Withdrawing Consent,
Michael Hudson, Debt, Economic Collapse and the Ancient World (much condensed. Note that European "democracies" were devised to pay for Bigger War Loans.)
In 1964, I joined Chase Manhattan, and my first assignment was to analyze how much Latin American countries could afford to borrow. I was told to focus on Argentina, Brazil and Chile. To calculate their debt-carrying capacity, I had to calculate how much they could afford to pay in interest out of their export earnings. I found that they already had reached their limit to pay creditors in dollars. So there was little way that they could afford to take on more debt.
That did not make the officers in the international department very happy because they wanted to increase their loans, just as the real estate and oil departments wanted to do. It seemed to me that international lending was close to the risk limit of default for many countries.
On a later occasion I had a meeting at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss my analysis. The Federal Reserve officer said that according to my calculations, Britain couldn’t afford to borrow any more money. I agreed. It had to keep borrowing just to maintain the exchange rate of the British pound.
The Federal Reserve man pointed out that the British had been maintaining their balance – mainly by raising interest rates to attract loans to stabilize their exchange rate. I agreed that this was what had enabled them to keep paying their debts. He pointed out that this was because U.S. creditors were lending them the money. And of course that was exactly what was keeping them afloat. He said that the same thing was true with Latin American countries. The United States was supporting them, at least as long as they were “friendly.” U.S. bankers therefore could lend them the money because U.S policy was to keep them solvent. The World Bank was showing them how to carry their debt service by privatizing their property, and the IMF giving them advice as to how to make their labor more competitive by paying it less and blocking attempts at unionization, while cutting back public social spending to “free” income to pay their creditors.
Under these terms it was clear that Latin America could continue to pay U.S. banks for new loans, at least for the immediate future. That was the financial sector’s time frame. But I could see that the only way that banks could keep expanding their loans to Latin America and England was to arrange for them to borrow the money to make their interest and principal repayments. That’s called a Ponzi scheme...
..I became a balance-of-payments advisor to Canada in the late 1970s and an advisor to UNITAR, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, which published my papers on why Latin America could not afford to pay its debts. I presented these findings at a large UNITAR meeting in Mexico City. That did not make the officers in the international department very happy because they wanted to increase their loans, just as the real estate and oil departments wanted to do. It seemed to me that international lending was close to the risk limit of default for many countries.
On a later occasion I had a meeting at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss my analysis. The Federal Reserve officer said that according to my calculations, Britain couldn’t afford to borrow any more money. I agreed. It had to keep borrowing just to maintain the exchange rate of the British pound.
The Federal Reserve man pointed out that the British had been maintaining their balance – mainly by raising interest rates to attract loans to stabilize their exchange rate. I agreed that this was what had enabled them to keep paying their debts. He pointed out that this was because U.S. creditors were lending them the money. And of course that was exactly what was keeping them afloat. He said that the same thing was true with Latin American countries. The United States was supporting them, at least as long as they were “friendly.” U.S. bankers therefore could lend them the money because U.S policy was to keep them solvent. The World Bank was showing them how to carry their debt service by privatizing their property, and the IMF giving them advice as to how to make their labor more competitive by paying it less and blocking attempts at unionization, while cutting back public social spending to “free” income to pay their creditors.
Under these terms it was clear that Latin America could continue to pay U.S. banks for new loans, at least for the immediate future. That was the financial sector’s time frame. But I could see that the only way that banks could keep expanding their loans to Latin America and England was to arrange for them to borrow the money to make their interest and principal repayments. That’s called a Ponzi scheme...
The U.S. rapporteur deliberately misrepresented my talk, saying that I had explained how Third World countries could pay their debts with U.S. aid. I stood up and said that this was a falsification of what I and other members of my U.S. delegation (including Bob Fitch and Loren Goldner) believed. I demanded an apology from Luis Echeverria, who had convened the meeting. There was pandemonium and I walked out in protest. The Russian delegate came outside and said that I had taken over the conference by saying the unspeakable.
The “unspeakable” happened pretty quickly. The Italian funders of the UNITAR group insisted that it stop publishing my warnings about Third World debt. I realized that the idea that countries could not pay their debt was really important. It was not unthinkable at all, but it was unspeakable in polite company. In 1982, Mexico defaulted on its bonds, triggering the Latin American “debt bomb.”...
..I thought that people would be more willing to accept the idea that cancelling debts was needed to avoid economic polarization and impoverishment if they could see how societies through the ages had dealt with the problem of debts exceeding the ability of large parts of the economy to pay. Around 1980-1981, I began to draft this history. I thought that if this logic were accepted for the past, the implications for today would become less unthinkable.
I looked for examples of early recognition that if debts couldn’t be paid on a widespread basis, some authority was needed to write them down, or else a creditor oligarchy would emerge to polarize and ultimately impoverish the economy. Such polarization and impoverishment is clear enough in the modern world. If governments don’t write down Latin America’s debts, for example, the continent’s debtor countries will be obliged to go to the IMF, World Bank and the U.S. State Department. These institutions will insist that the debtor economy would have to “stabilize” its exchange rate by selling off its land, mineral rights and public infrastructure to foreign investors, using the sales proceeds to pay foreign creditors. That will strip away the assets and patrimony of debtor countries.
It was fairly easy to go back to the 19th century and see the financial ruin of Persia and Egypt as a result of debts owed to European bankers. I began taking notes going back to the medieval times and the Crusades with its revival of war debts, and to Rome and Greece such as Solon’s seisachtheia of 594 BC, and to the Biblical Jubilee year. In looking through this literature I found scattered references to earlier Near Eastern debt cancellations.
To trace down these references I began to read about Mesopotamia. Most of the writing was in French and German. I had studied linguistics at the University of Chicago for my BA, but I didn’t read cuneiform. So I began to read translations of the laws of Hammurabi and even more important, the debt cancellations or “clean slates” of Hammurabi and all the other members of his Babylonian dynasty, as well as those of neighboring lands, and earlier in Sumer.
