....and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year

[Jones]

Written by an economist, Michael Hudson, the premise of this book is that the bible is about lending/finance the forgiveness of debts and Kings Jubilees where economy was reset occasionally by all debts being cancelled, rather than about sins. It apparently gives tips on how to deal with personal debt.

I haven't read it yet because it doesn't have a kindle version and I'm temporarily living light. But I think it will be an interesting read. Published in Oct 2018 it doesn't have any amazon reviews yet, but here's the overview:

In ...and forgive them their debts, renowned economist Michael Hudson – one of the few who could see the 2008 financial crisis coming – takes us on an epic journey through the economies of ancient civilizations and reveals their relevance for us today. For the past 40 years, in conjunction with Harvard’s Peabody Museum, he and his colleagues have documented how interest-bearing debt was invented in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and then disseminated to the ancient world. What the Bronze Age rulers understood was that avoiding economic instability required regular royal debt cancellations. Professor Hudson documents dozens of these these royal edicts and traces the archeological record and history of debt, and how societies have dealt with (or failed to deal with) the proliferation of debts that cannot be paid – and their consequences. In the pages of ...and forgive them their debts, readers will discover how debt played a central role in shaping ancient societies, and how it continues to shape our world – often destructively.

The Big Question: What happens when debts cannot be paid? Will there be a writedown in favor of debtors (as is routinely done for large corporations), or will creditors be allowed to foreclose (as is done to personal debtors and mortgagees), leading to the creditors' political takeover of the economy’s assets – and ultimately the government itself? Historically, the remedy of record was the royal Clean Slate proclamation, or biblical Jubilee Year of debt forgiveness.

The Real Message of Jesus: Jesus’s first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim a Clean Slate debt cancellation (the Jubilee Year), as was first described in the Bible (Leviticus 25), and had been used in Babylonia since Hammurabi’s dynasty. This message – more than any other religious claim – is what threatened his enemies, and is why he was put to death. This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, “…and forgive them their debts,” in The Lord’s Prayer. It has been changed to “…and forgive them their trespasses (or sins),” depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors).

Contrary to the message of Jesus, also found in the Bible and in other ancient texts, debt repayment has become sanctified and mystified as a way of moralizing claims on borrowers, allowing creditor elites and oligarchs the leverage to take over societies and privatize personal and public assets – especially in hard times. Historically, no monarchy or government has survived takeover by creditor elites and oligarchs (viz: Rome). Perhaps most striking is that – according to a nearly complete consensus of Assyriologists and biblical scholars – the Bible is preoccupied with debt forgiveness more than with sin.

In a time of increasing economic and political polarization, and a global economy deeper in debt than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, ...and forgive them their debts documents what individuals, governments and societies can learn from the ancient past for restoring economic and social stability today.

The author delves into the history of production, trade and commerce in ancient times. This article doesn't delve into the biblical meanings as it appears that the book does apart from the mention of Leviticus 25.
http://www.druckversion.studien-von-zeitfragen.net/Archaeology of Debt.pdf

Here is an interview with the author from the Naked Captalism website:
Michael Hudson: He Died for Our Debt, Not Our Sins | naked capitalism

And here is another interview with the author:

He doesn't question who Jesus was - but apparently Julius Caesar was in favour of debts being cancelled.

Here's a link to Leviticus 25:
Leviticus 25 KJV

 

[Jones]

This book is available on kindle now so I've down loaded a sample.
It's an interesting read so far and indicates how Jubilees were used to protect a stable economy:

The Rise and Fall of Jubilee Debt Cancellations and Clean Slates

The idea of annulling debts nowadays seems so unthinkable that most economists and many theologians doubt whether the Jubilee Year could have been applied in practice, and indeed on a regular basis. A widespread impression is that the Mosaic debt jubilee was a utopian ideal. However, Assyriologists have traced it to a long tradition of Near Eastern proclamations. That tradition is documented as soon as written inscriptions have been found - in Sumer, starting in the mid-third millennium BC.

Instead of causing economic crises, these debt jubilees preserved stability in nearly all Near Eastern societies. Economic polarisation, bondage and collapse occurred when such clean slates stopped being proclaimed.

What were Debt Jubilees?

Debt jubilees occurred on a regular basis in the ancient Near East from 2500 BC in Sumer to 1600 BC in Babylonia and its neighbours, and then in Assyria in the first millennium BC. It was normal for new rulers to proclaim these edicts upon taking the throne, in the aftermath of war, or upon the building or renovating a temple. Judaism took the practice out of the hands of kings and placed it at the centre of Mosaic Law.

By Babylonian times these debt amnesties contained the three elements that Judaism later adopted in its Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25. The first element was to cancel agrarian debts owed by the citizenry at large. Mercantile debts among businessmen were left in place.

A second element of these debt amnesties was to liberate bondservants - the debtor's wife, daughters or sons who had been pledged to creditors. They were allowed to return freely to the debtor's home. Slave girls that had been pledged for debt also were returned to the debtors' households. Royal debt jubilees thus freed society from debt bondage, but did not liberate chattel slaves.

A third element of these debt jubilees (subsequently adopted into Mosaic law) was to return the land or crop rights that debtors had pledged to creditors. This enabled families to resume their self-support on the land and pay taxes, serve in the military, and provide corvée labor on public works.

