They didn't used to count financial gains as part of the product [GDP] they looked at it as a subtrahend. You have the product and what you have is what you take home - that was the GDP, what you end up with. But now it's all what you don't end up with, forget what you do end up with, that doesn't count: It's only what you don't end up with that they consider the whole purpose of the economy, being run for the financial, insurance and the real estate sector [FIRE], that basically is the top 1% or 5% or 10% of the economy. And it's not the economy that you're part of.
Michael E. Hudson
noun: subtrahend; plural noun: subtrahends
a quantity or number to be subtracted from another.
In the Bible, Isaiah 61 describes a future Jubilee Year for Israel, when God will free the people from debt and slavery. The expression of Isaiah 61,2 "year of the Lord's favour" clearly refers to the prescriptons in the Book of Leviticus on the jubilee year (Lev 25,10-13). Therefore at Nazareth Jesus was proclaiming a Jubilee year.
The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning
https://jsr.shanti.virginia.edu › back-issues › reasoning-th...
The jubilee
concerns a return of property holdings and not simply the liberation of
the enslaved or the poor. And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years
unto ...
Empire and Economics: The Long History of Debt-Cancelation from Antiquity to Today
The phrase “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” appears in the Lord's Prayer, which is found in Matthew 6:9–13
Michael E. Hudson:
That was what the first sermon of Jesus was all about. When he went to
the synagogue, and Luke explains that he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah
the prophet and said, “I’ve come to proclaim the year of the Lord,”
which was the debt cancellation — the Jubilee year — that was brought in
from Babylonia into Judaism, as it was done all through the Near East.
Assyria had it when it conquered Judea. Babylonia had it when it
conquered Judea and took the exiles to Babylonia, and the exiles, picked
up, literally the same word used in Babylonian for a clean slate (debt
cancellation), brought it back to Israel, and word for word had the same
conditions of a clean slate: when a new ruler took the throne, or when
there was other reasons — a war was over, or there was any reason for a
debt cancellation — you’d cancel the debts, you’d liberate the debt
servants to go back to their families, you’d give them back the pledges
that they’d made. If they pledged a slave girl, they’d get the slave
girl back. If they pledged their land, they’d redistribute the land.
People who translated the Bible, from the fourth century, down to about
the twentieth century, didn’t really know what these words meant. What
does it mean, “year of the Lord?” What does it mean, “deror,” which was
the debt cancellation? And it was only after Assyriologists began to
find out how all of Near Eastern society had debt cancellation, just
like anthropologists were finding that all the way from the Native
American Indians to European realms, you’d have this practice of
restoring balance. The idea was, how do we prevent society from
destabilizing and polarizing? You cancel the debts.
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-on-debt-parasites
....................
— in North Africa it was the Donatists — are you
going to support the poor, which is what Jesus and early Christians
talked about?” Rome said, “Well, now there’s a state religion, the state
is the army supporting the wealthy landowners. We’re just going to kill
you, unless you join our church.” And that was Augustine’s universal
church. He said, “Forget what Jesus in the Lord’s Prayer said about,
‘Forgive us our debts.’ What he meant was, the debt of Adam having sex
with Eve. That’s original sin, we’re born into sin, that sin is all
about sex. It has nothing to do with the sin of offence and egotism and
hurting others and getting other people in debt. Forget that because,
the Roman Empire, debt is us.” In other words, Augustine said, “I’m pro
Wall Street.”
...........................