I found that it didn’t matter that I hadn’t studied Assyriology. Having to read Bronze Age royal proclamations in translation actually turned out to be an advantage, because the translation of the royal inscriptions and proclamations was quite different in German, French, English and American. It seemed that each translator used their own preconceptions of what exactly rulers were doing when they “proclaimed order.”...
I looked for examples of early recognition that if debts couldn’t be paid on a widespread basis, some authority was needed to write them down, or else a creditor oligarchy would emerge to polarize and ultimately impoverish the economy. Such polarization and impoverishment is clear enough in the modern world. If governments don’t write down Latin America’s debts, for example, the continent’s debtor countries will be obliged to go to the IMF, World Bank and the U.S. State Department. These institutions will insist that the debtor economy would have to “stabilize” its exchange rate by selling off its land, mineral rights and public infrastructure to foreign investors, using the sales proceeds to pay foreign creditors. That will strip away the assets and patrimony of debtor countries.
It was fairly easy to go back to the 19th century and see the financial ruin of Persia and Egypt as a result of debts owed to European bankers. I began taking notes going back to the medieval times and the Crusades with its revival of war debts, and to Rome and Greece such as Solon’s seisachtheia of 594 BC, and to the Biblical Jubilee year. In looking through this literature I found scattered references to earlier Near Eastern debt cancellations.
To trace down these references I began to read about Mesopotamia. Most of the writing was in French and German. I had studied linguistics at the University of Chicago for my BA, but I didn’t read cuneiform. So I began to read translations of the laws of Hammurabi and even more important, the debt cancellations or “clean slates” of Hammurabi and all the other members of his Babylonian dynasty, as well as those of neighboring lands, and earlier in Sumer.
I found that it didn’t matter that I hadn’t studied Assyriology. Having to read Bronze Age royal proclamations in translation actually turned out to be an advantage, because the translation of the royal inscriptions and proclamations was quite different in German, French, English and American. It seemed that each translator used their own preconceptions of what exactly rulers were doing when they “proclaimed order.”...
..Andurarum meant literally a free-flowing, meaning that bond servants held by their creditors had the liberaty to go back to their original homes. House slaves (often “mountain girls” that debtors had pledged to creditors were returned to their former masters who owned them. And land that had been forfeited to creditors was restored to debtors. (The Babylonian word was cognate to Hebrew deror, the word used in Leviticus 25 for the kindred Jubilee Year.)
The Germans had just what I was focusing on: a debt cancellation. F. R. Krauss wrote a detailed study of this. But then the French assyriologist Dominique Charpin had the least anachronistic translation of all. He called it a “restoration of order,” a return to the “mother condition” ending the disorder. The root of the Sumerian term for such proclamations, amargi was ama, “mother.” For instance, when the Iraqi President Hussein said that his war against the American invasion by George W. Bush was going to be “the mother of all wars,” he meant the paradigmatic war. Amargi was the paradigmatic social balance that Bronze age society thought should be the norm.
My Association with Harvard to Create a Scholarly Group to Analyze Near Eastern Economies
I wrote a draft of what I’d found, and my friend Alexander Marshack, the leading Ice Age archaeologist and on the Harvard faculty, sent what I’d written to the head of the Peabody Museum, Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky. He invited me up to Harvard, and suggested that I become a research fellow on the faculty in “Babylonian archaeology” and go into my academic research in depth.
It soon became apparent that I couldn’t simply write this history by myself. What was at issue was the broad context that shaped the Mesopotamian economic takeoff in which interest, money and “taxes” first arose and took shape. In order to get credibility for our study, we drew up a plan to invite the leading Assyriologist and Egyptologist scholars who could read the Bronze Age proclamations, letters and legal cases. We would hold a series of colloquia as a basis for creating a financial and economic history of the ancient Near East.
I had tried to write the original version of what became my volume, “… and Forgive Them Their Debts” to a number of publishers like the University of California. Every publisher rejected it, sending it to referees who thought that it was impossible for society to cancel the debts, because if that were the case, creditors wouldn’t have made loans anymore. One Assyriologist repeated Rabbi Hillel’s pro-creditor argument against the Jubilee Year to this effect. To counter the threat of debt cancellation, Hillel created the prosbul clause waiving the debtor’s right to have his debts cancelled in the Jubilee Year. That was the political context in which Jesus led the fight to revive the Jubilee Year practice.
What this argument missed was that most Bronze Age cultivators and other non-commercial individuals didn’t run up debts by borrowing money. They incurred tax arrears and other obligations that accrued during the crop year and were due at harvest time.
For instance, right now we’re having this conversation in a bar. It has long been typical for workers to run up a tab, to be paid on the next payday. Something similar happened in Mesopotamia. The ale women providing beer were part of a palatial or temple “public utility,” as the British word “pub” recognizes. Customers would run up tabs that were owed at the end of the harvest. Their payday was harvest time, the time that money actually was used – grain-money, weighed out on the threshing floor and paid to creditors, headed by the palace and temples.
But if the harvest was bad, the cultivators wouldn’t have the grain money to pay the debts that they had run up during the crop year. How were rulers going to deal with this situation when debtors couldn’t pay? Hammurabi and his contemporaries recognized that it was against their interest to let debtors fall into bondage to the palace for agricultural advances, to temple officials who were owed money for officiating at weddings or funerals, or to private creditors or “big men” who had advanced food or products to cultivators. If rulers permitted citizens on the land to fall into bondage to work off their debts to the large institutions or other creditors, debtors couldn’t serve in the army or work on civic infrastructure building the city walls, temples and other public construction.
Instead of a “sanctity of debt” there was a sanctity in its cancellation, at least for personal consumer debts. (Business commercial debts were left intact.) Instead of allowing the labor force to be reduced to bondage or having them forfeit their land tenure rights to creditors, rulers maintained economic balance by proclaiming a Clean Slate. That was the opposite of what the International Monetary Fund has done to Latin American debtor economies...
