglement of private and public interests in the current financial system.

On the other hand their critique and disappointment with the report is that it points in the wrong direction. The report proposes to solidify and manage the entanglement through further regulations, while Ons Geldproposes a clear separation between money-creation as a public utility and money lending as a commercial business. One venue which could incrementally lead to this separation is the establishment of a digital variation of cash. Once people get accustomed to digital cash, Ons Geld reasons, it will be easier to end the bank privilege of money-creation.

Meanwhile the societal discussion on the role of banks has been broadened and the issue of a fundamental change of the money system is on the political agenda. It is up to the government now to publish its own response to the report. Stay tuned.

Footnotes

[1]. IMMR. 2019. “Dutch WRR Report on Money and Debt is out“. International Movement for Monetary Reform. 1 Feb 2019.

[2]. Wortmann, Edgar. 2015. “Burgerinitiatief Ons Geld“. Ons Geld, 21 April 2015.

[3]. WRR. 2019. “Geld en Schuld: De Publieke Rol van Banken“. WRR Raport No. 100. Den Haag: Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid. Synopsis. Translations from Dutch by editor.

[4]. Ons Geld. 2019. “Reactie van Stichting Ons Geld op het WRR-rapport ‘Geld en Schuld’ “. 19 Jan 2019.

[5]. Schuller, Govert. 2019. “Ons Geld and the Road to the WRR Report“. News – Alliance for Just Money, 6 Mar 2019.

Ons Geld and the Road to the WRR Report

Ons Geld (Our Money) is a Dutch foundation promoting sovereign monetary reform. Its motto is “Money Creation for the General Welfare” and proposes four changes to the current, dysfunctional money system, which proposal is basically the same as what for example The American Monetary Institute [1] and The Alliance for Just Money [2] propose in the USA:

1) Money should only be created by a democratic and transparent agency which acts on behalf of the general interest.

2) Money has to be created free from debt.

3) Money should be spend in the real (non-financial) economy before it gets into financial markets and real estate bubbles.

4) Banks should not be allowed to create money [3].

Citizen’s Initiative

With this program in hand Ons Geld together with the economist and monetary expert Ad Broere, and the satirical theater group De Verleiders (The Seducers) started a citizen’s initiative which gathered about 100,000 signatures–comfortably more than the required 40,000–to get the issue of money-creation on the political agenda. What helped the initiative was the theater production Door de Bank Genomen (Taken by the Bank), which satirized the banking world and its practices.

The summation of their joint appeal reads as follows:

The financial system is unstable which has adverse effects on the economy and society. That instability is related to the creation of money which is today mainly in the private hands of commercial banks. The financial system can be improved by making money-creation into a public task.

The right and duty of money-creation lies in principle with the government, not with private parties. The benefits of money-creation should be used for social goals. In this way the government will be in a better position to meet its obligations, in particular its responsibility to secure minimal living conditions for its population and the spread of wealth.

We appeal to the Lower House to take a stand in favor of the rights and duties of the government in regards to money-creation and its resulting benefits, and to ensure that that the government will reinstate its exclusive right of money-creation by bringing into circulation debt-free Euros, which would be created by a newly constituted public authority and be spend into circulation or offered as interest-free loans [4].

Public Hearing

The successful initiative resulted first in a public hearing about the money system conducted by the permanent commission on financial affairs of the Tweede Kamer (Dutch lower house). There were two panels. The first one was composed of the two directors of Ons Geld, Martijn van der Linden and Luuk de Waal Malefijt; the scriptwriter and actor in the satire “Taken by the Bank”, George van Houts; and the legal expert Edgar Wortmann. The second panel consisted of a financial regulator, Reinier Pollman of the Authority on Financial Markets; a banker, Teunis Brosens of ING; a representative of the central bank, Jan Marc Berk; and two academicians, Dirk Bezemer and Klaas van Egmond [5, 6].

The first panel gave an exposition of its monetary reform proposals and during the second panel a debate developed between Dr. Bezemer and Dr. van Egmond about the necessity of reform.

Van Egmond made some passionate points in favor of reform. He seems to be totally on board with monetary reform, which seems to be a boon for the reformers as he is not only a respected sustainability scholar, but also a founding member of the Sustainable Finance Lab at the University of Utrecht and, most importantly, a member of the influential Dutch think tank The Social Economic Council (SER).

Actually van Egmond co-wrote a working paper with Dr. de Vries titled “Dynamics of a sustainable financial-economic system” [7], which presents a “dynamic simulation model” in which the recent insights into the nature of bankmoney by Dr. Richard Werner [8] were incorporated.

The model provides the ‘laboratory’ setting in which the discontinuities and associated socio-economic un-sustainability of the current financial-economic system can be studied and the feasibility of more sustainable alternatives can be explored.

Van Egmond is arguably the third scholar to model the sovereign money proposal after Drs. Benes and Kumhof at the IMF [9] and Dr. Yamaguchi from Japan [10 ]. They all come to positive conclusions regarding the proposal:

(1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money. (2) Complete elimination of bank runs. (3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt. (4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation (Benes & Kumhof, 2012: 1).