It was St. Augustine that changed all of this. He said, forget the
idea of monetary debt. The church in the fourth century had been banning
usury, banning the charging of interest. And St. Augustine said, “Wait a
minute. Now that Constantine has made Christianity the state religion,
we’ve got to support the state.” And he ended up fighting against the
original Christians who wanted to protect the poor from the rich, who
were forcing them all into debt — especially in North Africa, which was
the first part of the Roman Empire to really go feudal, huge land of
feudal law states with serfs called coloni who were tied to the land,
just like serfs in the Middle Ages. And so Augustine said, “If we’re
going to be a universal church, then universal means you can’t have any
disagreement.” So the great authority on this period, Brown, wrote that
Augustine was really the founder of the spirit of the Inquisition. He
appealed to the Romans, to support him against the people who actually
believed that the church should do what it had done for the last four
centuries: support the poor against the rich. And they basically ended
up killing them or exiling them, and grabbing the church property and
giving it all to Augustine. And he said, you know, forget about debt —
from stoicism to early Christianity, the whole idea was, what’s sinful
is for the wealthy people to use debt to oppress other people, to take
debt out of the interpersonal affairs and just personal injury and
keeping the peace, to making debt monetary, and getting people in debt
and then saying, well, just like there was a legacy from archaic times,
that people couldn’t pay the debt, they were exiled. And the Bible has
cities of exile, cities of refuge. And if you had people who couldn’t
pay the debts, and society didn’t want them to start a big feud, then
you’d exile them. Until basically a new ruler would come in, who would
declare a clean slate. He would say, “Okay, everything’s over, all you
people can come back, we’re going to have a new beginning. Nope, no
debts.”
To get back to your question — how did all this begin? — in
Mesopotamia basically most debts began to be owed to the palace or the
temples, in an agrarian economy. Obligations were paid throughout the
year. If you were in the third millennium Sumer, or second millennium
Babylonia, what do you do during the crop year, when you want to go out
to a bar? They actually want to alehouses, and the alehouse lady would
do just what a bartender would do today: they’d put it on the tab, and
you’d run up a tab to the alehouse, you’d run up a tab to the palace for
advances of animals, or water, or agricultural inputs, and everything
was done by credit, and the debts would all be paid on the threshing
floor, in grain. And a unit of grain was equal to a unit of silver. So
the palaces could keep the economy records with a dual monetary standard
and have a single standard that would include domestic agricultural
economy, the weaving of textiles, feeding people, and also foreign
trade.
So you’d have these debts, but sometimes, you would have a
crop failure. And at that time, you would have, like in the laws of
Hammurabi, you say, “If the storm god comes, Hadad, and ruins the crops,
then the debts don’t have to be paid.” Because obviously, what would
happen if you had all these cultivators who’d run up debts to the ale
lady who was sort of a public official — they call them pubs in England,
because they’re public houses. What would you do if the members of your
family got married, and you had to pay a temple priest to perform the
ceremony. All these things would be mounted up during the year. And if
there was a crop failure, or if there was a war, or if there was a
drought, and you couldn’t pay, what would happen if you hadn’t wiped out
the debts? All of a sudden all these people that owed debts would
become the servants of the person who they owed them to, a wealthy
person.
...................
Well, all this changed when, in around the eighth century BC, when
you have Near Easterners begin to sail westward into the Mediterranean,
into Greece, the Aegean and Italy, and they brought the idea of trade,
weights and measures, and commercial contracts. And also the idea of
interest-bearing debt appeared for the first time in the societies.
There was no concept of interest in in the West, in all of the Linear B
documents of Greece, from about 1,600 to 1,200 BC, you had a palatial
economy, but there was no concept of interest anywhere. All of a sudden
this was brought and you had basically local chieftains, who all of a
sudden became what a number of historians now call mafia families. Local
cities were like mafia groups, and they found a way of just
monopolizing the land, until about the seventh and sixth centuries.
There were revolutions all over by reformers, all over Greece, and
Italy, and reformers, later were called “Tyrants.” But they called
themselves reformers, and they were the people who introduced what
became democracy. They introduced public building, they ended up
incorporating the population, and preventing debt bondage.
The whole fight of early society, every society, was how do you
prevent the population from falling into bondage? And the palaces had a
reason for doing all of this. If you would have the taxpaying
smallholders, the small cultivators, owing their crop to the creditor
and owing their liberty, having to go to work on the creditor’s land,
instead of working as a corvee, building palace walls and digging
ditches for irrigation, if you would have these people fall in debt to
the creditors, they wouldn’t be able to pay this crop surplus and labour
surplus to the palace any more. The creditors would take over. And the
whole idea of rulers throughout the Near East, all the way into probably
the early kings of Rome, who said, “The one thing we’ve got to do is
prevent the creditor class from becoming an independent oligarchy.