..Economic liberty on the land meant being able to produce your own means of support. Hammurabi’s laws sought to preserve this condition – or restore it, if disturbed – by stipulating that if the storm god Adad the storm god floods the land, grain-debts wouldn’t have to be paid. Wartime was another occasion for such debt cancellations. And even without such problems, it was recognized that debts mounted up in the normal course of life. To clear this backlog of obligations hanging over agrarian individuals, every new ruler started his reign by proclaiming a Clean Slate – every ruler of Hammurabi’s dynasty, and those of earlier Lagash and other neighboring lands... The Germans had just what I was focusing on: a debt cancellation. F. R. Krauss wrote a detailed study of this. But then the French assyriologist Dominique Charpin had the least anachronistic translation of all. He called it a “restoration of order,” a return to the “mother condition” ending the disorder. The root of the Sumerian term for such proclamations, amargi was ama, “mother.” For instance, when the Iraqi President Hussein said that his war against the American invasion by George W. Bush was going to be “the mother of all wars,” he meant the paradigmatic war. Amargi was the paradigmatic social balance that Bronze age society thought should be the norm.
My Association with Harvard to Create a Scholarly Group to Analyze Near Eastern Economies
I wrote a draft of what I’d found, and my friend Alexander Marshack, the leading Ice Age archaeologist and on the Harvard faculty, sent what I’d written to the head of the Peabody Museum, Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky. He invited me up to Harvard, and suggested that I become a research fellow on the faculty in “Babylonian archaeology” and go into my academic research in depth.
It soon became apparent that I couldn’t simply write this history by myself. What was at issue was the broad context that shaped the Mesopotamian economic takeoff in which interest, money and “taxes” first arose and took shape. In order to get credibility for our study, we drew up a plan to invite the leading Assyriologist and Egyptologist scholars who could read the Bronze Age proclamations, letters and legal cases. We would hold a series of colloquia as a basis for creating a financial and economic history of the ancient Near East.
I had tried to write the original version of what became my volume, “… and Forgive Them Their Debts” to a number of publishers like the University of California. Every publisher rejected it, sending it to referees who thought that it was impossible for society to cancel the debts, because if that were the case, creditors wouldn’t have made loans anymore. One Assyriologist repeated Rabbi Hillel’s pro-creditor argument against the Jubilee Year to this effect. To counter the threat of debt cancellation, Hillel created the prosbul clause waiving the debtor’s right to have his debts cancelled in the Jubilee Year. That was the political context in which Jesus led the fight to revive the Jubilee Year practice.
What this argument missed was that most Bronze Age cultivators and other non-commercial individuals didn’t run up debts by borrowing money. They incurred tax arrears and other obligations that accrued during the crop year and were due at harvest time.
For instance, right now we’re having this conversation in a bar. It has long been typical for workers to run up a tab, to be paid on the next payday. Something similar happened in Mesopotamia. The ale women providing beer were part of a palatial or temple “public utility,” as the British word “pub” recognizes. Customers would run up tabs that were owed at the end of the harvest. Their payday was harvest time, the time that money actually was used – grain-money, weighed out on the threshing floor and paid to creditors, headed by the palace and temples.
But if the harvest was bad, the cultivators wouldn’t have the grain money to pay the debts that they had run up during the crop year. How were rulers going to deal with this situation when debtors couldn’t pay? Hammurabi and his contemporaries recognized that it was against their interest to let debtors fall into bondage to the palace for agricultural advances, to temple officials who were owed money for officiating at weddings or funerals, or to private creditors or “big men” who had advanced food or products to cultivators. If rulers permitted citizens on the land to fall into bondage to work off their debts to the large institutions or other creditors, debtors couldn’t serve in the army or work on civic infrastructure building the city walls, temples and other public construction.
Instead of a “sanctity of debt” there was a sanctity in its cancellation, at least for personal consumer debts. (Business commercial debts were left intact.) Instead of allowing the labor force to be reduced to bondage or having them forfeit their land tenure rights to creditors, rulers maintained economic balance by proclaiming a Clean Slate. That was the opposite of what the International Monetary Fund has done to Latin American debtor economies...
..What made Western civilization different at the outset was that the Mediterranean lands didn’t have kings. You said before that there was a collapse of the Mycenaeans. It wasn’t really a collapse. There was really bad weather around 1200 BC. There was a drought that set whole populations in motion. They couldn’t survive where they were. The same thing happened in India about 600 years earlier. The largest Bronze Age civilization, the Indus civilization, dried up...
The US is rapidly moving towards bankruptcy because the government in Washington is spending too much money, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has warned...The Middle Eastern merchants introduced the practice of charging interest to the West. Local Greek and Italian chieftains adopted it in their transactions with the rest of society. But the West had no palace rulers to cancel debts, so the dynamics of interest-bearing debt ended up leading to an aristocracy owning the land and holding the population in debt. That problem was only solved by the tyrants that we discussed earlier, who overthrew the predator aristocratic families, cancelled the debts and redistributed the land that had been monopolized.
The Syrian and Phoenician merchants also introduced Middle Eastern weights and measures as a necessary element of charging interest. But the arithmetic fractions and denomination were different in the West, and varied widely. Those of Mesopotamia (minas for weight and gur-bushels for volume) were based on 60ths because that system had been developed in the temples to distribute food to their dependent labor force of war widows and orphans on a monthly basis. The administrative year was divided into 30-day months, so each day two 60ths of the monthly ration (a “bushel”) would be consumed – two cups a day. Next month, another bushel would be given.
Interest charges were based initially on ease of calculation: one shekel per mina per month in Mesopotamia’s sexagesimal system of fractional divisions. Greece had a different system. It had been in the orbit of Crete and Egypt, which used the decimal system based on 10. So their rate would be 1 percent per month (12 percent for a year), or sometimes 10 percent. Rome used a fractional measuring system based on a year’s normal division into 12 months. So Roman weights measured 12 ounces in a pound. Its interest rate was set at an annual 1/12 (8 1/3 percent). This comparison shows that interest rates were not set by the rate of profit or productivity as modern theory assumes, but simply to make it easier to calculate in the local system of fractional accounting...
