Let’s Bail Out Ourselves!

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/04/lets-bail-out-ourselves/

:snip:

Consider this from David Graeber, anthropologist, author of Debt: the First 5000 Years, and OWS activist: ”A debt is just a promise… It has no greater moral standard than any other promise that you would make.”

Yet politicians insist that they can’t keep their promises, their political debts, to the public for education, jobs, or healthcare because they can’t break their sacred monetary debts to the bankers, with interest.

But in the history of world religions and social movements, what was sacred was not monetary debt, but the ability to make debt disappear, to forgive it, as in redemption. In the ancient Middle East, new kings would simply declare a clean slate and cancel all debts. The Biblical “Jubilee” was a way of institutionalizing that, to refresh a stalled economy of lending and borrowing. More recently, Saudi Arabia, in reaction to the Arab Spring, declared a debt cancellation. So there are precedents. Debts can be renegotiated. Trillions of dollars of debt can be made to disappear. The European Union has just arranged for banks to cut Greece’s debt in half, in order to save it from default.

How about doing the same for student loans and home foreclosures in this country? Graeber explains:

“Debts between the very wealthy or between governments can always be renegotiated and always have been throughout world history. They’re not anything set in stone. It’s, generally speaking, when you have debts owed by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation, more important than anything else. The idea of renegotiating them becomes unthinkable.” And yet, insists Graeber, “if democracy is going to mean anything now, we’re all going to have to be able to weigh in on what sorts of promises are made and what sorts of promises are adjusted.”

So let’s weigh in!

More at the link --

[Vincardog]

1. Add Medical debt to the mix and I am down with it