Commercial "silver" debts among traders and other entrepreneurs were not subject to these debt jubilees. Rulers recognised that productive business loans provide resources for the borrower to pay back with interest, in contract to consumer debt. This was the contrast that medieval Schoolmen later would draw between interest and usury.

Most non-business debts were owed to the palace or it's temples for taxes, rents and fees, along with beer to the public ale houses. Rulers initially were cancelling debts owed mainly to themselves and their officials.

This was not a utopian act, but was quite practical from the vantage point of restoring economic and military stability. Recognising that a backlog of debts had accrued that could not be paid out of current production, rulers gave priority to preserving an economy in which citizens could provide for their basic needs on their own land while paying taxes, performing their corvée labour duties and serving in the army.

Corvée definition:

1: unpaid labor (as toward constructing roads) due from a feudal vassal to his lord
2: labor exacted in lieu of taxes by public authorities especially for highway construction or repair

Corvée Has Roman Roots
Under the Roman Empire, certain classes of people owed personal services to the state or to private proprietors. For example, labor might be requisitioned for the maintenance of the postal systems of various regions, or landed proprietors might require tenant farmers and persons freed from slavery to perform unpaid labor on their estates. The feudal system of corvée - regular work that vassals owed their lords - developed from this Roman tradition. We borrowed the word corvée from French in the 14th century, and it ultimately traces back to the Latin word corrogata, meaning "to collect" or "to requisition." By the 18th century, corvée was also being used for the unpaid or partially paid labor public authorities exacted in lieu of taxes for the construction or repair of highways, bridges, or canals.

Definition of CORVÉE

unpaid labor (as toward constructing roads) due from a feudal vassal to his lord; labor exacted in lieu of taxes by public authorities especially for highway construction or repair… See the full definition

www.merriam-webster.com

Most personal debts were not the result of actual loans, but were accruals of unpaid agrarian fees, taxes and kindred obligations to royal collectors or temple officials. Rulers where aware that these debts tended to build up beyond the system's ability to pay. That is why they cancelled "barley" debts in times of crop failure, and typically in the aftermath of war.

Oh, for a wise ruler or two!

Even in the normal course of economic life, social balance required writing off debt arrears to the palace, temples or other creditors so as to maintain a free population of families to provide for their own basic needs.

As interest-bearing credit became privatised throughout the Near Eastern economies, personal debts owed to local headmen, merchants and creditors also were cancelled. Failure to write down agrarian debts would have enabled officials and, in due course, private creditors, merchants or local headmen to keep debtors in bondage and their land's crop surplus for themselves.

So we can start to see the seed of conflict of interests between benevolent rulers and private creditors, merchants and local headmen.

Crops paid to creditors were not available to be paid to the palace or other civic authorities as taxes, while labor obliged to work off debts to creditors was not available to provide corvée service or service in the army. Creditor claims thus set the wealthiest and most ambitious families on a collision course the the palace, along the lines that later occurred in classical Greece and Rome. In addition to preserving economic solvency for the population, rulers thus found debt cancellation to be a way to prevent a financial oligarchy from emerging to rival the policy aims of kings.

If you have a benevolent ruler/king who will write off debts if economic circumstances call for it to protect economic and social stability, those who need loans are not likely to approach a private creditor who could keep them in debt slavery and bondage regardless of economic and social difficulties!

Cancelling debts owed to wealthy local headmen limited their ability to amass power for themselves. Private creditors therefore sought to evade these debt jubilees. But surviving legal records show that royal proclamations were, indeed, enforced. Through Hammurabi's dynasty these "andurarum acts" became increasingly detailed so as to close loopholes and prevent ploys that creditors tried to use to gain control of labor, land and it's crop surplus.

Well, it looks like private creditors still found loopholes and have historicallydone quite well for themselves!

Social purpose of Debt Jubilees

The common policy denominator spanning Bronze Age Mesopotamia and the Byzantine Empire in the 9th and 10th centuries was the conflict between rulers acting to restore land to smallholders so as to maintain royal tax revenue and a land-tenured military force, and powerful families seeking to deny its usufruct to the palace.

This word 'usufruct' is an interesting word and understanding it's definition gives a clue to what is really owned and what isn't. Usufruct basically means 'user of the fruits'.

Basically anything that you have that has a requirement that you pay regular rates, fees, levy's, registrations or taxes to use - then you don't own it! The body that those monies are paid to owns it (naked owner). If you pay those monies, you have a legal interest in the property under consideration (usufructuary interest) that can be passed on in a will, but you don't own it.

When that item was bought - be it a car or house etc, ownership was't paid for - rather a legal usufructuary interest was paid for. This is how administrative governments, their agencies and subsidiaries can pass acts and statutes that take away fundamental rights - because they own things that we mistake as our own possessions! So not owning anything is a financial, legal/statutory fact over and above any spiritual connotations that are attached to that phrase! And the one with usufructuary interest pays the bills.

From a Harvard Study Guide on Usufruct:

1. Define usufruct.
Article 562 ± 578

Usufruct is a real right by virtue of which a person is given the right to enjoy the property of another with the obligation of preserving its form and substance, unless the title constituting it or the law provides otherwise.