The Syrian and Phoenician merchants also introduced Middle Eastern weights and measures as a necessary element of charging interest. But the arithmetic fractions and denomination were different in the West, and varied widely. Those of Mesopotamia (minas for weight and gur-bushels for volume) were based on 60ths because that system had been developed in the temples to distribute food to their dependent labor force of war widows and orphans on a monthly basis. The administrative year was divided into 30-day months, so each day two 60ths of the monthly ration (a “bushel”) would be consumed – two cups a day. Next month, another bushel would be given.
Interest charges were based initially on ease of calculation: one shekel per mina per month in Mesopotamia’s sexagesimal system of fractional divisions. Greece had a different system. It had been in the orbit of Crete and Egypt, which used the decimal system based on 10. So their rate would be 1 percent per month (12 percent for a year), or sometimes 10 percent. Rome used a fractional measuring system based on a year’s normal division into 12 months. So Roman weights measured 12 ounces in a pound. Its interest rate was set at an annual 1/12 (8 1/3 percent). This comparison shows that interest rates were not set by the rate of profit or productivity as modern theory assumes, but simply to make it easier to calculate in the local system of fractional accounting...
..When I first submitted my explanation to the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, its editors questioned whether it really could be so simple. It took them six years to agree to publish my article in 2000. My discoveries as an outsider have now been accepted by Assyriologists. But they are ignored outside of that field.
This experience helps explain why I was able to get assent from the Assyriologists and other prehistorians who were part of my 20-year Harvard colloquia. Assyriologists had refused ever since the 1920s to deal with economists or non-Assyriologists because there was so much ideological preconception about how civilization began...
This experience helps explain why I was able to get assent from the Assyriologists and other prehistorians who were part of my 20-year Harvard colloquia. Assyriologists had refused ever since the 1920s to deal with economists or non-Assyriologists because there was so much ideological preconception about how civilization began...
..I was an outsider to Assyriology, but also to mainstream economics. I knew that I didn’t know how archaic societies were organized. But I knew that what was important for me to find out was how different societies treated money and debt relations. I was looking for the laws of financial motion, the dynamics that you and I have been talking about.
The Assyriologists were willing to work with me and become part of my research because I simply asked what they could tell me about the documentation from their period on debt, land tenure, accounting and its weights and measures, and money, including the interest rates on contracts and in royal inscriptions. How did the earliest documented societies organize the building of their pyramids, palaces and city walls?...
..The greatest resistance to the discoveries resulting from my research came from the ideological prejudice against the idea that Bronze Age rulers needed to prevent the emergence of financial oligarchies. All history from the ancient Middle East through classical Greece and Rome is offensive to the modern economic and political ideology..
The Assyriologists were willing to work with me and become part of my research because I simply asked what they could tell me about the documentation from their period on debt, land tenure, accounting and its weights and measures, and money, including the interest rates on contracts and in royal inscriptions. How did the earliest documented societies organize the building of their pyramids, palaces and city walls?...
..The greatest resistance to the discoveries resulting from my research came from the ideological prejudice against the idea that Bronze Age rulers needed to prevent the emergence of financial oligarchies. All history from the ancient Middle East through classical Greece and Rome is offensive to the modern economic and political ideology..
..It was pretty easy for me to forecast interest rates and foreign exchange rates. I went around the world doing that. But what turned out to be much more difficult was trying to understand why antiquity and Western civilization followed the course that it did. That was much more difficult than being a futurist, because archaic societies and antiquity were so different from today, with different social values. The West’s polarization into creditor oligarchies was hard for me to understand, because I could not imagine how different the late Stone Age was, the Bronze Age and even classical antiquity. Their social and political systems were so fundamentally different, not just moving forward but transforming, largely as a result of the financial tensions that increased between private wealth and society’s administrative traditional governing values and authority.
And yet despite this transformation there was a common denominator, the choice between letting a financial oligarchy emerge or having a governing power strong enough to prevent that, such as the Near Eastern “divine kingship” or the so-called Greek tyrants who cancelled the personal debts and redistributed the land to lead the Greek takeoff, or modern socialist governments. It’s as if this transformation evolved from one species or genus of an economic system to another.
The mainstream Western view thinks of the past as being like today’s world, depicting us as the heirs of Greece and Rome. If that really remains our genetic political and social heritage, the West will retain the same dynamic that led to Rome’s decline and fall. What happened was that Greece and Rome – that is, Western civilization – took the Near Eastern financial innovations out of context, without having rulers empowered to cancel personal debts, and prevent oligarchies from taking over the land and monopolizing it to bring on the Dark Age.
Most people think the Greeks and Romans were democracies. But they only had short moves toward some transitory democratic voting forms. When Aristotle led a study of the various Greek constitutions, he said that they all called themselves democracies but were really oligarchies...
So if we can have the public infrastructure providing basic needs – healthcare, education, communications and transportation services, if we can have the post office, water and sewer systems as public functions provided freely or at subsidized prices, the economy can function at a much lower cost than if these services are privatized, monopolized as opportunities for rent extraction and duly financialized. The government’s business isn’t to make a profit. It is supposed to provide basic needs as a economic right.
Patten described the aim of public infrastructure as being to lower the economy’s overall cost of living and doing business so that industrialists would not have to pay their employees high enough wages to, for example, enable them to afford to pay for their own education – at $50,000 a year today – or their own healthcare at 18 percent of GDP. They would have subsidized transportation instead of letting it be monopolized and financialized as occurred in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Privatizing these hitherto public services has led them to be run for profit (largely by making monopoly rents), and even more, for capital gains for their stocks and for management fees. All this pushes up the cost of living and doing business... Everybody back in the 19th century considered called this public infrastructure to be socialism, not only the Marxists. You had Christian socialists, you had Henry George’s libertarian socialists, you had all sorts of socialists. What they had in common was that they saw the future of industrial capitalism to be an increasingly public economy with active public investment subsidizing the ability of the nation’s industrialists and labor to compete with that of other countries by lowering the cost overhead...
