Renegade Inc: And Forgive Them Their Debts

[Music] welcome to renegade in the show that allows us to think differently for millennia we've been told that Jesus Christ died for our sins but what if as a social reformer Jesus was killed because he was talking about reforming the economics of his day so much focus on sin hasn't left much room for theologians to talk about Jesus thoughts on economic justice someone who has thought about the economics of ancient societies is Professor Michael Hudson he's written a book called forgive them their debts in which he argues that it was debt that Jesus really wanted to do away with in fact writing off debt has been a cornerstone of economic reform for millennia so we went to New York to hear from Michael about how ancient debt principles have never been more relevant today [Music] Michael always a pleasure sitting here in New York with you in your hometown and we always research you obviously and one of the things that we found out more recently is something entirely unique that viewers won't know which is you're one of the first ever writers on Saturday Night Live is this true yes I wrote the LaRouche evening theater with Al Franken and some of the others they wanted to do a parody of Lyndon LaRouche his view of the world and they were worried that somebody was going to sue them so they had me go through the EEI are there a nutty publication they did it on the night that Oprah Winfrey was hosting Saturday Night Live they did it as the last skit and I think Al Franken played Henry Kissinger acting as a mule carrying dope for the Queen of England LaRue sued as we expected the NBC I think for a million dollars the jury ended up giving an award of two million dollars to NBC for the harassment of LaRouche because everything they did we took directly from the e IR and so that was my bit of comedy superstar economist and also brilliant comedy writer huh so a different bit of writing is your latest book not many jokes in your new book which is forgiven their debts why did you write it and what's this sort of central thesis well I went to a meeting for the United Nations in Mexico City in 1979 on third-world north/south debt I was an advisor to unit are the United Nations Institute for training and research that was following a third world debt and my I'd learned already on Wall Street at Chase Manhattan Bank that the third world most Latin American countries in African countries were absolutely at their limit they couldn't pay any more debts and I realized that the deaths had to be canceled I gave a speech there and there was literally a riot after it there was a man who I think was a CIA plant who was a reporter and who said after I gave my speech that I'd said that the third world would have to work hard to repay that so I stood up and demanded apology from the President of Mexico for permitting a CIA American operative to misrepresent falsify what I was saying I pulled out the American delegation I pulled out the Canadian delegation we all walked out and didn't know what was going to happen but I realized that the people had difficulty understanding the idea that most debts couldn't be paid and that that was natural that every economy tends to get out of balance and develop a larger amount of debt that can be paid and the question is what happened then so I decided since I was advocating by that time a debt cancellation for third world countries that I was going to write a history of debt cancellations and it took me about a year to go all the way back in time to Greece and Rome Holland's debt cancellations founding the athenian democracy the spartans debt cancellation the seventh century greek tyrants debt cancellation i realized that there was hints of something in Babylonia and Sumer people were deferred to the Jubilee law of Leviticus 25 in this Center of Mosaic law I'm Jewish law reflecting Babylonian law and there was no economic history of the ancient Near East no economic history of Sumer and Babylonia the popular histories were all about Sumerian literature writing how modern they were and I didn't read cuneiform but I wouldn't have helped if I did because the translations of the Sumerian and the Babylonian debt cancellations were different in every single language the American Samuel Kramer said that when aruch Agena cancelled the Sumerian debts and around 2200 BC this was a tax reduction and he wrote a letter to the New York Times when Ronald Reagan was elected saying Ronald Reagan do what Erica Dana didn't cancel the debts for the rich people this was exactly the opposite Jim well I then began to collect all the debt cancellations I could find from Sumer Babylonia I mentioned it to a friend of mine at the Peabody Museum I was almost immediately made a research associate in Babylonian archaeology in 1984 the Peabody Museum at Harvard and we decided to create a colloquium that would write an economic history of the ancient Near East a debt was really the imbalance in the various sectors of the economy so you had to discuss how did the economy operate and what was the role of debt and why did rulers throughout the bronze age every Bronze Age ruler we know what was their logic and canceling the debts when they'd take take the throne or when there was a route or a flood or reasons to cancel the debt and why didn't the rest of Western civilization follow suit but that's the point isn't it so the impetus really was looking at the problems the societal problems that we have today specifically linked to death and what you want to I've gone out and done and done brilliantly is give the historical context to this because in a sense what we're saying as a modern civilization is that we're so advanced we've got smartphones and all the rest of it we don't actually need to learn any of the lessons of history there is an act of hatred and opposition of history before Greece and Rome and especially on the left this is the case one of the worst offenders was Moses hit Finley said the Near East has nothing to do with Western civilization well the fact is almost all of the techniques of economic enterprise weights and measures mythology all of this comes from the Near East and that is expurgated from