Debt Forgiveness Day If the current uncertainty were to panic the financial markets and precipitate the Big Bankruptcy, that’s probably the only way we could clean up the mess we’ve created. I once had a business cleaning vacant apartments for a large real estate company. One lesson I learned was that a badly stained toilet can be cleaned only if all the water is first removed. It’s a nuisance, but nothing less will serve, because water dilutes the cleaning agent. The worst stains can only be removed by full-strength cleaners. Sadly, our present economic system is not only a “toilet,” it is grievously stained, and money is the water which flows through that system. It follows that only bankruptcy can interrupt the flow of money/water long enough for us to remove those stains. For those who prefer a more elegant approach to this subject, I present Thomas Carlyle, whose definitive History of the French Revolution was published more than 150 years ago. Speaking of the events which led up to that revolution, he wrote: “Are we breaking down, then into the black horrors of National Bankruptcy? Great is Bankruptcy, the bottomless gulf into which all falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing... For Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, like a bill drawn on Nature’s reality, and be presented there for payment, with the answer: no effects. Pity only that it had so long a circulation, that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it. Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank, and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, come daily in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further... ...Honor to Bankruptcy, ever righteous on the great scale, though in detail it is so cruel! No falsehood, did it rise heaven-high and cover the world, but Bankruptcy, one day, will sweep it down and make us free of it.” Carlyle could as easily have been speaking of modern America, where economic “lies” are so pervasive they’ve become clichés: Let’s blame welfare mothers or immigrants for our problems. Forget health insurance for workers; if they want it, they can pay for it themselves. The more austerity for workers, the more likely they are to accept demeaning work. The only time in recent history that we acted like a civilization was during the Great Depression. We paid writers to write, artists to make art, and we wrote laws that created the eight-hour workday, overtime pay and Social Security, all of which are now being threatened. The reason this happened was that the Wagon had turned over, and the power junkies were out of power (they were too busy jumping out of windows!). None of this would have happened had it not been for Roosevelt, and he was heavily influenced by an agenda laid out by Progressives, starting in San Francisco at the turn of the Twentieth Century. They were reacting to Social Darwinist excesses of the Nineteenth Century (and Bellamy’s hugely successful book!). The failure of modern “Progressives” to set out a new agenda does not bode well for the next (inevitable) national bankruptcy, which will otherwise be vulnerable to totalitarian forces. As I’ve already noted, the new progressive agenda must concentrate less on jobs and more on economic justice, since there will never again be enough good jobs. On one of his national radio programs, Charles Osgood interviewed one E.J. Peters, the owner of a neighborhood grocery store in a small New Hampshire town. Peters’ customers had accumulated more than $10,000 in debts to his store, and most were too embarrassed to come around. His business was dying, so Peters placed this ad in the local paper: “All is forgiven. No one owes me anything. Customers, please come back.” Asked Osgood: “Where did you get an idea like that?” Replied Peters: “From my heart, sir.” Osgood: “What do you think of that, America?” I’ll tell you what I think, Charles: I think we should set a date in the near future, declare International Debt Forgiveness Day, and get the dirty water out of the “toilet” so that we can eradicate the stains once and for all. Take, for example, those who have been collecting the interest we pay on the National debt. Perhaps they’d enjoy looking for a nice, low-paying, demeaning job. And, how about those who’ve been grabbing a disproportionate share of our national wealth simply by trading in pieces of paper? Maybe they’d like to do something productive for a change. The mind boggles at the possibilities. These days, government at all levels is irrelevant. Market forces hold all politicians hostage with the threat of bankruptcy. Failure to kowtow to the desires of bond traders and stock speculators has turned them into a herd of terrified sellers, who are leavng devastation in their wake. If we decided to embrace that bankruptcy as a purgative, a relentless cleaning device, then government might be in a position to exercise a little political muscle for a change.