From the start of the Crusades in 1095 through the 16th century, the Roman Church was the unipolar organizing power over Western Europe. Popes treated secular kings as their vassals and set out to gain control of Christendom’s four other patriarchates: Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, collectively known as the Eastern Orthodox Church.
At the end of the 1st millennium Constantinople was by far the dominant power, the New Rome and hence its emperor was the “real” Roman Emperor. The old Rome and its papacy seemed to be merely vestigial holdovers of early Christianity, having sunk so low a level by the 10th century that even Catholic historians refer to the papacy as the Pornocracy (Rule of the Harlots)...
And yet despite this transformation there was a common denominator, the choice between letting a financial oligarchy emerge or having a governing power strong enough to prevent that, such as the Near Eastern “divine kingship” or the so-called Greek tyrants who cancelled the personal debts and redistributed the land to lead the Greek takeoff, or modern socialist governments. It’s as if this transformation evolved from one species or genus of an economic system to another.
The mainstream Western view thinks of the past as being like today’s world, depicting us as the heirs of Greece and Rome. If that really remains our genetic political and social heritage, the West will retain the same dynamic that led to Rome’s decline and fall. What happened was that Greece and Rome – that is, Western civilization – took the Near Eastern financial innovations out of context, without having rulers empowered to cancel personal debts, and prevent oligarchies from taking over the land and monopolizing it to bring on the Dark Age.
Most people think the Greeks and Romans were democracies. But they only had short moves toward some transitory democratic voting forms. When Aristotle led a study of the various Greek constitutions, he said that they all called themselves democracies but were really oligarchies...
..Today’s challenge is not simply to move forward along our present trajectory, but to realize a need for self-transformation into a new trajectory of social and economic evolution. The alternative is self-destruction. What kind of world are we going to create? This is not a future that can be predicted with certainty. Will the West let itself be polarized and end up like the Roman Empire did? Or will Europe realize that it has made a mistake and rejoin the rest of Eurasia? And will Asia indeed free itself from the Western-sponsored neoliberalism that has deindustrialized the NATO world? Will the BRICS and Global majority progress with socialism, or regress with the West’s libertarian free-market characteristics? ...
..Once you privatize public infrastructure or the supply of basic needs, you vastly increase the cost of living. In the 19th century, Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli proclaimed that health, public health, was the essence of his party’s reforms. It was the Conservatives that wanted that policy. And in the United States it was Simon Patten, the first economics professor at the first business school, the Wharton School, who described public infrastructure as a distinct factor of production. The landlord’s ownership claim for rent is not a factor of production but an extractive rentier claim. And unlike labor’s wages or industrial capital, public infrastructure investment and the provision of essential social services is not aimed at making a profit. The role of public infrastructure and social welfare is like that of the Erie Canal and other American infrastructure. The aim is to lower the cost of living and doing business. So if we can have the public infrastructure providing basic needs – healthcare, education, communications and transportation services, if we can have the post office, water and sewer systems as public functions provided freely or at subsidized prices, the economy can function at a much lower cost than if these services are privatized, monopolized as opportunities for rent extraction and duly financialized. The government’s business isn’t to make a profit. It is supposed to provide basic needs as a economic right.
Patten described the aim of public infrastructure as being to lower the economy’s overall cost of living and doing business so that industrialists would not have to pay their employees high enough wages to, for example, enable them to afford to pay for their own education – at $50,000 a year today – or their own healthcare at 18 percent of GDP. They would have subsidized transportation instead of letting it be monopolized and financialized as occurred in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Privatizing these hitherto public services has led them to be run for profit (largely by making monopoly rents), and even more, for capital gains for their stocks and for management fees. All this pushes up the cost of living and doing business... Everybody back in the 19th century considered called this public infrastructure to be socialism, not only the Marxists. You had Christian socialists, you had Henry George’s libertarian socialists, you had all sorts of socialists. What they had in common was that they saw the future of industrial capitalism to be an increasingly public economy with active public investment subsidizing the ability of the nation’s industrialists and labor to compete with that of other countries by lowering the cost overhead...
..So if you have an economy of privatized healthcare, education, water and other basic needs with operators charging as much as an unregulated market can bear (euphemizing this as “the magic of the marketplace”), how can the Americans or Western Europeans that have become neoliberal expect to compete with countries that are calling themselves socialist and reinventing the policy wheel by rediscovering on pragmatic lines exactly what American and German industrial capitalists did in the 19th century...
..Governments in antiquity were creditors, not debtors. Royal indebtedness occurred only with the Roman Church’s attempt to bring fellow Christian realms under control of the papacy. That required armed force, and armies required financing. The Crusades and the numerous other wars waged by the papacy were directed mainly against fellow Christians in Germany, France (the Cathars), Sicily, the Balkans and the Byzantine Empire. Arranging financing for Rome’s warlord fiefs to fight these wars initiated the financialization of the West. These loans were at interest, bringing an international merchant-banking class into being – as well as reversing Christian opposition to usury/interest. From the start of the Crusades in 1095 through the 16th century, the Roman Church was the unipolar organizing power over Western Europe. Popes treated secular kings as their vassals and set out to gain control of Christendom’s four other patriarchates: Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, collectively known as the Eastern Orthodox Church.
At the end of the 1st millennium Constantinople was by far the dominant power, the New Rome and hence its emperor was the “real” Roman Emperor. The old Rome and its papacy seemed to be merely vestigial holdovers of early Christianity, having sunk so low a level by the 10th century that even Catholic historians refer to the papacy as the Pornocracy (Rule of the Harlots)...
