In the essay entitled The Foundations of Structural Sociology I suggest visualising the Societal Inversion process as the buckling of a sheet of metal. There are various ways this can occur. One way is to apply a force at the point of major curvature in the centre of the metal sheet.

Imagine this force as the weight of the accumulated debt and wealth divisions in a society as usury turns the screw...year in and year out. The act of Wiping Clean the Slate removes the force allowing society to re-establish The Natural Order. Look at the diagram in my blog on Friday 5th May 2006. Monetary dispatronage is one of the symptoms of the inverted state. A modified form of Gresham's Law might state that in an inverted society bad lending drives out good lending. Perhaps we should call this Wegerif's Law.

Establishment Economics contains its fair share of absolute nonsense. High on this list is the aptly named gross national product. Let me quote from the chapter entitled Democracy and Ecology in The Rise of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997). My understanding of the inner workings of the financial mechanism has altered somewhat over the past fifteen years. Below there are what I now see to be errors. My understanding of the National Debt has changed for instance. But the broad sweep is sound.

'What then of our Gross National Product? Green scholars have asked this question too, but soon found that there is a prior question as to just what it is anyway. Why are we rich if GNP is big and poor when it is small? Why are we successful and making progress when GNP is growing but unsuccessful and falling back when it is decaying?

Progress means increasing some good things and decreasing the bad things and doing it at a sensible pace so as not to put too great a stress on things and disrupt too many things too much before we have a chance to figure out what is going on. How does GNP measure this? Well the sad truth is that it doesn't. In a peculiarly perverse way, it adds together as if they were plusses all the plusses and all the minuses.

Cars are wrecked, bodies are smashed, new cars are bought to replace the smashed ones, hospitals work flat out to mend the human wreckage. The GNP just keeps on piling up. What sort of nonsense number is this?

Unfortunately a very critical one. At least for the megamachine and its Onwarding and Upwarding. With a basic theoretical error in the counting house and usury not accounted for, the whole financial pack of cards collapses without the numbers increasing exponentially. So what you might ask. Then let it and begin a new set of books. What is the problem? When society is in The Natural State there is no problem. But when all power flows from The Financial Mechanism and all goods and services are called into being by the pull of money and credit; when all money and credit is issued at interest as debt; and when debt has accumulated to such a degree that it pervades every facet of society, then to place a fire bomb under the counting house is to nuke society. The Bolsheviks did it seventy years ago and nobody who lived through it would ever suggest doing it again.

The Inverted Order presents a unique set of economic problems distinct from the economic problems and opportunities of The Natural Order. Negative interest rates could do the trick, unwinding after years of winding up. There is something to be said too for Keynes's inflation of the currency. And Lincoln's greenbacks might also have a part to play. But until economic scholars face up to the problem and set about the task of draining debt out of our societies, letting it be and putting a match to the books is unlikely to present the Greens (or anybody else) with a sensible course of action. And this fact is no help to the Greens as they try to put together a manifesto and go to the people with sound economic policies.'

But Wegerif's Law might give us a chance. The ratio of lending for 'goods' and 'bads' could be a good surrogate for a society's production and consumption of goods and bads. It might give us a tracker index that we can use to measure a society's deterioration from a Cathedral Culture serving ordinary people to a Money Culture where the society and its money distribution channels are controlled by the rich and powerful...and their institutionalised major and minor usury generators. There are 125 central banks at the last count. This was written two years ago. I added this coda.

‘The Americans only need to stay in Iraq long enough to get the Central Bank up and running. Once that is on automatic pilot the coalition forces can extricate themselves. How long does it take to embed a central banking system? Three years perhaps? Then Our Boys will be back home by the end of 2006.’ Events of the past two weeks could be no more than feints for the American mid-term elections which look set for a Democratic landslide as they regain control of the House of Representatives. Only a third of the seats in the US Senate seats are up for re-election so the Republicans might just hold on to power there. But whatever happens the Coalition is pulling out of Iraq.

