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?