..The effect was to legitimize the growth of great banking families that steadily became richer by lending to kings to wage war. After the Crusades ended in 1291 the papacy’s power began its long decline. But it had brought into being a financial class, whose growth in time came to overshadow that of Rome. The main long-term effect of the papal reform movement and its Crusades thus was to reverse Christianity’s core moral teaching opposing usury in the process of creating a new imperial and intolerant Christianity...
..Modern fiscal states have the power to levy national taxes, far beyond the fiscal power of kings to pledge their own property. The modern state was created above all as a fiscal organization to which creditors would be willing to lend the money to defend itself. That is how the northern Protestant states of Europe obtained the money to fight to become independent of Europe’s Catholic monarchies. Their political structures for achieving collective liability for debts evolved into democracies. The result was more than just a new kind of state; a supra-national financial system emerged, standing above nation-states that were obliged to enact pro-creditor fiscal and legal systems in order to obtain the loans that they needed to survive or fight their wars of conquest...
,,Creditors want states to be strong enough to enforce payment to them; strong enough to put the interest of domestic and foreign creditor alliances above that of the domestic economy’s growth. So you still have the same eternal fight over what will get priority: Will the economy grow and be free, or will creditors have the “right” or power to reduce it to debt dependency? ...
..I think that the addictive drive for economic power to dominate others subject to dependency relationships as debtors, renters or trade customers, dominating and impoverishing society around them, should be the center of modern economics. We’re seeing the One Percent doing what similar elites have always tried to do. We can see why creditors like the freedom to deny liberty to their debtors, and treat this as part of the natural order. The financial sector controls most monetary wealth, and is horrified at the thought that debtors might be freed from having to pay their loans. There is almost an abhorrence at viewing Bronze Age economic history and that of early antiquity as a success story in restraining the emergence of an oligarchy to use debt leverage to impoverish the population and appropriate its self-support lands for themselves, putting house to house and plot to plot together so that no more room in the land is left for people, as the Biblical prophet Isaiah put it.
Where is the economic discussion today about how to make a mixed and balanced public-private economy? Students are indoctrinated about how to let the free market, dominated by the wealthy financial sector, operate so that let the wealthy can do whatever they want. The Romans did not need a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan to advise them about economic freedom. To Rome’s oligarchy, freedom was their right to do anything they wanted to the rest of the population.
That’s what an economically and politically privatized free market leads to. Its freedom is for the creditors and landowners to charge rent, and for monopolies to take as much as they can from their victims. This is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the other classical economists meant by a free market. They meant a market free from landlords, free from monopoly rent and free from privatized creditor power.
That basic fight to free societies from “economic rent” and its associated oligarchic rentier power has been going on ever since antiquity...
..That should be the context in which one looks at every epoch’s economic view of the world, above all its perspective concerning how “free” a market should be, and just whose freedom is being endorsed. That has been the great question throughout the history of civilization, from the Bronze Age Near East when rulers regularly proclaimed Clean Slates to restore economic order to check incipient oligarchies, through the five centuries of civil war in the Roman Republic and Jesus’s fight against the emerging Jewish oligarchy, to today’s civilizational fight between the NATO West dominated by U.S.-oriented rentier oligarchies and the global majority centered now on the BRICS. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/michael-hudson-debt-economic-collapse-and-the-ancient-world.html
On Thursday, Musk shared a post on his X (formerly Twitter) platform by another user, who cited a forecast from the US government budget for fiscal year 2025 that said that the budget deficit could increase from the current $1.8 trillion to almost $16.3 trillion by 2035. "At current rates of government spending, America is in the fast lane to bankruptcy,” Musk wrote. The tech billionaire also suggested that “government overspending is what causes inflation” in the country. https://swentr.site/news/603366-us-musk-bankruptcy-inflation/
Dr. Khaled Alser was held for at least three months at notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and remains "forcibly disappeared," according to colleagues
Dr. Khaled Alser, a highly respected Palestinian surgeon, is the lead author of The Lancet’s first medical paper to detail cases of trauma among Gazan patients and medical professionals. But he has had little opportunity to mark the occasion: On March 25, the Israel Defense Forces abducted him during a raid on his hospital and he remains in captivity, his whereabouts unconfirmed. Since his abduction, he has been held at Ofer Detention Center. He has also spent at least three months at Sde Teiman, a notorious IDF-run torture camp in the Negev Desert. A Physicians for Human Rights Israel report provided to his colleagues recently includes testimony detailing Dr. Alser’s torture and abuse at the camp, though Alser has been accused of no wrongdoing. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-doctor-tortured-lancet
When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street, but kept hold of Malak Shihab.
They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”
The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her ready to fire at whoever might be inside. One door wouldn’t open, and in her desperation to obey, the girl remembers hammering on it with her head...
They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”
The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her ready to fire at whoever might be inside. One door wouldn’t open, and in her desperation to obey, the girl remembers hammering on it with her head...
..“Mowing the grass” it is called, by certain Israeli generals and pundits, and the cynical phrase is repeated on the West Bank by Palestinians with added irony as they are well aware they are the “grass”. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/31/trauma-in-the-west-bank-after-israeli-raids-palestinian-territory
"The U.S. is providing the bombs for this genocide," said one plaintiff. "I have lost countless friends and neighbors... When will the courts uphold the law and stop the horror?" https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-genocide-case
Israeli political commentator Sri Goldberg has said Netanyahu should be “worried” about the unrest, explaining that the deaths of the hostages made it clear to many that “the policy of Israel’s government is profoundly detrimental to Israelis – and perhaps, in the case of the hostages, even lethal.”
