CHINA, Oct. 1, 2019– Today the Chinese people celebrated 70 years of National Day.  President Xi Jinping said, “This was the end of 100 years of humiliation. The Chinese people stood up and embarked on a grand journey of rejuvenation … The country has made unparalleled achievements, and now there is no force that can shake the foundations of this nation or prevent us from moving ahead.” As I watched live from Beijing the over one million people gathered for the parades and floats, I was struck by the awesome might of the New China.

I am in China for the funeral of my father-in-law. For my wife’s family, today is both sad and happy. The death of a loved one is always a sad event; but the celebration of one’s country, one’s motherland, especially the last 40 years, is a time to be happy to be Chinese. Especially if one was born when signs read,  “no dogs or Chinese allowed”.

I have written and spoken since about the year 2011 that the Western global financial system was going to collapse again, because the leading countries of the G-7 have done nothing to reform the financial system. In a word, unpayable debt was the culprit.

Well, you can write the date of the new collapse – Sept 17, 2019. On that date, as in August 2007, the inter-bank overnight system froze again and the US Federal Reserve was forced to intervene. By September 20, the US Fed was pumping some 100 billion USD per day into the overnight market, and now are saying they will bring back Quantitative Easing (QE) to inject liquidity into the financial system to try and keep the bankrupt system afloat.

However, in 2007, there was only one problem – securitization of house mortgages. Today, there are many potential problems — credit card loans, student debt, emerging markets, country debts and the huge corporate unpayable debts. One or more will blow up the financial system in the near future.

Humankind is today at a pivotal stage. Either the real economy of production and consumption prevails and with it a new renaissance of a thousand years of peace on planet earth; or we allow the parasite class to win and drag humanity into a new Dark Age of death, diseases, and perhaps the destruction of humans on planet earth. Either a new beginning or the beginning of the end.

Currently, most of what we call the “economy” is really two completely different systems. First, there is the real economy of current production and consumption, wages and industrial profits. The second, or FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate) consists of land, monopoly rights and financial claims that yield rentier returns in the form of interest, financial fees, economic rent (unearned income), and monopoly gains.

In Belize, as in nearly the entire Western system, the relationship between the banks and real estate is dominant. Banks don’t lend for production and consumption, except if the loan is to buy out a going concern at distress prices. In fact, over 80% of bank loans in Belize, England, and the United States are real estate loans. Real estate is not taught in schools; but the books and teachers of economics pretend that banks lend money to industry. Pure lies.

The problem for mankind today is the FIRE sector of most economies. The FIRE sector is pure overheads, but because of the power of the neoliberals they literally get away with murder. In real life, borrowers go bankrupt and banks foreclose on the collateral, leaving the debtors without homes, and their livelihoods. The rich buy the houses at distress prices and these are rented back at inflated prices to the debtors, who are then forced into wage peonage to survive. When the banks themselves go bankrupt, the government bails them out. Thus the “market corrects,” but only with government intervention. This intervention just comes at the end of the cycle to rescue the creditors, whose ability to buy politicians gives them the upper hand.

On the way to China I had the good fortune to read a new book by America’s premier economist – Michael Hudson, presidential advisor, distinguished professor of political economy. The book is And forgive them their debts.  According to Prof. Hudson, the celebrated development of property rights and democracy in ancient Greece and Rome was not about serving the poor, but rather, to serve the rich who controlled elections just as they do today. “Free markets” meant the freedom to accumulate massive wealth at the expense of the poor and the state.

Over 30 years of research about ancient Babylon/Mesopotamia and Israel have led to the conclusion that money, writing, and accounting started in Sumer, not Greece nor Rome. And that the reason this area between the rivers succeeded for over two thousand years was because of the “jubilee” or forgiveness of debt, especially debt that cannot be repaid. In fact, Prof. Hudson has maintained that Jesus’s main mission on earth was to proclaim the Good News – a clean slate, that Jesus died for our debts, not our sins. According to Prof. Hudson, the word for sin and debt is the same in most languages. and the Bible was not about sex, but about money and the forgiveness of debt. Remember Jesus was “crucified”, which in Rome was for political crimes. He drove the bankers out of the temple. So they had him murdered by crucifixion because he was a threat to the creditors.

Many years ago, I read a letter written by Schiller in which he stated that Tiberius had ordered the death of Jesus by crucifixion because he was causing a lot of problems for Rome concerning the problem of debt. Remember, Julius Caesar was murdered because he wanted to institute a Jubilee for debt forgiveness. It was St. Paul and St. Augustine who changed the meaning of Jesus and Christianity.

The ancients knew that unpayable debts always lead to collapse of empires, such as Greece and Rome. Jubilees have always been part of Jewish and Christian thinking. The last Jubilee was 1947 to 1953 when the Americans forgave the debts of Germany, which resulted in the German miracle. And make no mistake. China was able to do in 70 years what no other nation-state has done – eradicate poverty from 70% in 1949 to less than 1% in 2018.  It increased the wages of average Chinese from USD $84 per annum in 1949 to some USD $16,800 per annum in 2018 and increased life expectancy from 35 years in 1949 to 78 in 2018, and literacy went from 20% to 99% in 2018. One of the key factors is that the banks in China are owned by the state. If a business fails, workers are not thrown on the street. Instead, the bankers find a way to solve the lack of profits. China gave to their business people, including investors from Taiwan and Hong Kong, a debt jubilee in 2009 after the global debt collapse.

Here in Belize, the PUP has a Creed/Philosophy section: (g) which states: “That it is the sacred duty of government to intervene actively in the economic life of the nation in order to achieve full employment and the eradication of poverty and secure a better life for all Belizeans.” This is from George Cadle Price, who was a true Christian trained in the Church’s tradition of Jubilee. This is why the National Bank of Belize is the best thing Prime Minister Dean Barrow has done for Belize. The National Bank is the means to create and make sure that the greed of the private bankers stops so that Belize can become an industrial nation-state that will eradicate poverty in Belize.