Because if it becomes independent of us, and it gets the economic
surplus, they’re going to use this labour to hire an army. They’re going
to overthrow us and they’re going to become the state.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/michael-hudson-forgiveness-foreclosure-christianity.html
Dr. Hudson: Well, the Babylonian word for the clean
slate, debt cancellation, was “andurārum”, meaning “free flow”, as in
bond servants being free to go back to their family. And that was a
cognate to the Hebrew word “deror”. Andurārum, deror. It seems that when
the exiled jewish families returned to Israel under the Persian
permission they incorporated the Jubilee Year into the core of Mosaic
law in Leviticus 25. Recently there’s been [found] whole archives of the
Jewish population in Babylonia and they assimilated to the Babylonians.
We have their wills and their marriage agreements. They picked up all
of the Babylonian rules for andurārum. And the wording of Leviticus 25
was almost word for word from Hammurabi’s laws. In the first place, the
personal debts were annulled. And secondly, the bond servants who had
been pledged to creditors, usually the daughters or wives, were
liberated and free to return to their homes. And house slaves also were
returned to their former owners who had pledged them to their creditors.
And in the third place, land tenure rights that had been forfeited to
creditors or sold under economic duress were returned to their families.
And similar acts of these were found throughout the 3rd millennium, 2nd
millennium, and early 1st millennium throughout the Middle East, even
in the Assyrian Empire. So there was a general broad recognition of the
fact that the natural tendencies of economies was to polarize if they
were not checked by royal fiat, to restore a well-ordered economy. And
that’s what makes the economics of the third millennium, second
millennium of the Bronze Age so much superior to modern economics. We
have the mathematical training of scribes. They’ve all been preserved,
and they’re more sophisticated than anything used by the National Bureau
of Economic Research. Or anything that I was taught in my PhD at NYU.
On the one hand, you had the Babylonians calculate the growth of herds,
and they were an S-curve tapering off. And they also had to calculate
how long does it take a debt to double and redouble and quadruple, and
that was by compound interest. And they showed that the [growth] rate of
compound interest of debt was much higher than the ability to pay out
of the growth of herds or the increase in grain production that had
remained fairly stable or more slowly growing. And that concept of the
distinction between the debt overhead and the economy’s ability to pay
without losing their land, without having lower living standards,
without losing their property and falling into bondage. That’s
completely missing from the economic models talked about today. So
there’s no way of understanding why the Western economies are
deindustrializing. In biblical times, certainly at the time that the
Bible was edited, after the return from exile, they all understood this.
Dr. Hudson: Well, it wasn’t simply Jesus’ role to begin
with. We know now from the Dead Sea Scrolls that there was a large
movement among the Jews to make sort of midrashes, quotations from all
of the different parts of the Bible, including the prophets that
mentioned debt cancellation. But in terms of Jesus, Luke describes him
as going back to the temple in his native city, and he unrolled the
scroll of Isaiah, proclaiming the Year of the Lord. That is the good
news. The word “gospel” meant good news, and wherever it was used, it
was always used in conjunction with debt cancellation. And that meant it
was time for the Jubilee Year to be proclaimed. Now, the problem was
that by Jesus’ time, it was quite different from what it was five
centuries earlier. The powerful financial oligarchy had emerged among
the Pharisees, for instance, whom Luke claimed loved money. And the
well-to-do classes resisted Jesus, but demands for debt cancellations
were very widespread. And since the return from exile, these wealthy
families had emerged and created basically a rabbinical school. One of
the leaders was Hillel, who introduced the Prosbul, which was a clause
in loan contracts where the debtor signed agreeing not to avail himself
of his rights under the Jubilee Year. Well, similar clauses had been
drawn up almost 2,000 years earlier by Babylonian creditors in the
second millennium, but they were all nullified in court proceedings. But
the rabbis basically overthrew the whole core of Judaism, and that left
the traditional Jews to become Christians. And it was not only Jesus,
it was others at the time, just as throughout antiquity for 500 years in
Greece and Rome, there’d been debt revolts. But Jesus became the center
of what was reported in the Bible, because at that time, the writing in
Judea and other Western countries was not on clay tablets, and so we
just don’t have the letters that they wrote anymore.
