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.’