Two years ago I added one final remark at the end of my Clean Slate chapter in England’s Economic Politics for a New Century. ‘Michael Hudson,’ I wrote, ‘will throw the Southern Baptists and the Friends of Greater Israel into some confusion. The Jewish Nation has always been rather ambivalent about its Jubilee Tradition.’

The earliest recorded debt cancellation was in Mesopotamia in 2400 BC when an amargi was decreed in Lagash. Amargi is often translated by vague words like liberty but means an Economic Clean Slate. There were ten other clean slates in Mesopotamia up to the start of the Babylonian dynasty and another sixteen in Babylonia from 1880 to 1636 BC. King Hammurapi proclaimed four in forty two years. The Hammurapi Code is a key event in economic history and its most binding edicts were misharum...'clean slate' debt, tax and bondage cancellations.

There were also regular edicts for debt cancellations in Assyria and Anatolia. And the custom was adopted by popular reformers until well into the first millennium BC, for example in Corinth and other Greek cities from 650 to 580. Greek reformers were called tyrants by their opponents...their tyranny being to overthrow the landed aristocracies, redistribute the property and cancel debts.

The refusal to lift the Cross of Gold off the back of humanity has now spread right round the world. From Jerusalem, through Rome and Constantinople, to Venice and Florence, Genoa, Amsterdam and Antwerp, London, New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris, Quebec, Moscow, Delhi, Buenos Ayres, Johannesburg, Sydney and Stockholm.

Debt is growing exponentially and is now digitised in a world wide web of electronic accounts controlled by 1000 commercial banks and 125 central banks. On top of the pyramid sit the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements and the World Trade Organisation. A washing away of the debt records as the clean slate was called in Anatolia three thousand years ago would mean deleting all financial obligations.

Boudewijn Wegerif was a devout Christian and in his view there is no other way forward for humanity than through a Clean Slate Policy at individual and collective levels. Usury must be brought to an end and all debts entered into for profit must be cancelled. We must finish what Jesus began and end money lending at interest and exploitative merchandising that is now basic to our society.

A correct translation of the original Lord's Prayer is 'Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors'. Jesus' assault on his local synagogue and the Temple are best understood against this background. It is not Christians but radical economists who understand the significance of this episode in endorsing the Clean Slate Doctrine adopted by statesmen like Solon of Athens and Julius Caesar of Rome (almost). The ambivalent attitude of the Jews to debt cancellation in the history of their Jubilee clean slate tradition runs through the Jewish Old Testament. For Jesus...the central figure in Christianity...it was central to his ministry.

Jesus stormed into the Temple in Jerusalem, upturned the benches of the Moneychangers and emptied their moneybags on the floor. He also overturned the tables of the merchants selling sacrificial animals. The Christian Gospels also report Jesus announcing in the words of the Jewish Old Testament prophet Jeremiah (7:11) 'My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves'.

Jeremiah’s central message…like that of other Jewish prophets…is that to prey on the weak, to monopolise the land and wealth is theft. Many centuries later Proudhon was to say succinctly Property is Theft. But Jeremiah also stressed the unique nature of the Jewish Covenant which is a subtle mixture of the solidarity politics that are an article of faith to the left and the individual 'human action' approach beloved by the right. Jesus the Messiah was not required to put the world back in order by organising a clean slate like a Bronze Age ruler. This was the task of each and every Jew.

In Boudewijn's words: 'The whole Jewish Nation, everyone, suffers from the sin of usury and the related ills of land and labour exploitation. Jesus was not singling out the Moneychangers and Merchants as damned. They were after all doing legitimate business. He was serving notice on the whole nation and indeed the whole world that if usury is practised and if the spirit of regular debt cancellation and freedom from land bondage is not upheld the earth breaks down. It is made desolate simply because a sustainable economic order is made impossible by the theft.'

The capacity of my hard disk is nine and a half gigabytes and nine are in use. I am tempted to buy an external hard drive…or add one of the spares acquired from dismantling computers that have died on me. But the real problem is that I have so many back-up files and so much recovered data on my hard drive that half the capacity may turn out to be surplus to my requirements. Two weekends ago frustration set me to work addressing the problem.

