By Nick Stamatakis
Helleniscope is known for its open doors to our friends on the left: we respect their views, and we have presented their analyses on numerous occasions on economic and geopolitical issues. This time our attention has turned to one of the best economists of the last 50 years, professor Michael Hudson (for his novel-like bio link here). As a former socialist myself (at a very young age starting in my early teenage years), I can attest to the link between Christianity and Socialism. The urge to eliminate social injustice is a common underlayer of both: the Biblical descriptions of Christ and his Apostles on such a worthy vision abound. Famously, the central verse in “Lord’s Prayer” is about forgiving “our trespasses,” which in Greek is expressed by “οφειλήματα,” literally meaning “debts”. Why is not always translated as “debts” has been the subject of many analyses… But the original meaning is undoubtedly “Debt”…
Michael Hudson is the top specialist on the history of debt forgiveness. We Greeks know that the “Tyrants” of antiquity, who were in essence “benevolent dictators,” were among the early practitioners of debt forgiveness (the famous Greek term is “σεισάχθεια”). It would not be an exaggeration to say that without Solon’s debt forgiveness, the miracle of Classical Greece would not materialize. From Babylonia to Greece, to Rome, to Medieval Europe, to modern Germany, debt forgiveness was an essential tool for eliminating structural problems or inequities threatening to lead to the concentration of power to the few who would enslave the rest and form totalitarian oligarchies.
We entered a similar situation in our times. How? When President Obama was elected, amid the disastrous financial chaos of 2008, instead of forgiving the illegal, predatory loans of the many, he gave the few predatory “banksters” over $4 billion of newly “minted” (read: printed) money and allowed – he, the “socialist” – the illegal debts to stay on the books. As a result, he created an army of bankrupt Americans… Why did he do that? Because the “banksters” were the ones who financed his campaign and this is what they wanted… This is how we entered the main phase of “finance capitalism,” which eliminated production in America and resulted in the concentration of power to the few and the destruction of our democratic republic, which we are witnessing now everywhere, from the DC “Swamp” to New York to Chicago to California…
The 30-minute video below will probably not be enough to satisfy your thirst for the truth… If this is so, you can follow this link for a complete analysis (The Q & A session in the second half of this link will leave you speechless…)
==================
According to fourthturning.com, we have Great Depressions every four generations. The liquidity trap or secular stagnation is because the depression persists for a decade while every one writes off bad debts. But the bible already figured that one out, because debts were supposed to be written off every forty nine years, which is exactly one solar storm (hence Kondratiev crop depression: seven fallow cycles of seven years each). They were written off all at once, not allowed to linger. If you are going to write them off anyway, why not do it all at once, instead of linger. Then Joseph and Pharaoh were the original patient capital buying up depressed assets (cheap grain) and selling them at a profit when prices were high (starvation); The same model as RFC, RTC, TARP and quantitative easing. Hence the magog (Turk, Tatar, Mongol, Magyar, Hun, Lapp, Finn, Viking, American Indian) fanaticism of the capitalist evangelicals is always prone to excess.
You write:
“When President Obama was elected, amid the disastrous financial chaos of 2008, instead of forgiving the illegal, predatory loans of the many, he gave the few predatory “banksters” over $4 billion of newly “minted” (read: printed) money and allowed – he, the “socialist” – the illegal debts to stay on the books”
Obama and Bernake gave the banksters 800 billion $ to refinance them, gave bankrupt GMC 15 billion $ and fired its CEO until they repaid the 15 billion$ in less than two years