2. What are the three fundamental Rights Appertaining to Ownership?
Ownership consists of three fundamental rights, to wit:

• - jus disponende (right to dispose)
• - jus utendi (right to use)
• - jus fruendi (right to the fruits)
  3. Of the above-mentioned fundamental rights, what consists usufruct and naked ownership?
  The combination of the jus utendi and jus fruendi is called usufruct. The remaining right jus disponendi is really the essence of what is termed 3naked ownership ́.
  4. What right is transferred to the usufructuary and what right is remained with the owner?
  In a usufruct, only the jus utendi and jus fruendi over the property is transferred to the usufructuary. The owner of the property maintains the jus disponendi or the power to alienate, encumber, transform, and even destroy the same. (Hemedes vs. CA, 316 SCRA 347 1999).
  5. What are the formulae with respect to full ownership, usufruct, and naked ownership?
  The following are the formulae:
• - Full Ownership equals Naked Ownership plus Usufruct
• - Naked Ownership equals Full Ownership minus Usufruct
• - Usufruct equals Full Ownership minus Naked Ownership

http://iamsomedude.com/pdf/usufruct/usufruct%20study%20guide.pdf

So what that last paragraph from the book is saying is that powerful families did not want to pay their bills/taxes to the palaces or temples, they didn't want usufructuary interest, they wanted naked ownership.

Back to the book -

Rulers sought to check the economic power of wealth creditors, military leaders or local administrators from concentrating land in their own hands and taking the crop surplus for themselves at the expense of the tax collector.

By clearing the slate of personal agrarian debts that had build up during the crop year, these royal proclamations pressed a land-tenured citizenry free from bondage. The effect was to restore balance and sustain economic growth by preventing widespread insolvency.

Babylonian scribes were taught the basic mathematical principle of compound interest, whereby the volume of debt increases exponentially, much faster than the rural economy's ability to pay. That is the basic dynamic of debt: to accrue and intrude increasingly into the economy, absorbing the surplus and transferring land and even the personal liberty of debtors to creditors.

Debt jubilees were designed to make such losses of liberty only temporary. The Mosaic injunction (Leviticus 25), "Proclaim liberty throughout the land," is inscribed on America's Liberty Bell. That is a translation of Hebrew deror, the debt Jubilee, cognate to Akkadian andurarum. The liberty in question originally was from debt peonage.

Quite the opposite of today where national debts are skyrocketing and the population at large carries the burden through interests, fines, taxes, levy's etc in an economic environment where wages are not keeping pace with increasing costs.

To insist that all debts must be paid, regardless of whether this may bankrupt debtors and strip away their land and means of livelihood, stands at odds with the many centuries of Near Eastern clean slates. Their success stands at odds with the assumption that creditor interests should take priority over those of the indebted economy at large.

In sum, the economic aim of debt jubilees was to restore solvency to the population as a whole. Many royal proclamations also freed businesses from various taxes and tariff duties, but the main objective was political and ideological. It was to create a fair and equitable society.

 

[Jones]

This ethic was not egalitarian as such. It merely aimed to provide citizens with the basic minimum standard needed to be self-sustaining. Wealth accumulation was permitted and even applauded, so long as it did not disrupt the normal functioning of society at large.

How well did Debt Jubilees succeed?

Creditors sought to avoid these laws, but Babylonian legal records show that the debt cancellations of Hammurabi's dynasty and those of his neighbours were enforced. These proclamations enabled society to avert military defeat by preserving a land-tenured citizenry as the source of military fighters, corvée labor and the tax base. The Bronze Age Near East thus avoided the economic polarisation between creditors and debtors that ended up imposing bondage on most of classical antiquity.

In the 7th-century BC, Greek populist leaders called tyrants (at that time with no original pejorative meaning) paved the way for the economic takeoff of Sparta, Corinth and Aegina by cancelling debts and redistributing the lands monopolised by their cities' aristocracies. In Athens, Solon's banning of debt bondage and clearing he land of debts in 594 BC avoided the land redistributions to the rich and powerful that much of the population had feared.

So popular was the demand for a debt jubilee that the 4th-century BC Greek general Aeneas Tacticus advised attackers of cities to draw the population over to their side by cancelling debts, and for defenders to hold onto the loyalty of their population by making the same offer. Cities that refrained from cancelling debts were conquered, or fell into widespread bondage, slavery and serfdom.

I wonder if countries who have let debt get out of hand will lose control if invaders come in and promise to cancel debt to get the national population on side?

That ultimately is what happened in Rome. Its historians describe how disenfranchising indebted citizens led to the hiring of mercenaries (often debtors expropriated from their family homestead) as wealthy creditors concentrated land in their own hands, along with law-making power and control of state religion. What, instead, threatened the security of widely-held property and ultimately led to collapse was the financial oligarchy's ending of the power of rulers to restore liberty from bondage and to save debtors from being deprived of land tenure on a widespread scale.
[....]

Why did debt Jubilees fall into disuse?

Throughout history a constant political dynamic has been manoeuvring by creditors to overthrow royal power capable of enforcing debt amnesties and reversing foreclosures on homes and subsistence land. The creditors' objective is to replace the customary right of citizens to self-support by it's opposite principle: the right of creditors to foreclose on the property and means of livelihood pledged as collateral (or to buy it at distress prices), and to make these transfers irreversible. The smallholders' security of property is replaced by the sanctity of debt instead of its periodic cancellation.