Then last week my 100Mb website started playing up. It refused to accept the 2.25Mb Adobe pdf file of England’s Climate and Energy Politics due for e-publication on Guy Fawkes Day. I had exceeded my 100 Mb. So I removed some folders from the host computer, paid £10 for another 10Mb of space and tried again. Still no joy so I got irritated because a few months ago I had complained that my Control Panel was wrong. It told me it was full when there was only 50Mb of files there. Eventually someone in authority at Head Basement threw a switch and my stuff started getting through…but the Control Panel was still reading full. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Shrug! Whatever!

I am now spending £2.80 on my Senior Railcard to visit Mahavi’s in Hastings whenever I have Webwork to do. Jamal Mahavi knows his stuff, his Cute FTP programme is a joy and his systems never crash. The £10 I pay for six internet hours is money well-spent. To cut a long story short on Friday I decide to pay Mahavi’s Webhosts thirty pounds for a year’s worth of more data storage and data transfer than I could ever dream of. My arrangement with IX Web Hosting in Kentucky means no more Webworries for a year…a pretty good deal. But home and dry I am not.

Last weekend I wasted an hour discovering that I have no copies of the thirty-six Rye Maritime Heritage images either on my computer or in back-up discs elsewhere onboard. They must be in the Jempson’s Storeroom on Winchelsea Road. Two weekends ago I wasted a couple more hours searching for the manuscript of Loves of My Life…Part III of Aspects of Autobiography. By the end I was almost convinced that the several versions of the three-page manuscript on my hard drive was it. But only almost. I knew that the 24 original hand-written pages are in a recent journal but I could have sworn I had typed them up. There is unrecovered data on my Apple Mac Mini.

This weekend I found a 150-page and 100 000 word draft entitled England’s Economic Politics for a new century by William Shepherd. It is dated Thursday 26th May 2005 and on the cover page it says ‘published on Midsummer Day 2005. Second Draft - 30th May 2005. Edited to Page 20 of Draft II - Page 16 of Draft I. On my hard drive I also found a 66-page manuscript dated 7th October entitled Wiping The Slate Clean with the same three parts…Theory, Reality and Strategy. In both cases the chapter headings for the first part were: Orthodoxy & Heresy, Political Economy, Money Talks, Kings, Land, War Business, Debt Laundering and Clean Slate Doctrine. What to do?

I fear things may get worse before they get better. Beside me on the port bunk is a 132-page Guy Fawkes Day 2004 version in hard-copy entitled English Economic Politics for a New Century which I have scribbled all over in classic Buckminster Fuller manner. There is a hand-written note on the cover page dated 8/1-2005...my daughter’s 32nd birthday…which goes like this: ‘My Apple Mac exploded on Wednesday 13/10-2004 leaving me without the means to continue with this manuscript until I had obtained money to replace my laptop...and £100 to recover data from my two exploding computers.’ Perhaps I need a few Personal Assistants to sort all this out for me. I had a whole menagerie at my beck and call in 1993 when working with Connie on The Tales of Crocodile Uppsala.

My reason for seeking the English Economic Politics manuscript was to introduce Clean Slate Doctrine into this week’s blogging record. Let me take up the story of this particular chapter in the early summer of 2001. Michael Hudson's had been busy researching Babylonian economic history at Harvard University's Peabody Museum when he wrote his history of debt cancellations. The Henry George School of Social Science in New York printed a few dozen copies and stapled them together as a 124-page booklet entitled The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations. One of these eventually landed on Boudewijn Wegerif's desk and it is here that our story really begins. Boudewijn spent a couple of days summarising the booklet and then sent his summary to his e-mail list. It was so it came to pass.

Six months ago Goldman Sachs splashed out $ 2600000000…a very big number…to acquire 5.7 percent of China’s largest bank: the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). Last week they made a nice little turn on the deal when ICBC floated on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges and was priced by the new punters…whoever they were…at $139000000000…another very big number. Out with your abacus. These are just numbers.