Meanwhile, Hamas claimed that the hostages were “deliberately” killed by the IDF. In a video addressed to the Israeli army following the recovery of the bodies, the Qassam Brigade insisted that “they were alive and were supposed to be released in the first phase of the deal.” https://swentr.site/news/603371-israel-protests-hamas-hostages/
US to give Zelensky ‘free hand’ on strikes deep inside Russia – Moscow
Washington has effectively become a party to the Ukraine conflict, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova has said https://swentr.site/news/603285-ukraine-us-weapons-zakharova/
New York Police Planning Mass 'Sick Leave' On Trump Sentencing Day? MAGA Claim Viral https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/new-york-police-unions-planning-mass-sick-leave-on-donald-trump-sentencing-day-maga-claim-viral-article-112938167
UPDATED: NOT STATE GUARD, FEDERAL TROOPS ! ! ! ! Reports: New York Deploying National Guard for Trump Sentencing on Sept 18 - CLAIM Trump to be IMPRISONED that day - Fear Riots to ensue
Is The Military Buildup in NYC There to Assist Throwing President Trump in Prison?
"Not The Type Of Character You Want" In High Office - Tim Walz's Brother Slams VP Candidate https://www.zerohedge.com/political/not-type-character-you-want-high-office-tim-walzs-brother-slams-vp-candidate
France stoops to hostage-taking of Telegram’s Pavel Durov
French Party Leader Warns Telegram CEO's Life May Be in Danger [His brother, safe in Dubai, is the actual tech-wizard who knows stuff.]
Ye-won, a healthy young girl, died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage caused by the Covid mRNA injection she received. https://slaynews.com/news/father-expresses-deep-regret-forcing-daughter-take-covid-shot-killed-her/
Meanwhile, Hamas claimed that the hostages were “deliberately” killed by the IDF. In a video addressed to the Israeli army following the recovery of the bodies, the Qassam Brigade insisted that “they were alive and were supposed to be released in the first phase of the deal.” https://swentr.site/news/603371-israel-protests-hamas-hostages/
Washington has effectively become a party to the Ukraine conflict, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova has said https://swentr.site/news/603285-ukraine-us-weapons-zakharova/
Numerous reports have begun coming-in saying large numbers of New York National Guard Troops are being brought into hotels around the Courthouse in Manhattan, in preparation for the IMPRISONMENT of President Trump on Sept. 18 at his Sentencing.
Word came from a federal law enforcement source saying New York State Judge Juan Merchan, whose daughter collected hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in political consulting work from Democrats during the Trump Trial, will order Trump taken to jail at the Sentencing on September 18. Trump will reportedly be taken to Riker's Island jail at that time.
Additional claims from that same federal law enforcement source say New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, fear that New York Police will engage in a "Sick Out" on that date, because all the police officers KNOW the trial was a complete sham, they want no part in persecuting Trump. https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news-selections/national-news/reports-new-york-deploying-national-guard-for-trump-sentencing-on-sept-18-claim-trump-to-be-imprisoned-that-day-fear-riots-to-ensue
Word came from a federal law enforcement source saying New York State Judge Juan Merchan, whose daughter collected hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in political consulting work from Democrats during the Trump Trial, will order Trump taken to jail at the Sentencing on September 18. Trump will reportedly be taken to Riker's Island jail at that time.
Additional claims from that same federal law enforcement source say New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, fear that New York Police will engage in a "Sick Out" on that date, because all the police officers KNOW the trial was a complete sham, they want no part in persecuting Trump. https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news-selections/national-news/reports-new-york-deploying-national-guard-for-trump-sentencing-on-sept-18-claim-trump-to-be-imprisoned-that-day-fear-riots-to-ensue
Jason Goodman found the army had taken over a public New York City hotel, and he was not allowed to tape...
Laura Loomer reported last night that NYC is preparing to imprison President Trump in a kangaroo, unconstitutional, criminal, corrupted, NY Court on felonies that are not crimes in any county in the nation (i.e. you cannot be charged with a felony for receiving a letter in the mail and yet President Trump is charged with 11 felonies for saying he did this – he never did and these are not crimes). https://joehoft.com/is-the-military-buildup-in-nyc-there-to-assist-throwing-president-trump-in-prison/At a time when the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has entered a disastrous phase of defeat, the Western elite must shut down all and every critical media. https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/30/france-stoops-hostage-taking-telegram-pavel-durov/
The life of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was released on bail this week as he faces a potential trial in France, might be in danger, Florian Philippot, the leader of The Patriots party, said on Saturday.
The politician referred to reports by French media, which claimed that the billionaire tech entrepreneur had been approached by French intelligence agents while in Dubai and that he had refused to share classified information.
"Day after day, the puzzle of [French President Emmanuel] Macron's delirious persistence against Pavel Durov, after having coaxed him, takes shape … Let's not forget that Macron has been using Telegram extensively with his teams for a long time, and that he feared ‘leaks’... Pavel Durov should really be careful, his life may be in danger!" Philippot said on X. https://sputnikglobe.com/20240831/french-party-leader-warns-telegram-ceos-life-may-be-in-danger-1119973143.html
The politician referred to reports by French media, which claimed that the billionaire tech entrepreneur had been approached by French intelligence agents while in Dubai and that he had refused to share classified information.
"Day after day, the puzzle of [French President Emmanuel] Macron's delirious persistence against Pavel Durov, after having coaxed him, takes shape … Let's not forget that Macron has been using Telegram extensively with his teams for a long time, and that he feared ‘leaks’... Pavel Durov should really be careful, his life may be in danger!" Philippot said on X. https://sputnikglobe.com/20240831/french-party-leader-warns-telegram-ceos-life-may-be-in-danger-1119973143.html
Drank the Kool-Aid, Hillary? Vaxxed and boosted? Clinton Drops Out Of Harris Fundraiser In The Hamptons After Getting Covid https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/clinton-drops-out-of-kamala-harris-fundraiser-in-the-hamptons-after-getting-covid/
From 3/22/2022, Hillary Clinton Tests Positive For Covid, Says She’s “More Grateful Than Ever” For Vaccines https://deadline.com/2022/03/hillary-clinton-positive-covid-1234984613/
A devastated father has issued a statement expressing his deep regret at forcing his young daughter to take the Covid mRNA shot that killed her.
