"remember there are thousands of records showing (debt forgiving was a) solution that was employed in #Babylon: "
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" An important role of palace rulers, for instance, was to prevent interest-bearing debt – and subsequent foreclosure, especially by palace revenue collectors – from stripping away the citizenry’s basic means of self-support. Royal “clean slates” preserved economic solvency by annulling agrarian “barley” debts (but not commercial “silver” debts), reversing land forfeitures and freeing debt pledges from bondage. This meant that indebted citizens could lose their liberty and self-support lands only temporarily.
The Near East thus managed to avert the debt problem that plagued classical antiquity. Although debt forced war widows and orphans into dependency and obliged the sick, infirm or others to pledge and then lose their land’s crop rights to creditors at the top of the economic pyramid, such forfeitures were limited to merely temporary duration (viz. the Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25 and its Babylonian antecedents). But they became permanent in Greece and Rome, reducing much of the population to the status of bondservants and unfree dependents.
This is primarily what distinguishes the Greek and Roman oligarchies from the Near Eastern mixed economies. It proved much easier to cancel debts owed to the palace and its collectors in Mesopotamia than to annul debts owed to individual creditors acting on their own in classical times.
Debt was the lever that made the land transferable in traditional societies, which usually had restrictions to prevent self-support land from being alienated outside of the family or clan. (Hudson and Levine 1999 gives examples.) By holding that the essence of private property is its ability to be sold or forfeited irreversibly, Roman law removed the archaic checks to foreclosure that prevented property from being concentrated in the hands of the few. In practice, this Roman concept of property is essentially creditor-oriented, and quickly became predatory.
Wealthy Greek and Roman families controlled handicraft production, trade and credit directly rather than coordinating these activities via the temples and palaces. Yet classical antiquity’s aristocratic attitude viewed commercial enterprise as demeaning and corrupting. The details of trade and enterprise typically were left to outsiders or to slaves and other subordinates acting as on-the-spot managers, organizers and middlemen.
Most enterprising individuals were drawn from the bottom ranks of the social scale, typified by the fictional but paradigmatic freedman Trimalchio in Petronius’s comedy dating from the time of Augustus. “The greater a man’s dignitas,” D’Arms (1981:45) has pointed out, “the more likely that his involvement [in business] was indirect and discreet, camouflaged behind that of an undistinguished freedman, – client, partner, ‘front man,’ or ‘friend,’” and leaving management of their affairs to slaves or other subordinates.
Although we might expect Romans at the high end of the economic spectrum to have enormous personal fortunes corresponding to the city-state’s great riches (parasitic as these may have been), Heichelheim (1970:125) notes that its leading families spent beyond their means, running up catastrophic debts in their drive for status and power. This behavior “finds no analogy at the time of the Golden Age of Greece either among private individuals or among princes.”
In light of this longue durée, the problem for economic historians is to explain why commerce and enterprise yielded to a Dark Age. What stifled enterprise thousands of years after the Near Eastern takeoff? For a century the culprit was assumed to be state regulation. But, it was the temples and palaces of Sumer and Babylonia that first introduced most basic commercial innovations, including the first formal prices and markets. The collapse of antiquity can be traced more to oligarchies capturing the state and dismantling the checks and balances that had kept economies in the Near East from polarizing to so fatal an extent between creditors and debtors, patrons and their clients, free men and slaves.
The ascent of Rome saw laws become more creditor-oriented and property appropriations more irreversible, while the tax burden was shifted increasingly onto the lower orders.
There are actually considerably fewer records from Rome, which means we have to think why Everything is wrong:
Quote ...twenty-first century globalists, have been morally blinded by a dark legacy of some twenty-eight centuries of decontextualized history. This has left us, for all practical purposes, utterly ignorant of the corrective civilizational model that is needed to save ourselves from tottering into bleak neo-feudal barbarism.
This corrective model actually existed and flourished in the economic functioning of Mesopotamian societies during the third and second millennia B.C. It can be termed Clean Slate amnesty...
...amargi and níg-si-sá in Sumerian, andurārum and mīšarum in Akkadian (the language of Babylonia), šudūtu and kirenzi in Hurrian, para tarnumar in Hittite, and deror (דְּרוֹר) in Hebrew: It is the necessary and periodic erasure of the debts of small farmers — necessary because such farmers are, in any society in which interest on loans is calculated, inevitably subject to being impoverished, then stripped of their property, and finally reduced to servitude (including the sexual servitude of daughters and wives) by their creditors, creditors. The latter inevitably seek to effect the terminal polarization of society into an oligarchy of predatory creditors cannibalizing a sinking underclass mired in irreversible debt peonage.
In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite...
For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists.
Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail.
The true roots of Western Civilization lie not in the Greek poleis that lacked royal oversight to cancel debts, but in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian societies that understood how life, liberty and land would be cyclically restored to debtors again and again. But, in the eighth century B.C., along with the alphabet coming from the Near East to the Greeks, so came the concept of calculating interest on loans. This concept of exponentially-increasing interest was adopted by the Greeks — and subsequently by the Romans — without the balancing concept of Clean Slate amnesty.
