Robert Stark, “The Stark Truth: Interview with Joseph Fasciani” (Voice of Reason, 27 April 2012)
With the global financial industry coming under greater public scrutiny and people beginning to question the assumptions underlying debt-based financial systems, perhaps it’s time to investigate social credit as a possible credible alternative to a system in which to create money, it is created as debt and thus automatically births an unequal relationship in which the lender has power over the borrower. In this episode of “The Stark Truth”, Robert Stark discusses social credit with US-born Canadian writer / poet Joseph Fasciani and various issues related to or deriving from it. The interview is highly informative though at times tough-going as I’ve already discovered with previous “The Stark Truth” episodes; if listeners’ attention wavers even for less than a minute, the thread of conversation can be lost very quickly as interviewer and interviewee range over a very wide territory of all things monetary. Fasciani has a strong interest in monetary systems, especially alternative monetary systems, and his enthusiasm for social credit and alternative economic ideas such as distributism is reflected in the depth of his knowledge about these and in his articulate speaking manner.
Although Fasciani spent the first 26 years of his life in the United States and was a successful self-employed businessman in California, he emigrated to Canada in 1969, dissatisfied with the direction of society in his native country, and much of what he talks about with Stark is about Canadian society, especially society in British Columbia and Alberta, and Canadian politics. He traces the history of social credit in Canada, how for a while it was successful and how ultimately the Canadian government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1980s throttled it by privatising so many public institutions and corporations. The fact that the social credit movement was dominated by charismatic individuals or families with few if any of the principles of social credit written down did not help the movement either. Fasciani also explains how social credit works in Canada; to me, a couple of examples he uses to illustrate its workings seem the same as what the Australian government does except here in Australia the “social credit” is called a “tax rebate”. So Australia has also been following social credit principles and I did not know that!
Interesting topics discussed include a theory on why US President Abraham Lincoln was killed in 1865 – it was apparently nothing to do with conventional explanations of John Wilkes Booth’s motivations and possibly everything to do with the President’s attempts to control money creation and supply in defiance of private banks – plus banking and finance in the Roman empire, Austrian economics, the need for small-scale capitalism, a social service tax on alcohol and tobacco (which together are responsible for 40% of health care costs in Canada), US retailing giant Walmart and the rise of Barack Obama from obscurity in Chicago to the White House and the incestuous relationships of money, as Fasciani puts it, backing him. On each topic, Fasciani dives straight into the deep end and if it weren’t for his plain style of speaking, I’d have been totally lost on several topics he speaks on.
Fasciani is a surprisingly humble man, saying at the end of the interview that he hopes Stark’s listeners gained something out of what he said for nearly an hour. Wow, there is so much to be gained just from five minutes of his time alone! Googling his name, I could not find if he had a website but he is on Facebook and has written several articles for various websites including an essay “Gaza is our Guernica” in which he deplores the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.