Forget the noughts for the moment and multiply this second very big number by 57. Set it to the left three positions to take account of the fact that we really want to find out what 5.7% of the very big number is. The 26 in Goldman Sachs VBN#1 has now magically transmuted into 79 in GSVBN#2…an increase of 53. This is alchemy of the highest order.

Tack the eight zeros back on and divide by the 1.8975 Barclays Bank adopted when converting last week’s $400 cheque from Chattanooga into money my local butcher could do business with and you are just seven million shy of two thousand eight hundred million pounds. This would buy me a posh Pied-à-Terre or two in Kensington or Belgravia…with Russian oligarchs for neighbours. May I have this seven million please? I need to store my stuff.

As for the rest of the £2800 million let us hazard a guess where it has gone. Some went to a few hundred Goldman Sachs partners last week in six, seven and eight figure bonuses. Some was recycled back into the banking system where it destroyed large dollops of the money supply…as economists quaintly refer to it. Did you know banks create money every time they make a deposit to your account and destroy money every time your loan repayment comes in?

Some more of the loot went to assorted Money Power Fraternities around the world. None of this funny money ever sees the light of day. Instead it takes a strange turn or two around a gaggle of printed circuit boards clipped onto motherboards surrounded by steel cabinets in the basements of tall buildings in Kentucky or London’s Docklands…to name the particular locations of ixwebhosting.com and easily.co.uk whose Linux Servers and Apache Open Source Software look after my own imaginary numbers. This looting is wrong…but legal. We the People permit banks to reclaim the costs of their expensive lunches in elegant City Watering Holes. Then there is usury…major and minor.

So much for the visible tip of the iceberg. What lies below the water line? Let’s start chipping away. The ICBC float is a peculiar chapter in Free Market History. Not so long ago ICBC was one of the ugliest kids on the global banking block because it was overloaded with Bad Debts…rather like the holding companies for Nuclear Power Plants. Along with China’s other three giant state-owned banks, Industrial & Commercial was technically insolvent.

So in 1999 the Chinese Government started shifting non-performing loans…a euphemism for loans that will never be repaid…off the balance sheets of the Big Four into a state-controlled Asset Management Company. Over the next seven years ICBC’s books were scrubbed clean as one third of its Loan Portfolio…140 billion dollars-worth…was taken out of ICBC’s public purse and placed with AMC. By 2006 ICBC was ready for market…as the saying goes.

One question this raises is whether anything has changed at ICBC. Will local Communist Party Bureaucrats carry on issuing orders to ICBC Bank Managers…money for this; none for that; roll this loan over; swap that with this. Another question is the fate of the AMC. In this country it would be placed in liquidation. For years companies have been able to destroy their debts in this manner while partnerships and individuals have been forced to make good their indebtedness…even after all being robbed of their assets…though not their livelihood…at least in theory.

An interesting coda to this Tale of Everyday Capitalism brings us back to those doyens of the American Financial Establishment…Goldman Sachs. A few years ago the firm moved aggressively into the International Debt Swapping Business which works like this. Peter Late owes Paul Early £2000. Paul reckons there is not a chance in hell of getting his money back as Peter is being screwed by the VAT Gestapo for money he didn’t know he owed and doesn’t have. But Ronnie and his brother have ways of making offers that people find hard to refuse. So they do a deal with Paul…Peter was not asked his opinion…and give Paul £1000 for the £2000 Peter owes him. It is all nice and legal. Ronnie’s solicitor Johnnie Walker draws up the contract, Ronnie and Paul sign it and Paul buys Ronnie lunch.

Happy Paul goes off to Corfu with Tracy. Sadly for the Fray Brothers Paul and Tracy die of carbon monoxide poisoning…faulty boiler...before Peter is informed about the second part of his deal. Paul should have got in the habit of reading the small print. Strange the ways of fate. In the end Peter Late flew out to Istanbul and back to Amsterdam with Ronnie’s consignment of diamonds in Paul’s stead. Peter travels a lot for the Frays nowadays. Peter’s marriage was already crumbling because of his VAT problem but it might have survived. But no love was lost between Kimberley and Ronnie Fray. ‘Diamonds? You are so stupid! You’re a mule. Get out while you can.’ These were Kim’s last words to Peter as she left the flat with her suitcases. Peter would like to wipe the slate clean. But he can’t.