Archaic restorations of order ended when the forfeiture or forced sale of self-support land no longer could be reversed. When creditors and absentee landlords gained the upper political hand, reducing the economic status for much of the population to one of debt dependency and serfdom, classical antiquity's oligarchies used their economic gains, military power or bureaucratic position to buy up the land of smallholders, as well as public land such as Rome's ager publicus.

Violence played a major political role, almost entirely by creditors. Having overthrown kings and populist tyrants, oligarchies accused advocates of debtor interests of being "tyrants" (in Greece) or seeking kingship (as the Gracchi brothers and Julius Caesar were accused of in Rome). Sparta's kings Agis and Cleomenes were killed for trying to cancel debts and reversing the monopolisation of land in the 3rd century BC. Neighboring oligarchies called on Rome to overthrow Sparta's reformer-kings.

The creditor-sponsored counter-revolution against democracy led to economic polarisation, fiscal crisis, and ultimately to being conquered - first the Western Roman Empire and then Byzantium. Livy, Plutarch and other Roman historians blamed Rome's decline on creditors using fraud, force and political assassination to impoverish and disenfranchise the population. Barbarians had always stood at the gates, but only as societies weakened internally were their invasions successful.

Something else to look forward as before comets and earth changes wipe us out?

Today's mainstream political and economic theories deny a positive role for government policy to constrain the large-scale concentration of wealth. Attempting to explain the history of inequality since the Stone Age, for instance, Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's 2017 book The Great Leveler downplays the ability of State policy to reduce such inequality substantially without natural disasters wiping out the wealth at the top.

Ha! Maybe he read Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection!

He recognises that the inherent tendency of history is for the wealthy to win out and make society increasingly unequal. This argument also has been made by Thomas Piketty and based largely on the inheritance of great fortunes (the same argument made by his countryman Saint-Simon two centuries earlier). But the only "solutions" to inequality that Scheidel finds at work are the four "great levellers": warfare, violent revolution, lethal pandemics or state collapse. He does not acknowledge progressive tax policy, limitations on inherited wealth, debt write offs or a replacement of debt with equity as means of preventing or reversing the concentration of wealth in the absence of an external crisis.

Nope - Both Hudson and Scheidel seems to have missed the boat on extreme earth changes and weather events.

The Book of Revelation forecast these four plagues as punishment for the greed and inequity into which the Roman Empire was falling. By Late Roman times there seemed no alternative to the Dark Age that was descending. Recovery of a more equitable past seemed politically hopeless, and so was idealised as occurring only by divine intervention at the end of history. Yet for thousands of years, economic polarisation was reversed by cancelling debts and restoring land tenure to smallholders who cultivated the land, fought in the army, paid taxes and/or performed corvée labour duties. That also would be Byzantine policy to avoid polarisation from the 7th through 10th centuries, echoing Babylonia's royal proclamation of clean slates.

Within Judaism, rabbinical orthodox attributed to Hillel developed the prosbul clause by which debtors waived their right to have their debts cancelled in the Jubilee year.

I was just thinking that up until the 16th century AD, common man either couldn't read the bible for lack of education or it was illegal for him to do so. So, much of the population wouldn't have known that Jubilees could be seen as a lawful imperative.

This prosbul also may not have been entirely understood - who in their right mind would agree to a debt with a prosbul clause if there was a possibility of debt cancellation during hard times?

Perhaps this is just another of those loopholes that rich creditors used.

Hillel claimed that if the Jubilee Year were maintained, creditors would not lend to needy debtors - as if most debts were the result of loans, not arrears to Roman tax collectors and other unpaid bills.

Well, the point was to prevent creditors from getting too powerful, so it seems as though Hillel was on their side!

Opposing this pro-creditor argument, Jesus announced in his inaugural sermon that he had come to proclaim the Jubilee Year of the Lord cited by Isaiah, whose scroll he unrolled. His congregation is reported to have reacted with fury. (Like 4 tells the story). Like other populist leaders of his day, Jesus was accused of seeking kingship to enforce his program on creditors.

Subsequent Christianity gave the ideal of a debt amnesty an otherworldly eschatological meaning as debt cancellation became politically impossible under the Roman Empire's military enforcement of creditor privileges. Falling into debt subjected Greeks and Romans to bondage without much hope of recovering their liberty. They no longer could look forward to the prospect of debt amnesties such as had annulled personal debts in Sumer, Babylonia and their neighbouring realms, liberating citizens who had fallen into bondage or pledged and lost their land tenure rights to foreclosing creditors.

The result was destructive. The only debts that Emperor Hadrian annulled were Rome's tax records, which he burned in 119 AD - tax debts owed to the palace, not debts to the creditor oligarchy that had gained control of Rome's land.

A rising proportion of Greeks and Romans lost their liberty irreversibly. The great political cry throughout antiquity was for debt cancellation and land redistribution. But it was achieved in such classical times only rarely, as when Greece's 7th-century BC tyrants overthrew their cities' aristocracies who had monopolised the land and were subjecting the citizenry to debt dependency. The word "tyrant" later became a term of invective, as if liberating Greek populations from bondage to a narrow hereditary ethnic aristocracy was not a precondition for establishing democracy and economic freedom.