The father, Yi Geun-jae from the town of Pyeongtaek, South Korea, has issued a video statement with a warning for others about the dangers of blindly trusting government advice.Ye-won, a healthy young girl, died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage caused by the Covid mRNA injection she received. https://slaynews.com/news/father-expresses-deep-regret-forcing-daughter-take-covid-shot-killed-her/
COVID never killed healthy kids. It takes a "vaccine" to do that. $3,000 and a Toy: Novavax Dangles Incentives to Fill Clinical Trials on COVID Shots for Babies, Kids
The “Hummingbird” trial is testing two primary shots and a booster shot of Novavax’s adjuvanted recombinant spike protein nanoparticle vaccine in children. The trial is enrolling 3,600 children from the U.S. and other countries. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/novavax-covid-vaccine-trial-infants-children/Ten years after a whistleblower at the CDC leaked data showing the agency identified a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in African American boys, the agency has done nothing to address the issue. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-whistleblower-mmr-vaccine-autism-link/
Steve Kirsch, Legal updates: US and New Zealand
Kansas is the first of 5 states to file suit against Pfizer. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, they've spent $2M to prosecute whistleblower Barry Young and $0 to analyze their own data for safety signals. https://kirschsubstack.com/p/legal-updates-us-and-new-zealand Steve Kirsch, The New Zealand COVID vaccine data shows that the shots make you more likely to die
Have you seen any analysis of the NZ data posted by any prominent epidemiologist showing it is safe? I haven't and it's been almost 1 year since I set the data free. https://kirschsubstack.com/p/the-new-zealand-covid-vaccine-dataThe DOJ attorney who defended the FDA when doctors sued the agency over its anti-ivermectin social media posts during the COVID-19 pandemic admitted the FDA’s war against ivermectin was an abuse of governmental authority, according to an investigation by Project Veritas. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/fda-war-on-ivermectin-doj-attorney-project-veritas/
William Makis MD, IVERMECTIN should be given to all advanced Breast Cancer patients - outperforms chemo Paclitaxel and kills Cancer Stem Cells! https://makismd.substack.com/p/ivermectin-should-be-given-to-all
Nothing is perfect, but helping is good: Cancer researcher: IVERMECTIN can overcome chemotherapy resistance of TURBO CANCERS caused by mRNA vaccines https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-08-30-ivermectin-overcome-chemo-resistant-mrna-caused-cancers.html
Colin Todhunter, The War on Food and the War on Humanity: Platforms of Control and the Unbreakable Spirit
A major change that we have seen in recent years is the increasing dominance of cloud-based services and platforms. In the food and agriculture sector, we are seeing the rollout of these phenomena tied to a techno solutionist ‘data-driven’ or ‘precision’ agriculture legitimised by ‘humanitarian’ notions of ‘helping farmers’, ‘saving the planet’ and ‘feeding the world’ in the face of some kind of impending Malthusian catastrophe. A part-fear mongering, part-self-aggrandisement narrative promoted by those who have fuelled ecological devastation, corporate dependency, land dispossession, food insecurity and farmer indebtedness as a result of the global food regime that they helped to create and profited from. Now, with a highly profitable but flawed carbon credit trading scheme and a greenwashed technology-driven eco-modernism, they are going to save humanity from itself...
..Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, argues that what we are seeing is a shift from capitalism to technofeudalism. He argues that tech giants like Apple, Meta and Amazon act as modern-day feudal lords. Users of digital platforms (such as companies or farmers) essentially become ‘cloud serfs’, and ‘rent’ (fees, data etc) is extracted from them for being on a platform.
In feudalism (land) rent drives the system. In capitalism, profits drive the system. Varoufakis says that markets are being replaced by algorithmic ‘digital fiefdoms’.
Although digital platforms require some form of capitalist production, as companies like Amazon need manufacturers to produce goods for their platforms, the new system represents a significant shift in power dynamics, favouring those who own and control the platforms... the changes we are seeing are having profound impacts on economies and populations that are increasingly surveilled as they are compelled to shift their lives online...
..Elected officials are facilitating this by putting the needs of monopolistic global interests ahead of ordinary people’s personal freedoms and workers’ rights, as well as the needs of independent local producers, enterprises and markets... In feudalism (land) rent drives the system. In capitalism, profits drive the system. Varoufakis says that markets are being replaced by algorithmic ‘digital fiefdoms’.
Although digital platforms require some form of capitalist production, as companies like Amazon need manufacturers to produce goods for their platforms, the new system represents a significant shift in power dynamics, favouring those who own and control the platforms... the changes we are seeing are having profound impacts on economies and populations that are increasingly surveilled as they are compelled to shift their lives online...
..Genuine approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces are being ignored by policymakers or cynically attacked by corporate lobbyists. These solutions involve systemic shifts in agricultural, food and economic systems with a focus on low consumption (energy) lifestyles, localisation and an ecologically sustainable agroecology...
..This is something discussed in the recent article From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia in which it is argued that co-operative labour, fellowship and our long-standing spiritual connection to the land should inform how as a society we should live.....However, what we are seeing is an agenda based on a different set of values rooted in a lust for power and money and the total subjugation of ordinary people being rammed through under the false promise of techno solutionism (transhumanism, vaccines in food, neural laces to detect moods implanted in the skull, programmable digital money, track and trace technology etc.) and some distant notion of a techno utopia that leave malevolent power relations intact and unchallenged. https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-food-war-humanity-control/5866768
Meryl Nass MD, How to Protect Your Food and Medical Freedoms/ Brownstone https://merylnass.substack.com/p/how-to-protect-your-food-and-medical
The Attack on Food and Farmers, and How to Fight Back, September 6 & 7, 2024, via Door To Freedom and Children's Health Defense, livestream and recordings: Full program list here. I'm right after lunch on Day 2, "Preparing Your Kitchen Garden" https://doortofreedom.org/
Armed With Vegetables (pictured with Jenny and banana patch)
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