By Tom Dennen
What is the definition of
permanent change? Hegel’s Dialectical Materialism? Thesis, antithesis,
thesis? Equal and opposite forces? Tidal ebb and flow? Yin and Yang?
What was the world that has gone – or certainly going – called?
Debt, stupid!
Debt first influenced society in Babylon six thousand years ago when
it was discovered that farmers worked harder when in debt. Nothing has
changed except the mortgage burden. The debt / slave paradigm is so
embedded in our language, “debt slaves, wage slaves, slaves to the
system” that we do not question it.
Let’s examine the world that has just ended or is in its last phases
of winding down, much to the recent and current chagrin of European
nations along with the rest of the west: A current example of the
changes going on is the fact that
shell-abandons-alaska-as-industry-sheds-100-000-jobs
Two thousand years ago the Roman historian and journalist Tacitus
wrote a wonderful description of the eviction of money merchants (really
debt merchants) from Italy in A.D. 27 by the Roman Emperor Tiberius
Caesar (it was not Jesus, BTW; that story was I believe embedded in the
bible assembled at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 300 because the Word of
the Son of God would carry more weight against the Ancient Curse of
Usury than that of a rather obscure Roman Emperor.
By the time Tiberius took over, the Roman Empire was in an economic
shambles and the Romans had had enough of compound interest with its
massive rates, bankruptcies and multiple foreclosures forced by private
money merchants that robbed them of their properties, just like today.
At that time, according to Tacitus, “… a powerful host of accusers
fell with sudden fury on the class which systematically increased its
wealth by usury in defiance of a law passed by Caesar defining the terms
of lending money and of holding estates in Italy, a law long obsolete
because the public good is sacrificed to private interest” – The Annals
of Rome, A.D. 29.
”Hence followed a scarcity of money, a great shock being given to all
credit, the current coin too, in consequence of the conviction of so
many persons and the sale of their property being locked up in the
imperial treasury or the public exchequer. “To meet this, the Senate had
directed that every creditor should have two-thirds his capital secured
on estates in Italy. “Creditors however were suing for payment in full,
and it was not respectable for persons when sued to break faith. So, at
first, there were clamorous meetings and importunate entreaties; then
noisy applications to the praetor’s court, and the very device intended
as a remedy – the sale and purchase of estates – proved the contrary, as
the usurers had hoarded up all their gold for buying land.
[What do you think banks are doing with their borrowing facilities
now that the interest rate on the dollar has been left alone by Ms
Yellen?]
“The facilities for selling were followed by a fall of prices, and
the deeper a man was in debt, the more reluctantly did he part with his
property, and many were utterly ruined. “The destruction of private
wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation, till at last the
emperor interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks [which
were not at that time in the hands of money merchants] a hundred million
sesterces, and allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three
years, provided the borrower gave security to the State in land to
double the amount.
“Credit was thus restored, and gradually private lenders were found.
The purchase too of estates was not carried out according to the letter
of the Senate’s decree, rigor at the outset, as usual with such matters,
becoming negligence in the end.” Roman money was a solid gold sesterce
that would be valued today at $16, half the $32 an ounce up until the
gold standard was abandoned, so the bailout then could be valued in
today’s money at around $1.6 billion in a country with less than million
adult people. Churchill’s terse account of Edward the First’s doing the
same thing to the United Kingdom’s money merchants thirteen hundred
years later for the same reasons as Tiberius does not lend much weight
to the argument against usury, but then Churchill was a warrior not an
economist and both classes seem to avoid Tiberius and Edward as well as
the Biblical angry Jesus throwing money merchants about.
During the next few paragraphs, a great “Anti-Semite” outcry will be
heard, the ubiquitous red herring thrown onto the usury trail, so far
successfully; let us then leave conspiracy theories behind and call it
fiction. But I still think it’s a good, plausible and verifiable story
confirmed at the very least by Wikipedia, if not History itself.
The record of the Jews in England goes back to the first written one
of Jewish settlement in 1070. The Jewish presence continued until King
Edward the First’s Edict of Expulsion in 1290 “over matters of usury.”
“After the expulsion, there was no Jewish community, apart from
individuals who practiced Judaism secretly, until the rule of Oliver
Cromwell. While Cromwell never officially readmitted Jews to Britain, a
small colony of Sephardic Jews living in London was identified in 1656
and allowed to remain. “The Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, an
attempt to legalize the Jewish presence in England, remained in force
for only a few months. Historians commonly date Jewish Emancipation to
either 1829 or 1858 when Jews were finally allowed to sit in Parliament,
though Benjamin Disraeli, born Jewish, had been a Member of Parliament
long before this, and even Prime Minister. At the insistence of Irish
leader Daniel O’Connell, in 1846, the British law “De Judaismo”, which
prescribed a special dress for Jews, was repealed.