Dr. Hudson: Gradually, you had a rise in economic
prosperity. Economies were becoming productive and rich enough to afford
the emergence of a wealthy oligarchy independent of the kings. There
was a whole break in Near Eastern civilization around 1200 B.C. There
was bad weather. Apparently there was a drought. And you had in
Mycenaean Greece, for instance, the palaces disappeared. And so you had
very early on, when interest-bearing debt was brought to the
Mediterranean, to Greece and Rome around the 700s BC, you didn’t have
any kings in the West. These were Near Eastern. There was no central
authority able to cancel the debts. There was always human greed as a
constant. But wherever this had emerged in primitive indigenous
communities, communities had always taken moves to keep this greed in
check. But Western civilization didn’t have any of these checks and
balances. And when debt was brought to Greece and Italy, you had
basically mafia-type aristocracies controlling the land. These had to be
overthrown by the Greek tyrants in order to sort of free their
societies. There was a social revolution in the 7th and 6th centuries
that overthrew the mafia-type aristocracies, and the tyrants were the
reformers who paved the way for democracy taking place. So we’re talking
about a universal phenomenon. Nobody was copying anyone else. They
didn’t have to copy. You had essentially credit becoming privatized in
the West as opposed to being a public function in Near East and Asiatic
societies. Only the West had privatized the land and money and credit in
the way that it’s done to the extreme case that no earlier society was
rich enough to have been able to afford.
Dr. Hudson: Well, remember, when Constantine converted
to Christianity, he moved the center of the Empire to Constantinople.
That became the new Rome, and the result was that Christianity became
Orthodox Eastern Christianity, and Constantinople was the center. But
there were also four other patriarchs. There was Antioch, there was
Alexandria, there was Jerusalem, and Rome was left as a completely
decadent patriarchate. There was a Roman pope, but it was controlled by
local families in control of Rome. Vatican history refers to the 10th
century popes as the pornography. It was rule by the concubines that was
utterly corrupting Christianity. What you had in the East was not what
you had in Rome in the West.
..........
St. Augustine grew up as something of a
rake, right? He enjoyed wine, women, and song in his early days, and he
felt remorseful or apologetic about that history. And so he wove that
into his theology—this idea that forgiveness is more about personal
sexual sins and less about falling into hopeless and irrecoverable debt
or debt bondage. Does that all track?
Dr. Hudson: He was
also an opportunist and a power-mad himself. The problem Augustine faced
was to obtain Roman support against the real Christians. In his North
African area, these were the Donatists. The Roman landowners were
creditors, so the new reversal of Christianity could not accept the
Lord’s Prayer calling for debt cancellation. Augustine called in the
Roman troops to fight against Christians. His problem was, how do we get
rid of Christianity and call it Christianity? His biographer, Peter
Brown, calls him the real founder of the Inquisition. He was the
disaster that made Western Christianity what it was: anti-Christian and
absolutely antagonistic to the Christianity that survived in
Constantinople in the East.
Well, Augustine said what Jesus meant wasn’t
to cancel the debts at all, but what needed to be forgiven was sin,
mainly of a sexual or other egoistic character. And that forgiveness was
only available from the Church. It was deemed egoistic to undertake,
for instance, good works by oneself. Or to cancel debts—that was
condemned as being egoistic. Only by turning money over to the church,
which meant the poor (the clergy who were acting as proxies for the
poor)—that was the only hope for redemption from sin and egotism that
was inborn with Adam. Well, the creditors making loans were not Adam.