Parliamentary Debate

The second result of the initiative was a parliamentary debate in the Dutch House of Representatives [11], where on March 22, 2016, the following motion was carried in a 108-42 vote (with the whole faction of the ruling party the VVD voting against):

Ascertaining that deeper research of the role and function of banks in money-creation and other functions is necessary;

Considering the need of a serviceable banking system with less risks for savers and taxpayers;

The government requests The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy to issue an opinion about the functioning of the money system including all forms of money-creation by banks and also include the advantages and disadvantages of alternative systems of money-creation and the amount of profits generated through money-creation [12].

Report

Three years later, on January 17, 2019, the council presented its work to the Dutch minister of finance. The 301-page report is titled “Money and Debt: The Public Role of Banks” and was accompanied with a 15-page synopsis [13, 14].

A summary of the report and the response by Ons Geld you can find here [15].

Footnotes

[1]. Zarlenga, Stephen. 2009 (2006). “Presenting the American Monetary Act”. Valatie, NY: American Monetary Institute.

[2]. The Alliance for Just Money. “Mission“. 7 Mar 2019.

[3]. Various formulations in different amounts of bullet points were developed by Ons Geld since its inception.

[4]. Wortmann, Edgar. 2015. “Burgerinitiatief Ons Geld“. Ons Geld, 21 April 2015.

[5]. Jourdan, Stanislas. 2016. “Dutch Parliament Hearing about money-creation sparks Debate“. Positive Money, 13 Jan 2016.

[6]. Permanente Commissie Financiale Zaken. 2016. “Roundtable on the Monetary System in the Netherlands (with English subtitles)“. Video file. 14 Oct 2016.

[7]. Van Egmond, Nicolas D. & de Vries, Bert J.M. 2016. “Dynamics of a sustainable financial-economic system”. Sustainable Finance Lab Working Paper. Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

[8]. Werner, Richard A. 2012. “Towards a New Research Programme on ‘Banking and the Economy’ —Implications of the Quantity Theory of Credit for the Prevention and Resolution of Banking and Debt Crises”. International Review of Financial Analysis, 25/5 (December 2012): 94-105.

[9]. Kumhof, Michael & Benes, Jaromir. 2012. “The Chicago Plan Revisited“. IMF Working Papers 12/202. Washington: International Monetary Fund.

[10]. Yamaguchi, Kaoru. 2012. “On the Monetary and Financial Stability under A Public Money System (Revised): Modeling the American Monetary Act Simplified”. Paper presented at the 8th Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference in Chicago, USA, Sept. 20 – 23, 2012. It was originally presented at the 30th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, St. Gallen, Switzerland, July 22 – 26, 2012.

[11]. “Burgerinitiatief Ons Geld“. Parliamentary Debate at the Dutch House of Representatives. Video file. 16 Mar 2016.

[12]. “Gewijzigde motie van het lid Merkies (t.v.v. 34346, nr. 5) over een onderzoek door de WRR naar de werking van het geldstelsel”. Tweede Kamer, vergaderjaar 2015–2016, 34 346, nr. 16.

[13]. WRR. 2019. “Geld en Schuld: De Publieke Rol van Banken“. WRR Raport No. 100. Den Haag: Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid. 15-page Synopsis of the report.

[14]. IMMR. 2019. “Dutch WRR Report on Money and Debt is out“. International Movement for Monetary Reform. 1 Feb 2019.

[15]. Schuller, Govert. 2019. “Dutch Report on Money and Debt and its Reception by Ons Geld“. News – Alliance for Just Money, 6 Mar 2019.

The MH17 Tragedy: Update on Findings

Today it is four years ago that flight MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine killing all 15 crew and 283 passengers on board. Because 193 of the passengers were Dutch the Dutch government was given the lead to investigate its cause. First they established that it was a BUK surface-to-air missile which caused the plane to disintegrate and then this year they established that the BUK system came from a Russian military base. [1][2]

“The JIT [Joint Investigation Team] is convinced that the BUK-TELAR that was used to down MH17, originates from the 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile brigade (hereinafter 53rd brigade), a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation.”[3]

So far there has been minimal cooperation from the Russian government and they flat-out deny any involvement.

Yesterday the foreign ministers of the G7, including US Secretary of State Pompeo, have made a statement supporting the work of the JIT and calling on Russia to cooperate:

“The JIT’s findings on Russia’s role in the downing of MH17 are compelling, significant and deeply disturbing. The G7 recalls that UN Security Council Resolution 2166 demands that all states cooperate fully with efforts to establish accountability. We are united in our support of Australia and the Netherlands as they call on Russia to account for its role in this incident and to cooperate fully with the process to establish the truth and achieve justice for the victims of MH17 and their next of kin.”[4]

So far nobody has been indicted, though the investigative cooperative Bellingcat, which had to endure multiple cyber attacks from Russia [5], has identified a Russian officer who was involved. His name is Oleg Ivannikov and is identified as a “high-ranking Russian GRU officer”.[6]

With Trump’s disgraceful and almost treasonous subjugation to Putin at the Helsinki summit it is clear that the cause of justice for the victims and their families will not get a helping hand from him.

[1]. https://www.yahoo.com/news/mh17-anniversary-four-years-tragic-084026497.html.

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17.

[3]. https://www.om.nl/onderwerpen/mh17-crash/@103196/update-criminal-0/.

[4]. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/g7-foreign-ministers-statement-on-mh17.

[5]. https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/russia-hacks-bellingcat-mh17-investigation/.

[6]. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/05/25/mh17-russian-gru-commander-orion-identified-oleg-ivannikov/.