Buying and Selling Loan Portfolios has become a lucrative business for Goldman Sachs. Perhaps I underestimated them. They may turn out to have a use for Rob Muller’s goldmansex.com website. After all what is pornography?

Douglas Hamilton is skipper of the 38-foot ketch Nefertiti and is back in Rye for the winter of o-six after spending the winter of o-five and the spring of o-six in the small town of Santiago on the Galatian Coast of Portugal. I was in Stockholm on Douglas’s return to Rye in July. And when I came back in August he had gone away again for a month to do some work for a German property developer and boating friend in Palma on the Island of Majorca.

So it was a nice surprise when Douglas banged on the cabin roof mid-morning and requested permission to come aboard. The last time we spoke was at his Farewell Party a year ago just before I headed off for Llangolman. There used to be rules about the best time to do things nautical. By these standards he had left his departure rather late. But seasoned mariners are not sure it makes much difference anymore. Nowadays you can hit bad weather any time.

On setting off from Rye the winds were in the wrong direction which meant burning diesel all the way down the channel. Nefertiti carries 60 gallons…enough to last Vemara 120 hours. But Douglas does not believe in moorings or marinas when he can anchor. Nor does he burn fuel if he can help it...and particularly not expensive French diesel.

So Nefertiti hugged the English coast as far as the Scillies sailing as much as possible while keeping within striking distance of the Devon and Cornwall coasts and the low-taxed supplies of English Red Diesel used by boats and tractors. Nefertiti’s crew left at the Scillies…and a few hours later the wind came round and set fine for Spain. At least the direction was fine. Connie would not have ventured out of St Mary’s Bay with Vemara with winds of Beaufort 8 - 9 forecast. But Douglas was running late…and is not one to waste a good wind…however boisterous.

Nefertiti made landfall near Corunna on the north-west corner of the Spanish Peninsular seventy hours after leaving the Scilly Isles. That is seriously fast. ‘My GPS was showing 12 knots at one time. And I was going seven on just my two masts without any sail up.’ Spilling wind is what sailing boats do at sea. Too much more often than too little.

For ordinary mortals a 38-foot ketch is at the limit of what can be sailed single-handed. There is a lot of kit to keep your eye on. One of the halyards snagged on the cross-trees and broke them. This is not critical but cross-trees are there for a reason. They spread the load on the mast. This allows you to carry more sail…or to put it another way makes it less likely that your mast will break should you get caught unawares by some strong winds with too much sail up. It was an exciting crossing. Nefertiti took rather longer to get back.

Leaving Oporto…200-miles north of Lisbon…the wind took her out into the North Atlantic. Douglas took her 300-miles west of Ireland before going about and heading for his landfall at The Lizard. It took 15 days to get back to Rye…long enough to know how English Mariners must have felt over the centuries as they passed The Lizard and started Up-Channel with Brest over the horizon 100-miles away and the coast of Cornwall in sight to port.

Douglas belongs to that dying breed who left school at sixteen and signed on for a seven-year apprenticeship. In a typical winter he can get by on £ 3000. He saves this over the summer plying his Shipwright’s Trade. But he is a big man and at 58 he cannot fold himself into small spaces the way he used to. So he listened attentively as I waxed lyrical on the joys of reaching sixty…with its winter fuel allowances, senior citizen railcards and benefit entitlements on offer without signing on at the Labour Exchange every two weeks. But not without filling in a few forms.

Douglas is wary of governments and their Creeping Totalitarianism. He also hates forms and has spent his life keeping them at a safe distance. But he needs a new suite of sails next year and £ 3000 of Working Tax Credit would cover much of the cost. So I am guessing that the Citizens Advice Bureau will have another client on Tuesday when they are next in town. As for the forms. ‘Bring them to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll do them for you.’ Not so silly having the best shipwright on the South Coast owing you a favour or two when there is work to be done on your boat.