So the word 'tyrant' has changed in meaning over time. Here's the entry from etymology online:


tyrant (n.)
c. 1300, "absolute ruler," especially one without legal right; "cruel, oppressive ruler," from Old French tiran, tyrant (12c.), from Latin tyrannus "lord, master, monarch, despot," especially "arbitrary ruler, cruel governor, autocrat" (source also of Spanish tirano, Italian tiranno), from Greek tyrannos "lord, master, sovereign, absolute ruler unlimited by law or constitution," a loan-word from a language of Asia Minor (probably Lydian); Klein compares Etruscan Turan "mistress, lady" (surname of Venus).

In the exact sense, a tyrant is an individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a right to it. This is how the Greeks understood the word 'tyrant': they applied it indifferently to good and bad princes whose authority was not legitimate. [Rousseau, "The Social Contract"]
Originally in Greek the word was not applied to old hereditary sovereignties (basileiai) and despotic kings, but it was used of usurpers, even when popular, moderate, and just (such as Cypselus of Corinth), however it soon became a word of reproach in the usual modern sense. The unetymological spelling with -t arose in Old French by analogy with present-participle endings in -ant. Fem. form tyranness is recorded from 1590 (Spenser); Medieval Latin had tyrannissa (late 14c.).

I wonder if this clarifies or modifies what Castaneda was referring to when he talks about Petty Tyrants?

A study of the long sweep of history reveals a universal principle to be at work: The burden of debt tends to expand in an agrarian society to the point where it exceeds the ability of debtors to pay. That has been the major cause of economic polarization from antiquity to modern times. The basic principle that should guide economic policy is recognition that debts which can't be paid, won't be. The great political question is, how won't they be paid?

There are two ways not to pay debts. Our economic mainstream still believes that all debts must be paid, leaving them on the books to continue accruing interest and fees - and to let creditors foreclose when they do not receive the scheduled interest and amortisation payment.

This is what the U.S. President Obama did after the 2008 crisis. Homeowners, credit-card customers and other debtors had to start paying down the debts they had run up. About 10 million families lost their homes to foreclosure. Leaving the debt overhead in place meant stifling and polarising the economy by transferring property from debtors to creditors.

Today's legal system is based on the Roman Empire's legal philosophy upholding the sanctity of debt, not it's cancellation. Instead of protecting debtors from losing their property and status, the main concern is with saving creditors from loss, as if this is a prerequisite for economic stability and growth. Moral blame is placed on debtors, as if their arrears are a personal choice rather than stemming from economic strains that compel them to run into debt simply to survive.

Something has to give when debts cannot be paid on a wide spread basis. The volume of debt tends to increase exponentially, to the point where it causes a crisis. If debts are not written down, they will expand and become a lever for creditors to pry away land and income from the indebted economy at large. That is why debt cancellations to save rural economies from insolvency were deemed sacred from Sumer and Babylonia through the Bible.

 

[wodasi]

thee two guys think a Jubilee could be at hand ???

Bill Holter & Jim Sinclair . . .

Greg Hunter
Published on Jul 9, 2019
Legendary investor Jim Sinclair and his business partner Bill Holter say Gold is going much higher. It’s a mathematical certainty. Sinclair says, “You need to look at gold, not a speculation, but as a savings account. If the dollar gets sliced in half, you basically double the value (of your gold) if not more. I think much more. . . . In the second reset, that will take gold to a price where it will balance the ability to pay global debt. That’s the major move coming forward. Right now, we are definitely going back to the $1,850 and $1,925 area per ounce for gold. The second reset, you can pick any price you want for gold. Pick a high price.”

 

[Ruth]

So, does anyone really care about us? I don't think so.

 

[Jones]

@wodasi I dunno. I don't think that higher gold prices will convince rich oligarchs or creditors to give up their income! It'd take much more than that. Apart from that, there hasn't been a Jubilee in Australia since it was settled - and I don't recall any country in modern times except for Iceland doing anything that resembled a debt Jubilee.

Here in Australia, real estate prices are down and are probably only being propped by low mortgage interest rates. I think investors will have dumped real estate on the promise of rising gold prices that have been talked about since BRICS and the stockpiling of gold by those countries.

 

[Jones]

So, does anyone really care about us? I don't think so.

Well, the best that we can do is learn and prepare so that if a good statesmen does appear we'll be able to recognise him/her and give the necessary support. For those of us that don't transition to 4D or 5D that may be one of the best things we can do in preparation for civilisations crumbling under the weight of debt crises or natural disaster.

 

[Jones]

Much of the first part of the next chapter has already been covered.

Archaic Economies Versus Modern Preconceptions
[....]
While deeming this literal reading of Genesis to be historical, they ignore the Biblical narrative describing the centuries-long struggle between debtors and creditors.

It's in this struggle between debtors and creditors that places the Bible as a foundational document for Common Law and Constitutional Law among those that study these subjects.

The economic laws of Moses and the Prophets, which Jesus announce his intention to revive and fulfil, are brushed aside as anachronistic artefacts, not the moral centre of the Old and New Testaments, the Jewish and Christian bibles. The Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25) is the "good news" that Jesus - in his first reported sermon (Luke 4) - announced that he had come to proclaim.