So it was inevitable that, over the centuries of Greek and Roman history, increasing numbers of small farmers became irredeemably indebted and lost their land. It likewise was inevitable that their creditors amassed huge land holdings and established themselves in parasitic oligarchies. This innate tendency to social polarization arising from debt unforgiveness is the original and incurable curse on our post-eighth-century-B.C. Western Civilization, the lurid birthmark that cannot be washed away or excised.
For centuries English-speakers have recited the Lord’s Prayer with the assumption that they were merely asking for the forgiveness of their trespasses, their theological sins: “… and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….” is the translation presented in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. What is lost in translation is the fact that Jesus came “to preach the gospel to the poor … to preach the acceptable Year of the Lord”: He came, that is, to proclaim a Jubilee Year, a restoration of deror for debtors: He came to institute a Clean Slate Amnesty (which is what Hebrew דְּרוֹר connotes in this context).
So consider the passage from the Lord’s Prayer literally: … καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν: “… and send away (ἄφες) for us our debts (ὀφειλήματα).” The Latin translation is not only grammatically identical to the Greek, but also shows the Greek word ὀφειλήματα revealingly translated as debita: … et dimitte nobis debita nostra: “… and discharge (dimitte) for us our debts (debita).” There was consequently, on the part of the creditor class, a most pressing and practical reason to have Jesus put to death: He was demanding that they restore the property they had rapaciously taken from their debtors. And after His death there was likewise a most pressing and practical reason to have His Jubilee proclamation of a Clean Slate Amnesty made toothless, that is to say, made merely theological: So the rich could continue to oppress the poor, forever and ever. Amen.
Judaism or Jesus, you can find the same message as the Babylonian. Same thing. Why might Jews be notorious for rebelling against the Romans?
To put it more blandly and Encyclopedicly:
Quote In order for a Mesopotamian monarch to fulfill his duty to the gods to shepherd his people properly, he was expected to bring about reform of abuses. Some rulers considered themselves reformers when they declared in royal pronouncements that they would fashion laws to make society more just and equitable. These kings maintained that they had a religious obligation as a trustee of their deity to protect their people and restore order so that the strong would not oppress the weak; widows and orphans would be cared for; and the poor would be released from their debts. The earliest attested reform document was issued by Uru’inimgina of Lagash, circa 2400 b.c.e. During the Old Babylonian period (circa 1894 - circa 1595 b.c.e.), some kings are known to have declared that, as the gods’ trustee, they would restore order by reducing burdensome debt. In the prologue to his laws, Hammurabi (circa 1792 - circa 1750 b.c.e.) stated that as the “pious prince, who venerates the gods,” he had a duty “to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.” He also claimed that he quelled rebellion, guided his people, established justice, and enhanced the well-being of his people. The ruler who claimed to have instituted equity called himself a shar mesharim, “king of justice.”
During the Old Babylonian period, the king might issue periodic decrees that attempted to redress domestic economic problems and thereby proclaim himself to be a reformer who restored justice to the land. These releases, called mesharum-edicts, were issued at the king’s accession or irregularly on an as-needed basis during the king’s reign. The main focus of such edicts was to cancel existing debts, mainly agricultural loans. They provided relief for debtors bound into servitude, annulment of the debtor’s sale of his property to pay off arrears, and cancellations of various unpaid land taxes and outstanding non-commercial loans.
The tenth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon, Ammi-saduqa, who ruled circa 1646 - circa 1626 b.c.e., issued a reform edict that included many provisions referring to the cancellation of debts, a royal tradition that dated back to about 2400 b.c.e.., when king Uru’inimgina of Lagash canceled obligations resulting from nonpayment of debt and slave status resulting from punishment for theft or murder. Ammi-saduqa’s edict freed only citizens from debt obligations.
The same principle is evident in all the oligarchical #history, interest is interesting but the real passion is to collect collateral.
That is why #Europe was horrified by Thomas Paine and the American Revolution--and subsequently Europe received "nominal" revolutions which merely pushed kings aside and let #banks ensconce themselves in protective legislation. Eventually, of course, the favor was extended as the Federal #Reserve #System.
Sure, all of our efforts and complaints will fall useless as long as we assert Constitutions that give credence to the parasitic class, who would prefer you not to be able to believe that their nefarious machinations can be whisked away by the wave of a magic wand. That "wand" is the pen of the legislator, or autocrat or tyrant if need be.
It would be preferred for you to have a theological Jesus based on things he never said, thinking that is extremely important, while going around oblivious to the basics available in #Leviticus or the #Lord's #Prayer.
There are two alternatives to not following that advice:
Revolution or Collapse
We are too opiated to accomplish a Revolution, so this is almost a done deal."
#quote from #pa