the history because the very thought of debt cancellation as preserving stability rather than causing a disaster is anathema to the Chicago School to the bankers to the to the Economics Department of the university so the victors in in some respects have rewritten the history because and there's been an amnesia to say actually we don't need any of that stuff we just need to not an amnesia almost an act of cutting out in a brain surgery to exclude so a frontal lobotomy really and you got rid of all that and and and just define the Near East a country wise why are we talking about Iraq which was southern Iraq was basically Sumer going north along the Euphrates that turns up in this area and the colonies of up into Anatolia which is now central Turkey and then further eastward you have what is now Iran looking back over this history and reading the book you can't ever divorce a theology obviously from this treatment that you've written I don't know any clergyman clergy women who've ever been through a theological school and ever had any kind of briefing or insight into the economics of for instance Jesus why is that economists don't talk about religion or a society or anything about how to trade in a market and theologians act as if religions all about religion and Evon and sex and debt is left out why is that because if religious leaders are interested in social justice as Jesus was then it turns out you can have to talk a little bit about economics well I think part of the reason is when they translated the Bible into English German and the vernacular they didn't know what many of the words meant and so they didn't understand that most of the Bible was redacted by the returnees from the Babylonian captivity and people who came back from Babylon and what they brought back from Babylon was this concept of a debt cancellation under our on a clean slate and the Hebrew word was drawer and in the Bible you'll have other words for the clean slate for the Jubilee year of Leviticus 25 they didn't realize that when the word gospel was said the good news the good news was there's going to be a debt cancellation they didn't realize that the Ten Commandments were very largely about debt that one shall not covet the neighbor's wife that means you don't make a loan to the guy so that he has to pledge his wife is a debt slave to her so that you can have your way with it but but no dinerral II that guests just translates it as adultery yes adultery but they didn't get that the vehicle for all of this was debt that thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain mean if you are you can swear that so-and-so owes you the money and he didn't that all of this had to do with the great destabilizing factor in society in the 1st millennium BC which was debts beyond the ability to be paid leading to bondage of the debtor and ultimately to forfeiture of the land to wealthy people who were beginning to group the lands all together and as Isaiah said lot the plot and the house the house until there are no more people left in the land and nobody to fight against the Assyrian Assyrian Empire that did cancel the debts at the neo-assyrian empire held itself together by canceling the deaths regularly and after them the Persians and the Babylonian Empire we have their debt cancellations and Herodotus talked about it but these are all looked at is somehow anomalies there's a and you have had a work by some professor at a Yale University that tried to write a history of money and I discussed that and he talked about the market crash of something like 1782 BC he said there had to be a market crash because the debts were all canceled I guess the ruler must have run into debt and he couldn't pay so he cancelled the debts not realizing that the palace was the creditor not the debtor and this was done by Hammurabi and by everybody repeatedly in order to maintain stability so you have the economics profession denying in principle that debt can be a destabilizing factor they assume that all debts can be paid and that has never been the case at any point in history so if you would have members of the Chicago School or the mainstream economists today get in a time machine go back to Greece or Rome or Judea or Sumer a Babylonians say we we have some advice for you here's how to organize a society that society would have polarized very quickly the population would have fallen into debt for the creditors the land would be monopolized the kings would be overthrown by a democracy meaning ruled by the rich people turning into an oligarchy is Aristotle and Plato and Socrates explained and you'd have instability in the land but very quickly either be conquered by other countries or the the people would just defect to whoever was going to overthrow their rotten mafiosi running the country [Music] in the book forgive them that's the idea really in modern theological thinking is forgive them their sins how come you've replaced the word debts with sins in every language the indo-european language sholde in German but also in Hebrew and the Babylonian language the word for sin and debt is the same and from anthropology there is a very clear explanation of this if you injure somebody you would have to pay reparations or else you would have feud justice so the result for creating an offense a sin is to pay the reparations debt and you would have the depth and the reparations were two sides of the same coin but in English it's been a more reductionist to do translation it's just that word debt and of course that then is yes because at that point the very thought of forgive them their debts is not something the translator of the Bible and their sponsors looked at very happily on and the very thought of Jesus coming and saying I have come to cancel your debts not to save you from the sin you can imagine that this was not how to make the Bible a best-seller so my name is Sarah Jane Clifton I am director of TV debt campaign where UK charity working to tackle poverty caused by unjust debt through research education and campaigning we came out of the UK campaigning in the 90s in response to the wave of debt crisis which hit countries in Africa Asia and Latin America all those you know