But if you said well, no, the sin has nothing to do with making loans at
all. It has nothing to do with debt forgiveness. It’s only inborn from
Adam and it’s that you all want sex. I think he was describing his own
class. And those advocating debt forgiveness were attacked militarily
and [fought] against the sort of anti-Christian Romans who really had
turned religion into the doctrine of landowners and creditors. They
inverted Christianity. This had already begun under Cyril of Alexandria
earlier, but that was the point at which Christianity in the West
stopped being Christian.
Dr. Hudson: Well, the papal dictates of 1075 laid out a
plan for an imperial papacy to demand obedience by secular kings. And
the Pope said, first of all, we want the power of investiture. That is,
we want to enable popes to appoint the bishops in every kingdom. And
church land was typically the largest land in any kingdom. It was larger
than the royal domain. And control of its revenues gave power,
basically, to Rome by saying, send all your money to us. Don’t use it
for domestic development. And already in around 1054, the Christians had
broken from Eastern Christianity and said we want to take over all of
the other churches with war. And so they said, well, how are we going to
take it over? We don’t have an army. So the popes recruited Norman
warlords, like Robert Guiscard in southern Italy and Sicily who made a
deal with the pope saying they would make him king if he agreed to make
his kingdom a fiefdom of the papacy and pledge fealty to the pope in
exchange for kingship and giving regular support to the pope. And
William the Conqueror, another warlord, Norman, made a similar pledge to
make England a fiefdom of Rome in 1066 and pay Peter’s pence. Armies
needed financing, and the papacy arranged the financing by reversing
Christianity’s long standing opposition to usury.
Dr. Hudson: Well, the Crusades were against Christians,
not against Constantinople until the end. The Crusades were against
neighboring Christian countries like Germany that resisted the takeover
of Rome. They wanted to reform the papacy and make it less utterly
corrupt and greedy, and so they were attacked. Another crusade was
against the Cathars in France that had the idea that the papacy and the
existing order was devilish and evil, not sacred. So you had Rome attack
the Cathars, and they were attacking parts of what is now Yugoslavia
that followed Eastern Orthodoxy and Constantinople instead. So the first
task of the Romans was, how do we get rid of all the Christians and
take over the Christian areas and make them basically our own colonies?
And at the very end, of course, they did attack Constantinople and loot
it, and that basically paved the way for the Ottoman Empire to replace
Christianity there. The Roman destruction of Christianity became
self-destructive throughout the West, opening it up to invasions further
east. But the essence of the Crusades was a fight against Christians,
including the Eastern Orthodox churches, who were the main Christians.
So it wasn’t a fight against Islam. Every fight they made against Islam,
they lost. They only conquered other Christian countries, and that’s
the real story of the Crusades.
Dr. Hudson: Well, Protestantism was created by the
financial interests. Here was the problem that bankers had. If they lent
money to the Catholic kings, the Catholic kings were so oppressive that
they kept going bankrupt. They couldn’t raise the money to pay for the
wars, and they kept defaulting. And what the banks wanted was the modern
national state. They wanted states that had a parliament that, instead
of opposing debts, as they did under the kings, parliaments would be
willing to borrow money to wage wars to defend themselves against the
Catholics who were attacking them, by pledging all of the revenue of the
whole population. And the modern states, [with] the power to tax and
pledge public debts, were essentially created with constitutions to
satisfy the banking interests, enough to be able to raise credit. And
the modern states, ever since the Protestant Reformation, have become
basically agents of the international financial class.
https://michael-hudson.com/2023/04/democratic-liberty-versus-oligarchic-liberty/
You stripped away from Roman Christianity the economic and social
context that had guided early Christianity. The great aim of
Christianity was its anti-Semitism. The last thing it wanted was Jewish
Christians because they knew the original Christianity and because that
evolved out of Judaism as a whole. You had the first great excuse for
expelling not only the Jews but reformers, which was done by probably
the most evil saint in Christianity– although it’s hard to say who’s the
most– Cyril of Alexandria. Alexandria had a very large Jewish
population, and Cyril organized big pogroms to kill the Jews and, in
fact, anybody who could read the book. The one thing that the Roman
Christians hated was people who could read. If you could read, you’d
read the Bible. If you read the Bible, you’d know that there was a
clash. So I think the most famous person that Cyril killed was Hypatia, a
woman who was a mathematician.