[....]
Hammurabi's Babylonian laws became instantly famous when they were discovered in 1901 and translated the next year. Less familiar is the fact that nearly each member of his dynasty inaugurated his rule by proclaiming a debt amnesty - andurarum, the source of Hebrew cognate deror, the Jubilee Year, which has the same root as its Babylonian model.
[...]
And land or crop rights pledged to creditors or sold under distress conditions were returned to their customary holders.
[....]
When harvests failed as a result of drought, flood or pests, there was not enough crop surplus to pay agrarian debts. In such cases rulers cancelled debts owed and above all to themselves and their officials, and increasingly to private creditors as well. The palace had little interest in seeing these creditors force debtors into bondage.
[....]
This principle of keeping debts in line with the ability to pay and forgiving them under extenuating circumstances also governed commercial shipping loans. From Hammurabi's laws down to those of Rome, such mercantile debs were annulled in the cases of shipwreck or piracy, and for overland caravans that were robbed.

Another modern objection to the practicality of debt cancellations concerns property rights. If land is periodically returned to its customary family holders, how can it be bought and sold? The answer is that self support land (unlike town-houses) was not supposed to be sold as a market commodity. Security of land tenure was part of the quid pro quo obliging holders to serve in the military and perform corvée labor. If wealthy creditors were permitted to "join house to house and lay field to field...until there is no more room and you alone are left in the land" (Isaiah 5:8) while reducing debtors to bondage, who would be left to build infrastructure and fight to defend against the ever-present aggressors?

These public needs took priority over the acquisitive ambitions of the creditors. Cancelling debt did not disrupt economic activity, nor did it violate the idea of good economic order. By saving debtors from falling into servitude to a financial oligarchy, such amnesties preserved the liberty of citizens and their subsistence land rights. These acts were a precondition for maintaining economic stability. Indeed, proclaiming amnesty to restore the body politic - like periodically returning exiles from cities of refuge - was common to Native American as well as Biblical practice. The logic seems universal.

This echo's an earlier sentiment that Capitalism was basically encouraged and applauded, but it was limited to the degree that it caused harm to the rest of the population.

[.....]
As credit became more widely privatised, usury became the major lever to pry away land and crop rights, and to reduce labor to irreversible bondage. The process culminated with classical antiquity's oligarchies replacing "divine kingship" with creditor-oriented rules. To resist widespread bondage and expropriation of debtors, Judaism placed debt cancellation at the core of Mosaic Law.

Though the prosbul implemented by Hillel created another loophole to protect the creditors and keep the debtors in bondage.

My own professional training is as an economist. During the 1960s and 1970s I wrote articles and books warning that Third World debts could not be paid - or those of the United States for that matter. I came to this conclusion working as Chase Manhattan's balance-of-payments analyst in the mid-1960s. It was apparent that the U.S. and other governments could pay their debts only by borrowing from foreign creditors-adding the interest charges onto the debt, so the the amount owed grew at an exponential rate. This was "the magic of compound interest." Over time it makes any economy's overall volume of debts unpayably high.

In the late 1970s I wrote a series of papers for the United Nations Institute for Training and Development (UNITAR) warning that Third World economies could not pay their foreign debts and that a break was imminent. It came in 1982 when Mexico announced it could not pay, triggering the Latin American "debt bomb," leading to the Brady Plan to write down debts.

A basic outline of Brady Bonds

Brady Bonds: What it is, How it Works, Examples

Brady bonds are sovereign debt securities, denominated in U.S. dollars, issued by developing countries and backed by U.S. Treasury bonds.

www.investopedia.com

It reads as though Mexico invoked it's equitable right of subrogation - a basic definition here:

Equitable Subrogation: What It Is, How It Works

Equitable subrogation is a legal principle allowing a party that makes payments to another party to collect damages from a debtor to the second party.

www.investopedia.com

Subrogation is different to debt cancellation in that subrogation allows a debtor to swap places with a creditor. One of the interesting things about the equitable right to subrogation is where it mentions 'acting as agent' or 'through an agency'. Anyone who signs a contract is acting as agent because the living cannot transact with the dead so in a tricky bate and switch, signing a contract also means accepting that you are acting as agent! Though, under Common Law, the living have unlimited right to enter contracts. This basically means that anyone who signs a contract can have access to the equitable right of subrogation under the right circumstances.

The capstone of the UNITAR project was a 1980 meeting in Mexico hosted by its former president, Luis Echeverria, who had helped draft the text for the New International Economic Order (NIEO). An angry fight broke out over my insistence that Latin American debtors would soon have to default.

The pro-creditor U.S. rapporteur for the meeting gave a travesty of my position in his summation. When I stood up and announced that I was pulling out my colleagues in response to this censorship, I was followed out of the hall by Russian and Third World delegates. In the aftermath, Italian banks financially backing the UNITAR project said that they would withdraw funding if there was any suggestion that sovereign debts could not be paid. The idea was deemed unthinkable - or so creditor lobbyists wanted the world to believe.

STS wishful thinking?!

But most banks knew quite well that global lending would end in default.

This experience drove home to me how controversial the idea of debt write downs was. I set about compiling a history of how societies through the ages had felt obliged to write down their debts, and the political tension this involved.

It took me about a year to sketch the history of debts back to classical Greece and Rome. Livy, Diodorus and Plutarch described how Roman creditors wages a century-long Social War (133-29 BC) turning democracy into oligarchy. But among modern historians, Arnold Toynbee is almost alone in emphasising the role of debt in concentrating Roman wealth and property ownership.

