Must-read.
Naked Capitalism
Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts
John Siman
Friday, November 16, 2018
John Siman — Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts
Must-read.
Naked Capitalism
Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts
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4 comments:
If even honest interest is bad* then how much worse are government privileges for private debt-for-interest creation? Since they enable the driving of the general population into debt lest they be priced out of the market wrt housing and business establishment by those who do borrow?
*The Bible does allow interest but only from foreigners, not from one's fellow countrymen.
I’d like to see Hudson’s latest book turned into a YouTube video.
Hudson notes that ancient Sumerian rulers understood that debt grows exponentially, while the ability to pay on debts does not. Hence Sumerian rulers accorded certain protections to debtors.
In contrast, Western societies accord all protections and moral legitimacy to creditors, who always destroy their respective societies.
This sickness is called neoliberalism, and it has plagued us since ancient Greece and Rome.
Today, creditors (including banks and organizations like the IMF and World Bank) create loan money out of thin air, and they use that loan money to own and enslave the planet.
Sumerian rulers understood this. They knew that societies would collapse unless there were periodic debt erasures (or “jubilees”). For Hudson, debt jubilees were not products of kindness, but of cyclical views of life and nature.
By contrast, Western societies have linear views of life and nature, in which the purpose of life is to steal and enslave all you can, while you deny the resulting destruction. Debtors are worthless. Creditors are divine.
This insane glorification of creditors saturates Western society, and manifests as collective psychosis and widespread suffering.
Hudson gives examples of how Christianity glorifies creditors by twisting the original meaning of Christ’s words into their opposite meaning -- or into meaningless babble.
Likewise, many of the reader comments at the Naked Capitalism blog are meaningless babble, as readers bicker about metaphysical religious dogma, while they ignore Hudson’s main point that compounding debt is destroying us, just as it destroyed ancient Rome.
The Western worship of creditors fills Western societies with hate. For example, many Westerners imagine that no one will work unless everyone is a debt slave. They imagine themselves surrounded and victimized by lazy parasites. They imagine themselves as divine creditors -- i.e. they feel they are “owed” by the people around them, who are all “debtors” and therefore worthless. They imagine that God is a supreme good because God is a supreme creditor, and that Jesus magically “paid our debts” to the creditor-in-the-sky.
In the USA, when debtors can’t pay back their loans, the U.S. government often pays back the loans. For example, if people default in their student loans, the US government pays back the creditors, while students remain in debt to the creditors. Sweet!
Creditor-worship and a linear view of life are engines of war, hate, selfishness, and environmental destruction. They are the engine of the bullshit mantra, “How will you pay for it?” They are the reason why people reject the facts of MMT.
Well at least the Hebrews were to be loyal to themselves. That sure beats Gentiles using government privilege to loot the poorer among them for the benefit of the richer and for the benefit of the banks themselves.
If only John Calvin had realized that finance does not require collecting interest but that shares in equity (common stock) was the way to go.
Dr. Hudson's interpretation of Jesus's (Y'shua bar Abbas's) assault on the moneychangers in the Temple courtyard and his Lords' Prayer to "forgive us our debts" is that "He" was advocating an immediate Jubilee. What this fails to notice is the question "Who is to declare Jubilee and who is it to administer it?" Herod Antipas? Tiberius Caesar? Y'shua, whatever "He" was, was certainly not an idiot who could imagine any such thing. "His" answer, of course, was "I will. As soon as my kingdom is established." So if Y'shua was calling for Jubilee (and I agree completely that such was the case) it was as a central part of the social and political insurrection that was to sweep away the Herods and Caesars and establish "Him" as king of a Judaean Kingdom of Heaven. Which also explains both why the Romans were determined to execute "Him" under Roman Law after the failure of "His" Gethsemane plot and why the Jewish masses tried to get him released with the outcray "Liberate Bar Abbas!"
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