Yes. He sent his thugs, Peter the Hammer,
down to the seashore, where they grabbed her, grabbed seashells and
scraped all of the skin off her body so there’d be no memory. That was
the Christian way of killing.
First, Cyril had a consul at Ephesus
calling on the Roman military to kill all of his opponents. You had
Christianity hijacked by Cyril. The wealthiest part of the Roman Empire
by this time, the fourth and fifth centuries, was North Africa– Egypt
and Hippo. The old Carthaginian area was the breadbasket of the Roman
Empire; that’s where the grain was made. The Christians there opposed
the creditors. They opposed the Romans. They said, “No, what the Romans
are doing is not Christianity.” Rome wanted them to turn over all of
their sacred books so that they could be destroyed. You can’t have
Christianity, as the medieval Christians realized, if people can read
the Bible. If they read the Bible, they see that Christianity, under
Roman Christianity, fights against everything that the Bible is all
about. The North African Christians, many of them refused to turn over
the sacred books, and they were killed.
Finally, Augustine came to power, and he
sponsored the pro-Romans. There was a civil war that went on decade
after decade, preventing the local Roman landowners from indebting the
population, from enserfing them. Augustine called on the Romans to take
away their churches and to give him their churches. So essentially,
Augustine expropriated the Christian churches and made them his own
deviant Christianity– I hate to even call it Christianity, it’s really
Augustinianism– in a wave of violence.
Peter Brown, who’s the main writer and
historian of this period, rightly states that Augustine is the true
founder of the Inquisition ever since the Roman Church became the Church
of the Inquisition. That’s what I talk about in the third volume of my
trilogy, where I pick up matters with the Crusades. So what Rome
bequeathed to the West was not only creditor-oriented law but a
creditor-oriented Christianity. This is what you have in American
Evangelism today. King Jesus will make you rich. Essentially, that
became Christianity as it evolved in the West.
Finally, in the 11th century Roman
Christianity, there were five churches that survived the decline of the
Roman Empire: Antioch, Jerusalem, and Byzantium became the key. What
survived the Roman Empire was the Byzantine Empire and its church, which
was Orthodox Christianity. Orthodox Christianity maintained many of the
qualities of original Christianity, including debt cancellations when
there was a crop failure through freezing or a frost that killed the
crops and caused a loss of land and indebtedness. You had Constantinople
as the main bishopric, with Antioch and Jerusalem. Rome became a
backwater until you had the Norman Invasion of Europe.
Rome made deals
with William the Conqueror in England and, before that, the Norman
Conqueror of Sicily. If you conquer the land, we will bless you – if you
agree that you are the feudal serf of the Pope. The kings of England,
the kings of Sicily and southern Italy pledged fealty to the Pope, who
organized armies to have new crusades with new inquisitions under the
Dominicans against Christians who didn’t agree with Roman leadership,
whether it was the French Cathars or ultimately the Crusades that looted
Constantinople and destroyed its ability to resist what became the
Ottoman takeover at the time.
So essentially, you had this split at the
time, and most people look at Western civilization as the continuity of
Rome without realizing how the Empire itself, under Augustine, made yet
another break from the Near East that continued to be the wealthy,
solvent part of the Empire in Constantinople and the Near East.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/michael-hudson-on-debt-parasites.html
The creditors would take over. And the whole idea of rulers
throughout the Near East, all the way into probably the early kings of
Rome, who said, “The one thing we’ve got to do is prevent the creditor
class from becoming an independent oligarchy. Because if it becomes
independent of us, and it gets the economic surplus, they’re going to
use this labor to hire an army. They’re going to overthrow us and
they’re going to become the state.”
