Author Archives: Tom Lewis

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In the best of times, it’s a good thing to be in the ten percent. Not so much, in the worst of times.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

In August, Bloomberg Business mentioned, matter-of-factly, “There’s no doubt that the U.S. economy is in a boom.” The New York Times echoed, in November, “The economy is booming, with more people working at higher pay.” The belief that the economy is “booming” has become so well established among the well established that it is now presented not as an argument, but as an aside requiring no supporting evidence. Most economists “never thought the economy could grow this fast,” gushed former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh in October.

And yet, in this same country, in November, General Motors — the throbbing iron heart of industrial America — announced it was closing five manufacturing plants in the U.S. and Canada, it was killing off several passenger cars – including the Chevrolet Impala – and eliminating the jobs of 14,000 people. This followed a similar downsizing by Ford. The economy is booming, but people are not buying cars? Really?   Continue reading →

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[This is the last of a series of essays on debt, prompted by recent revelations about how the issue was handled in ancient Mesopotamia.]

According to Michael Hudson’s new book Forgive Us Our Debts, the efforts of the rising moneyed classes in the ancient world to stamp out the long standing tradition of periodic debt amnesties were awe-inspiring in their tenacity.

For example: the historical record has convinced Hudson that Jesus Christ’s core mission was to restore Clean Slate Amnesties, or Jubilee. In his very first sermon, at the age of 15, Jesus said;

“…the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the meek, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to set the spiritual prisoners free; to proclaim the year of God’s favor and the day of our God’s reckoning.”

All of which can be interpreted figuratively, to say God wants everybody to be happy, or literally: God wants all the debts cancelled. Continue reading →

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[This is the third of a series of essays on debt, prompted by recent revelations about how the issue was handled in ancient Mesopotamia.]

When the kings and potentates of Bronze Age Mesopotamia realized that interest-bearing debt was a cancer that would inevitably destroy first the lower classes and then the entire kingdom (or empire, or whatever form of government they were using at the time) they reacted, forcefully and logically. They cancelled all debts, periodically.

Not merely once every 49 years, as the Bible would later recommend, but every once in a while — when a new king took the throne, on an anniversary of the empire, or because it was Thursday (the seven-day week was first defined by the Babylonians). Every esoteric language used in the region for more than 2,000 years has a term for the practice, as Dr. Michael Hudson explains in his new book And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (ISLET 2018).  As Dr. Hudson translates it, the term is “Clean Slate Amnesty.”    Continue reading →

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[This is the second of a series of essays on debt, prompted by recent revelations about how the issue was handled in ancient Mesopotamia.]

Western civilization began to flourish about 6,000 years ago, not long after agriculture replaced hunting-and-gathering as the occupation of most humans, on the fertile ground between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The region is known in history as Mesopotamia, a cradle of civilization, and is known today, with terrible irony, as Iraq and Syria, war-ravaged graveyards of civilization.

One of the earliest systems of writing (cuneiform) began here, the wheel was invented here, the Semitic languages — Hebrew and Arabic — arose here, metalworking — the Bronze Age — began here, as did mathematics, astronomy and codified law. These were smart, creative people, who among many other things experimented with forms of government: city-states, kingdoms, elements of democracy, empires.

Very early on, shortly after it was invented, they all seem to have recognized the toxicity of debt. Modern historians discovered this only recently, because of breakthroughs in the decoding of ancient languages. For some time the revelations about debt were particular to some time frame or ruler being studied, but a few scholars began to see and pursue a wider pattern. The foremost among them, Dr. Michael Hudson of the University of Missouri, has spent 30 years fleshing out this pattern, with mind-blowing results. Continue reading →

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[This is the first of a series of essays on debt, prompted by recent revelations about how the issue was handled in ancient Mesopotamia.]

Debt is a growing cancer on our private lives, our governments and corporations, on civilization itself. It is as implacable as it is insidious, offering us the Faustian bargain of immediate pleasures in exchange for eternally increasing pain. Let us examine and define this problem, and then take a look at it from the perspective of a  brand new discovery about our ancient past — one that offers a solution, one that has been proven to work, but has been suppressed by 28 centuries of fake news.

A friend of mine once defined state-run lotteries as “a tax on the mathematically illiterate.” Debt is like that, except that it is a far more onerous burden. Buying too many lottery tickets may deprive you of a few pricey coffees, or a pack of cigarettes, or whatever your discretionary spending includes. But debt will deprive you of your freedom. One sees frequent references in the media to today’s “debt slaves,” and we understand that to be figurative, but for much of human history, debt has led quickly and surely to literal slavery. [More on that later in this series.]   Continue reading →