color realism formally ended it left in place an extremely unequal a set of economic relations between countries so a lot of the debt that countries in Africa Asia and Latin America with a facing in the 80s and 90s was debt which had been learnt very irresponsibly by European and US banks very often to corrupt dictatorships have been spent on very repressive activities often like you know on military operations to repress the population or the money had gone missing governments in the global South trying to you know tackle urgent issues around poverty and trying to develop their economies have got no option but to borrow so we're campaigning at the moment for quite a simple change which would just say that when a bank lends money to a government it has to declare it within 30 days of that happening and that is just a really basic starting point which was allows civil society in borrowing countries to hold their governments to account a significant amount of debt right off is already written into the the business models of the banks and the lenders so when a country is in debts distress quite often its lenders will sell on its debt a dramatically reduced rates and there are hedge funds called vulture funds whose business model is really geared towards purchasing that debt when it's really cheap and then using very expensive litigation to extract the full amount from the borrower a big part of our work is coming painting to prevent debt crises in the first place but when debts have built up to the point that they're unsustainable or whether undermining people's basic human rights we think the only moral responses for those debts to be written off you mentioned the translators of the Bible you also mentioned the sponsors of the translators of the Bible are these the old vested interests that Templars in the 12th century developed the whole concept of banking and credit and foreclosure and lending against the land and taking the land out of the community in order to pay the Templars and the hospital ease the to banking orders so the whole religion if you read Matthew Parris another twelve thirteen fourteen century writers it was all about the papacy treated England like the European Union treats Greece demanding Peter's pence demanding all sorts of debt service to the Italian bankers that attached themselves to the papacy like the IMF and the European Central Bank will do to Greece and so obviously the whole idea that payment that should have priority instead of society having priority has become a distinguishing feature of Western civilization in its exact opposite of the origins of civilization and is what you're saying implicit in that is that modern civilization is actually following Rome and Roman civilization Western civilization made in abrupt detour with Rome Rome was never a democracy and the the thought that it was a democracy the votes were weighted according to land holding rights and how much land and money you had so it was very much like today the donor class ran the votes not the actual voters who had very little impact Rome destroyed Greece militarily first at the end of the third century when it was called in to help fight against the two kings of Sparta Aegis and Cleo - who cancelled the debts and were killed for it as followed by novice who also was destroyed Rome began to destroy northern Greece at that time and Sparta it then destroyed Athens and Corinth and the middle of the second century BC and then during the Mithra Datuk wars the Roman dictator to be Sola looted Athens looted Asia Minor paid his army to come back to Rome and make himself dictator that was his official title and rewrote the Constitution and murdered thousands of his enemies bought up their property at fire sale prices for himself and for his cronies like Crassus who became the richest man in Rome after sulla and Rome became bequeathed its legacy of creditor oriented law to subsequent Western Europe Aristotle said that all democracies tend to evolve into oligarchy the oligarchy makes itself hereditary as it's made itself today the first thing the rich people do the oligarchy once they get rid of the kings get rid of the tyrants get rid of any central government that could tax or regulate them is the untaxed themselves they deregulate the economy and they do what Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did they create an economy run for the rich people and then they expurgate they rewrite history to say there is no alternative as if it's always been that way and that's what modern history is it there is no alternative and that's why they very thought that Sumer Babylonia Persia the whole Near East survived keeping stability keeping their population free from debt bondage free from slavery century after century millennia after millennia that is treated is anathema as if it couldn't happen the Babylonian and Sumerian rulers had in effect an economic model that was much more sophisticated than any model that is used by any government today they knew the economy grew in an s-curve they also calculated how fast does debt grow they all knew the debts grew faster than the ability to pay and so when any new ruler would take the throne they would cancel the debts proclaim a clean slate liberate the debond servants and return lands that had been forfeited by debtors to their creditors to restore a independent self-supporting peasantry that could serve in the army and provide the core of a labor duties which built up all of the public infrastructure what would be the modern-day equivalent of that how would that look would you just go to the student loan market or the student debt market and forgive all those debts well would you go to the mortgage market and say actually you know you can own your house free and clear what would you do if you were in that position well the kind of debts that were forgiven or only the personal debts not the business debts you wouldn't forgive the student debt and you'd forgive the credit card debt and the personal debt what about the you stone absolutely not if you would cancel the mortgage debts of the large landowners today people like Donald Trump and the large absentee owners would all of a sudden be the richest