So you always had a struggle between the state protecting society
from the creditor class — the oligarchy — and the oligarchy wanting to
be independent, wanting not to have a debt cancellation. And this was a
fight that went on for four centuries before Jesus’s time. The fourth
century BC and the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown there was a long
political fight. And Jesus represented the people who were trying to
fight all of this. And so the early Christians were basically advocates
of the Jubilee year, trying to trying to cancel it.
Well, in Rome, the wrong kings were overthrown in about 509 BC by an
oligarchy, who essentially wanted to reduce the rest of the Roman
population to serfdom. And they were so oppressive, that there was a
walkout, the secessio plebis in about 494 BC. They walked out, they came
back. There was just five centuries of early Roman history into the
Republic — the whole Republic was a long set of one revolt after another
after another, wanting a debt cancellation and redistribution of land.
All of this was called a democracy. A democracy to the oligarchy means
all the creditors are equal, and therefore liberty is the liberty to
enslave the rest of the population, and make them dependent on reducing
to serfdom.
Democracy throughout antiquity meant serfdom for most of the
population. Aristotle was very clear on this. He said, “Many cities have
constitutions that appear to be democracies, but they’re really
oligarchies.” And in fact, every democracy, Aristotle wrote, tends to
turn into an oligarchy, as wealthy people get rich, and then the
oligarchy makes itself into a hereditary aristocracy, and lords it over
the rest of society, and the only way that you can prevent a total
breakdown is when some members of the ruling, wealthy families get
together and one family breaks and says, “Look, we don’t want this kind
of poverty, we’re going to try to go and take the people into our camp.”
Those are the words that Aristotle used: we’re going to take them into
our camp and throw out the oligarchs, just as the Tyrants did in the
seventh and sixth centuries, in the wealthiest Greek cities, from Sparta
to the area north of Athens. Athens was about the last of these cities
to have a democracy.
You had this whole background that led to the modern world, which was
a world that stopped the tradition of debt cancellation that had
liberated populations from debt servitude, from debt bondage, and what
became serfdom, and on the idea that, well, the law is inexorable,
you’re not going to have any debt cancellation. And there was the fight
within the Christian church against Rome, especially again in North
Africa, which had been Carthage that was destroyed by the Romans in 146
BC. They took over the very rich agricultural land, and that became the
agricultural breadbasket of the Roman Empire from Egypt, all the way to
Numidia, which was Carthage but then it went all the way to what is now
Algeria, basically, providing all of the grain for Rome.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/01/07/just-suppose-jesus-was-obsessed-with-debt-and-not-sex-what-would-christianity-have-to-say-in-that-case/
I offer this, from Luke, Chapter 4:
16 Jesus
went to Nazareth, where he had been raised. On the Sabbath he went to
the synagogue as he normally did and stood up to read. 17 The
synagogue assistant gave him the scroll from the prophet Isaiah. He
unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
19 and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
20 He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the synagogue assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him. 21 He began to explain to them, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.”
Let me be quite clear: I am not seeking to convert anyone to
anything. I am seeking to discuss the importance of a particular
religious understanding and its role and impact on our society.
https://archive.org/details/michael-hudson-on-the-debt-jubilee-part-1
https://archive.org/details/michael-hudson-on-the-debt-jubilee-part-2
https://archive.org/details/3hr-debt-empires-and-oligarchs-dr.-michael-hudson-part-1-and-2/112pg-Global%20Economic%20History%20in%202.5%20Hours%20_%20Michael%20Hudson?q=michael+hudson+forgive+debts
https://ia800101.us.archive.org/20/items/hudson_202303/THE%20LOST%20TRADITION%20OF%20BIBLICAL%20DEBT%20CANCELLATIONS.pdf
https://archive.org/details/killinghosthowfi0000huds/mode/2up?q=michael+hudson+forgive+debts
https://ia802706.us.archive.org/19/items/debt-and-economic-renewal-in-the-ancient-near-east-michael-hudson-marc-van-de-mieroop-z-library/Debt%20and%20economic%20renewal%20in%20the%20ancient%20Near%20East%20%28Michael%20Hudson%2C%20Marc%20Van%20de%20Mieroop%29%20%28Z-Library%29.pdf
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