Due to the lack of anti-Jewish violence in Britain in the 19th
century, it acquired a reputation for religious tolerance and attracted
significant immigration from Eastern Europe. In the 1930s and 1940s,
some European Jews fled to England to escape the Nazis. “Jews faced
anti-Semitism and stereotyping in Britain and anti-Semitism ‘in most
cases went along with Germanophobia’ to the extent that Jews were
equated with Germans in the early 20th century.
This led many Jewish families to Anglicize their often
German-sounding names. “Jews in Britain now number 300,000, and England
contains the second largest Jewish population in Europe and the fifth
largest Jewish community worldwide.” – Wikipedia. Edward discovered that
the Babylonian / Roman Curse had been in effect in the United Kingdom
for almost two hundred years before his reign and threw the money
merchants out in 1270 for the same reasons as Tiberius: because of
disputes over “matters of Usury”, basically the theft of massive
sections of the nobility’s property through compounded interest rates
leading to bankruptcy and foreclosure.
We need to examine at this point a very possible and plausible
explanation of the economic forces behind the expansion of the usury
method of money extraction to gambling – The key lies in the Tulip Mania
phenomenon in Holland some 300 years after Edward’s usurers were thrown
out of the United Kingdom. My assumptions that carry this theory of
Tulip Mania may bring that enigma to where it can be considered as a
“Pivotal Point” in economic history, the true beginning of Capitalism
and the foundation upon which money merchants ended their 2000-year role
as persona non grata throughout the world and became part of the
innermost circles of political power and finally, rulers of the global
economy, today’s prime example being Timothy Geithner, moving from
Chairman of Goldman Sachs to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
“Give me control of a nation’s money supply and I care not what laws
it makes.” Amschel Mayer Rothschild Control of the Capitalist boom /
bust money system began with the very first demonstration of a stock
market ‘pump and dump’ manipulation using tulip bulbs.
This was, I believe, a practical demonstration put on for the crowned
heads of Europe who I accuse then of finally accepting money merchants
into the mainstream of government so the rulers could share the wealth
derived from Boom-Bust (pump and dump) Capitalism: credit-driven boom
times followed by equity market busts which harvest all future boom time
debt-wealth signed over by borrowers and mortgagees in exchange for
their commitment to future work and pledges of existing collateral if
the work is not done or the debt not paid because the markets collapsed.
This system of Capitalist boom / bust manipulation between 1720 and
the Great Depression until now was reduced to economic and mathematical
detail in a book called ‘The Reckoning’ by journalist James Dale
Davidson and Lord Reese-Mogg, Sidgewick & Jackson, 1996, which I
believe was nothing less than a guide for the wealthy through the bust
brought about by the Japanese property market collapse in 1978. So Tulip
Mania was really a demonstration of the simple mechanics of boom-bust
Capitalism and definitely a Pivotal Event.
Just a theory?
There are no historical records kept by “money Lenders” (does the
Mafia have an internal written history? Ask any one of them…) Extant are
only descriptions by contemporary historians of what they did to
society, how it was done and what rid society of this parasitical
practice.
Where were these merchants of money between Tacitus and Edward,
between Edward and the Dutch stock markets; where did they go and what
did they do? Taken from the records available, from around 27 A.D. to
around 1070 (almost a thousand years) they went unrecorded.
Between Edward’s Eviction in 1270 to the creation of the first Stock
Exchange in Amsterdam less than three hundred years later, where were
these history-less people, what were they doing and were they the same
people Tacitus threw out and Edward evicted?
Assuming that they were, I also assume that they were by their third
attempt to gain economic control over the dominant empire of the time,
fed up with prejudice and hatred, removals and evictions every time they
insinuated themselves into society and eroded the tax base, and I think
those decisions were made to keep this from happening again: From these
decisions, the pious, prestigious, upmarket, socially acceptable
casinos called stock exchanges, or commodity markets were invented.
Tulip bulbs were then and still are a relatively worthless commodity.
For over a hundred years, stock markets – commodity exchanges –
appeared in the cities of Europe, innocence itself. And nothing like
gambling on a sure thing, even though underneath the insouciance lay the
knowledge that the house always wins: the market trader takes a
commission on a sell and another on a buy. Securitization and fraudulent
Default Swap Options came sometime later, but the basics were in.
And therein we had the stolid Dutch middle-class burgher investing
his money sensibly in the future prices of wheat, corn, sorghum, pork
belly, your basic trading stuff, commodities, much dependent on weather
and other variables, but still sensible. Except for the tulips. And so
here we are again today, but without a Tiberius and without a Henry: on
the one hand, most people and nations are under an unsustainable and
growing mountain of debt overhanging their economies, bankrupt economies
around the world with their GDP – traditionally used for services to
the people – diverted to pay interest on that debt aka ‘Economic
Globalization’.
On the other hand, a growing number of individuals and communities
around the world have formed an antithesis to this globalism by
localizing their economies, creating, harvesting and growing their own
local goods and services, a natural, creative, innovative and human
response to the globalization of economies, which has been nothing but
the massing of resources for the wealthy for centuries. The permanent
solution lies of course, in a Permaculture of community gardens: The
Beginning of the World as We Will Know It?