people in the world because now they bought all their property with very little money down all with borrowed money and they would become like the landlord class that dominated Europe in the Dark Ages so you would essentially the debt cancel a clean slate would be to turn over all the property to its current users to its current occupants they would all have them free of debt but the rental value of property would all be taxed appropriately as it was essentially an antiquity so with what we've is that the Romans were basically neoliberal Babylonia had a land value type and the key of neoliberalism is you have to kill everybody who's not a neoliberal who doesn't share your belief that was Roman neoliberalism there was mass murder but is that not today American foreign policy yes that's why you have the that's history of American support of Latin America the pudding and the dictators that was Hillary Clinton's policy in Honduras deflating to the mayor sex exodus of Honduras America has supported dictators as long as there are dictators do you find it ironic that the usual American foreign policy response has failed in Syria specifically that bit of the world when we're talking in these terms not ironic it's inevitable I mean essentially America wanted to control the oil resources of the Near East thinking that since the 19th century GDP per capita and energy use per capita are parallel and they think if we can control energy then we can put sanctions on any country that doesn't let us buy into their commanding heights that doesn't let us buy and privatize their infrastructure any country that doesn't follow the doctrine of Margaret Thatcher Ronald Reagan and the Chicago boys will just starve them out we won't given them food they won't give them the energy and so the Americans policy since the 80s has been to use Isis's their Foreign Legion to use the Sunni crazies to smash every country and saying look we will do to you what we did to Libya what we did do Iraq and what we're doing to Syria if you don't follow our orders with the thesis that you provided in the historical context that you've written about how do you begin to use that to influence American foreign policy and influence the economics tradition to start saying look we can't just keep going around the world smashing it up because ultimately that's not in anybody's interest it is in the interest of the ruling class yeah but it absolutely is it's in the interest of the government you have to tell people there are two interests there the interests of the creditor class that ends up doing to the Western world what Rome did to antiquity destroying it and looting it and also because many people consider themselves to be Christians you say by the way here is what we now can translate the Bible and not only do we know what Jesus said from Luke that he his message was to cancel the debts but the Dead Sea Scrolls which were the library of the Temple of Jerusalem that they left for safekeeping we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls how all about them Melchizedek the followers were all about preserving this Leviticus 25 the Jubilee year you say this was supposed to be the foundation document of what you call Western Judaism and Christianity and all of a sudden you have made a travesty was Jesus an economic reformer of course that's what his message was and you you get it in his parables again and again when he went back to his hometown to the temple to the synagogue to give a sermon he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah that said I've come to proclaim the year of the Lord and Jesus said that's what I'm that is my mission here and the people got so upset they drove him out of town they didn't like him and the Pharisee said we got to get rid of this guy Luke then said the Pharisees love money you know they didn't like him and their rabbinical school leader Hallel had developed something called a prose bowl that said I waive all of my rights under the jubilee year when I signed this contract but in other words he fought hel-hello in the rabbinical school rejected the entirety of the Jewish Bible they were the atheists of their time so Judaism since Hillel has been essentially pro creditor there's been that strain in it Maimonides and other people tried to restore the jubilee year but that has been sort of subordinated to the history and obviously the Christians are no more eager even less eager to say this was a message of Jesus to proclaim the Jubilee year and cancel the debts not what oligarchy wants to do was Jesus a land reformer he didn't speak at that point about land reform but when he said he'd come to proclaim the Jubilee what that meant was returning the lamb to this debtor who had forfeited it to the foreclosing creditor that was part of the Jubilee as it was in Babylonia the wording for the Jubilee year in Leviticus 25 was word for word the same as Hammurabi and other Babylonian rulers had used in their clean slate proclamations so what you did was judaism simply took over the babylonian background and so what I've tried to do in the book is show that there was a continuity from the Near East through Judaism to early Christianity do you think Jesus was a socialist that's what Carole kelskiy wrote yes in today he would be called a socialist because he advocated a mixed economy there had to be a check to the power of the independent oligarchy and without checks and balances you're going to have a one-sided oligarchic take over Jesus was saying exactly what Socrates had said in the Republic but just a very similar reasoning although they didn't read Socrates but it was spontaneously I mean it was sort of obvious from the logic of the time Michael Hudson thank you very much for good to be here [Music] [Music] you

Channel: RT UK

Views: 19,455

Rating: 4.8948903 out of 5

Keywords: RT (TV Network), Russia Today, RT UK, News, Britain, Politics, Renegade Inc, Michael Hudson, Jesus, Christianity, economic justice

Id: XpG_BCDQ-jE

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/jollyroger1720]

Amen to that. Now comes the funny part where "christians" defend money lenders and "conservatives" argue in favor of socialized loan sharking