By the time Roman creditors won, the Pharisee Rabbi Hillel had innovated the prosbul clause in debt contracts, whereby debtors waived their right to have their debts annulled in the Jubilee Year. This is the kind of stratagem that today's banks use in the "small print" of their contracts obliging users to waive their rights to the courts and instead submit to arbitration by bank-friendly referees in case of dispute over credit cards, bank loans or general bank malfeasance. Creditors had tried to use similar clauses already in the Old Babylonian era, but these were deemed illegal under more pro-debtor royal law.

In researching the historical background of the Jubilee Year, I found occasional references to debt cancellations going back to Sumer in the third millennium BC. The material was widely scattered through the literature, because no history of Near Eastern economic institutions and enterprise had been written. Most history depicts our civilisation as starting in Greece and Rome, not in the preceding thousands of years when the techniques of commercial enterprise, finance and accounting were developed.

So I began to search through the journal literature and relatively few books on Sumer and Babylonia. "Debt" rarely appeared in the indexes. It was buried in the discussion of other topics.

Not being able to read cuneiform, I was obliges to rely on translations - and was struck by how radically the versions in each language differed when it came to the terms used for royal proclamations. The American Noah Kramer translated the Sumerian amar-gi in texts of the third-millennium Lagash ruler Urukagina as a "tax reduction". In 1980 he even urged incoming President Ronald Reagan to emulate this policy, as if Urukagina were a photo-Republican.

The British Assyriologist Wilfred Lambert explained to me that andurarum meant "free trade" - typical of English policy since it abolished its Corn Laws in 1846. Looking at the Assyrian trade, Mogens Larsen of Denmark agreed with this reading. The German Fritz Kraus saw the royal edicts of Hammurabi's dynasty as what they certainly were: debt cancellations. But I found the most enlightening reading to be that of the French Assyriologist Dominique Charpin: "restoration of order."

All these translators knew that the basic root of Sumerian amar-gi is "mother" (ama), as in "mother condition." This was an idealised original state of economic balance with no personal or agrarian debt arrears or debt bondage (but with slavery for captured prisoners and others, to be sure)

So the "mother condition" is possibly related to the Goddess and pro-creditor conditions the patriarchal God.

Even before reading Charpin's books and articles, it was obvious that what was needed to understand the meaning of royal inscriptions was more than just linguistics. It was necessary to reconstruct the overall worldview and indeed, social cosmology at work. In 1984, after three years of research, I showed my findings to my friend Alex Marshack, and Ice Age archaeologist associated with Harvard's Peabody Museum, the university's anthropology department. He passed on my summary to its director, Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, who invited me up for a weekend to discuss it. The upshot was an invitation to become a Research Fellow at Peabody in Babylonian economic archaeology. For the next decade we discussed the Bronze Age economy and structures out of which interest-bearing debt is first documented.

I presented my first academic paper on the ancient Near East in 1990, tracing how interest was developed in Mesopotamia, most likely initially to finance foreign trade, and how Syrian and Levantine traders brought the practice to the Mediterranean lands around the 8th century BC. In Greece and Rome, however, charging interest was not accompanied by debt cancellations. Charging interest was brought from the Near East and transplanted in a new context of chieftains and clan leaders who used interest-bearing usury to reduce populations to a state of dependency, creating oligarchies that soon were overthrown from Sparta to Corinth, until Solon's debt reforms in Athens in 594 BC. Classical antiquity's "takeoff" thus adopted Near Eastern economic practices in an increasingly oligarchic context.

Tension between creditors and debtors led to ongoing political and economic turmoil.

 

[Arwenn]

Very interesting Jones, thanks for posting the excerpts. I dunno if we’ll ever see a Jubilee scenario here in Aus, but who knows? As a vassal state of the US, I find policies & politics in Australia sadly only getting worse.

 

[Jones]

Very interesting Jones, thanks for posting the excerpts. I dunno if we’ll ever see a Jubilee scenario here in Aus, but who knows? As a vassal state of the US, I find policies & politics in Australia sadly only getting worse.

Yeah, true. I think the possibility of us seeing a Jubilee is fairly low, but who knows what impact learning about it will have. I mean, what was the original impulse that led to Iceland getting rid of dodgy bankers and writing off debt?

As far as Australia being a vassal state of the US - that's only in assumption - one that we've accepted and contracted to in ignorance. We didn't grok what Whitlam was up to in the '70s and we haven't had a constitutional parliament since before his time. As is stated in an earlier post, the common law gives us as individuals unlimited rights to contract - we just didn't get the full impact of what we were contracting to.

Our constitutional monarchy structure still exists because it was written as an 'indissoluble' contract/trust between Queen Victoria and her heirs and successors and the people and their heirs and successors so we are within our rights to claim our inheritance in that as individuals - but it takes a bit of study.

Outside of that we've got the likes of the GAP party who are pushing a constitutional agenda. I don't like the chances of them changing the administrative system from within that system - but at least they are raising awareness of what we've lost by entering contracts with the administrative Australian Government - which basically operates as a middle man between the Commonwealth of Australia and the people and we get to pay for that to the benefit of the U.S. If we did manage to move the interest in all those contracts back to the Commonwealth - which is achievable - I still don't hold out much hope for a Jubilee - but the general cost of living would at least decrease because there would be no need for government agencies and subsidiaries to run on a for profit basis - they would only need to charge for the cost of operation of the public service and the privatisation of public utilities could be reversed. As an example of that it has been put forward that land rates would be around 1/3 of the cost that they are now.

Believe it or not - some of the best material and research I've learned about all of this has been shared by farmers - those who were looking for remedy to the situation of losing the rights to their land, being crippled by creditors, losing their cropping rights, getting insufficient relief during droughts or floods, being threatened with gaol for refusing to sign bankruptcy paperwork even if they weren't insolvent etc. So some of Hudsons work really strikes a chord with me and what I've been learning from the farmers who have hit the books to look for remedies to their situation.

 

[goyacobol]

So, does anyone really care about us? I don't think so.

It's a question many of us have asked I think.

Session 22 July 2010:

Q: (L) And what is causing the internal planetary changes including the magnetic field alterations?

A: Both the change in the cosmic environment and the presence of foreign bodies in and near the inner solar system. {pause} Realm convergence.

Q: (L) Well, clearly human beings are really miniscule specks on this planet, and the planet itself is a miniscule speck in the galaxy, which is a miniscule speck in the universe. So, in a very large sense, we don't really count. So whatever happens, happens.

A: More or less, but remember that some consciousnesses "weigh" more than others. Also recall that "His eye is on the sparrow." While it may seem grim from your perspective, even you care about your smallest parts.

Q: (L) Well, it just seems like psychopaths have really screwed things up.

A: It is actually a bad time for them.

Q: (L) It's a bad time for them? What do you mean?

A: They will get all the blame!

Ruth,

If you care I care. How is that for a start.

 

[genero81]

If you care I care. How is that for a start?

I'm with you!

 

[Jones]

While we're on C's session quotes - Hudson mentions above that when the Greeks and Romans introduced credit, they didn't implement Jubilees or debt cancellation and instead preferred to keep the population in bondage and transfer land holdings, so that may account for what is said in the following sessions mentioning that the Bible was corrupted by 'Greek Enforcers'. Did it have something to do with the conflict between debtors and creditors?

941107

Q: (L) What is the origin of the name Appolyon?
A: Light being?
Q: (L) Why is Appolyon called the "destroyer" in Revelation?
A: Backward for sake of deception. Bible corrupted.
Q: (L) You have often stated that the Bible is corrupted, I would like to know who, exactly, corrupted the Bible and when and how they did this?
A: Illuminati brotherhood for a thousand earth years.
Q: (L) Does this mean that up until a thousand years ago the Bible was fairly accurate?
A: No.
Q: (L) Is there any possibility that the Catholic church had anything to do with this corrupting influence?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Does the Catholic church have in its possession actual original texts of the Bible that have not been corrupted?
A: No.
Q: (L) Were there ever such texts in existence?
A: No.
Q: (L) Who wrote the book of Matthew?
A: Greek enforcers.
Q: (L) What are Greek enforcers?
A: Like your FBI.
Q: (L) Who wrote the book of Mark?
A: Same.
Q: (L) Luke and John?
A: Same
Q: (L) Acts?
A: Same
Q: (L) Are any books of the New Testament written by who they claim to be written by?
A: No. Remember this is 70% propaganda.
Q: (L) Is 30% then the truth or the actual teachings?
A: Close. Enough you must decipher from instinct through meditation.

980404

Q: You once mentioned 'Greek Enforcers' who wrote the New Testament. Where did these Greek Enforcers come from?
A: Order of Thelon.
Q: Never heard of it. On another occasion you called the Nephilim 'enforcers.' Is there any relation between this order of Thelon and the Nephilim?
A: Maybe...
Q: Where is the headquarters of this group?
A: Sicinthos.
Q: Is that a place? Never heard of it.
A: Yes.

 

[Jones]

This SOTT article talking about China becoming a leading international creditor - it will be interesting to see if China is actually attempting to transfer land ownership.

The majority of debt claims were acquired in international bond markets by China's state-owned central bank. In addition, China's government has extended increasing sums of direct loans, in particular to developing and emerging countries.

Research has shown that Chinese state banks issued around a quarter of total bank lending to emerging markets, propelling China into the leading global position as official creditor, leaving behind the IMF and World Bank.

According to the experts, China's international lending boom has chiefly been due to the country's rapid economic growth. Another important factor, Trebesch added, was "the "going global" policy of the Chinese state".

However, some 50 percent of China's international lending to developing and emerging countries bypasses official statistics, remaining unrecorded by the IMF, Paris Club, rating agencies or private data providers.

For the 50 top recipients of Chinese loans, who are predominantly smaller or poorer countries, debt to China grew from around one percent of their GDP in 2005 to over 15 percent of GDP in 2016.

"What makes China's international lending unique is not only its sheer size and the lack of transparency, but also the fact that it is almost entirely state-driven, by the government, China's state owned banks or by the state-controlled central bank", says Trebesch.

What country is the world's biggest secret money lender?

China is already the world's largest official creditor, second only to the US in total amount of loans issued, however, the question of who dominates in "under the radar" export of capital has been shrouded in mystery. In an interesting recent...

www.sott.net