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By Fred Clark, February 22, 2012 9:40 pm

Sinead O’Connor: “Take Off Your Shoes”

In Pop Matters, Josh Langhoff says How About I Be Me (And You Be You) is worth a listen.

P.S.: So Scott, Josh, Beatrix and Frank walked into a bar …

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By Fred Clark, February 22, 2012 9:05 pm

My point in the previous post is simply this: Our rude and dim new friend, like many who argue for the criminalization of abortion, insists that we are in a crisis. And yet our rude and dim new friend does not behave as though he himself is living in the context of such a crisis.

It is therefore reasonable to conclude that our RADNF is talking out of his backside.

The claim of a context of crisis rests on the belief that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception. If one truly believes this, then one faces two vast and shocking crises that must both, by virtue of their enormity and gravity, trump nearly every other moral concern.

And yet our RADNF only seems to recognize the existence of one of these. He’s upset about medical abortion, but not about natural abortion. And natural abortion — miscarriage — claims the lives of even more fully human persons every year.

Each year in the United States there are about 6 million known pregnancies. According to the Mayo Clinic:

About 15 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is probably much higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn’t even know she’s pregnant.

So that’s 1.2 million people — fully human persons — who die every year in miscarriages, not including the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more such fully human persons who die without anyone ever even knowing they had been conceived.

Let’s just focus on the 1.2 million people there that we know about for certain. That makes miscarriage the largest single cause of mortality in our nation. Not cardiovascular disease. Not cancer. Those are the No. 2 and No. 3 causes of death in the U.S., but miscarriage is a bigger killer than both of those combined. (The stats there are from the CDC’s page on deaths and mortality — a page that, like every other public statistic on mortality you will ever hear, refuses to count the unborn as fully human persons.)

If you truly believe that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, then you must also believe that miscarriage is the No. 1 health crisis in the United States. You should, at a minimum, be calling for private or public funding for research into this pandemic catastrophe.

Yet no one is doing that. At all. This massive crisis is a necessary and inescapable conclusion from the premise that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, yet those who claim to believe that premise have not bothered to reach this conclusion.

Why not?

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By Fred Clark, February 22, 2012 5:34 pm

Syndicated reruns got me hooked on the old CBS show Early Edition years after it was cancelled.

It’s a lot of fun. If you haven’t seen it, it starred a pre-Friday Night Lights Kyle Chandler as Chicagoan Gary Hobson. Every morning, mysteriously, he receives the next day’s newspaper — a newspaper with tomorrow’s news.

Given this advance warning of the traumas and tragedies about to unfold, Chandler races around the city, trying to avert disasters, rescue the innocent and save as many lives as he can.

This plays havoc with his life. It disrupts his career and upends his relationships. He ultimately has to surrender any thought of a normal life or even of ever getting to take a day off.

He resents this — resents the ceaseless, relentless responsibility that comes with the “early edition.” But what choice does he have? Lives are at stake. If he took a day off or ignored the paper when it arrived, then people would die.

And you can’t have a show in which the hero is willing to sit around on his butt, just letting innocent people die without even trying to save them. That wouldn’t make him the hero of the show. It would make him a callous, apathetic monster.

All of which is to say, yet again, that I cannot believe that my “pro-life” friends really believe the extraordinary things they claim to believe. Because if they really believed the things they claim to believe, that would make them callous, apathetic monsters. And I don’t think that’s what they are.

Consider, for example, our new friend Frank the Prolific Poster. Earlier today, Frank wrote this as a description of legal abortion in the U.S. over the past 40 years: “Almost 55 million unborn children killed.”

Children. Killed. Someone is killing children! Tens of millions of children!

That’s horrifying!

I mean that. If one truly believes that this is an accurate description of abortion, then one truly should be horrified by it.

But most people who claim to believe such a thing don’t.

Our new friend Frank, for example, says he believes that an embryo or fetus is a fully human person, indistinct from any other human person. Thus, in his view, abortion is the murder of innocent children. I do not believe that an embryo or fetus is a fully human person. Thus, in my view, abortion does not involve the killing of innocent children. That seems to be the core of our disagreement.

But, again, I do not believe we really disagree. I do not believe that Frank really believes what he says he believes.

I don’t just mean that at the basic level at which, as former anti-abortion pioneer Frank Schaeffer says, “it is gut-check self-evident that a fertilized egg is not a person, because personhood is a lot more than a collection of chromosomes in a Petri dish or in the womb.”

What I mean is that if our new friend Frank really believed that tens of millions of children  were being murdered, then his behavior would be inexcusable. To believe what he claims to believe while behaving as he behaves would be monstrous — inhumanly callous and cowardly.

And I refuse to believe that our new friend is such a contemptibly cowardly monster.

Here is the headline of our early edition: This year, some 1.2 million abortions will be performed in the United States.

To believe what Frank says he believes would mean that you had to accept that every day, some 3,288 children are going to be murdered. That’s more than a 9/11 every single day for a year. Every. Single. Day.

What would such a belief, if it were genuinely held, require of the one who believed it?

Far more than joining a political party or voting in elections every few years. Far more than sending the occasional check to some group abstractly lobbying against the murder of children.

And far, far more than trolling the comment sections of C-level blogs to repeatedly express a strongly worded opinion.

This is a belief that — at a minimum — demands the believer quit his job and take to the streets. It won’t do to volunteer occasionally. It is nowhere near sufficient to demonstrate the sincerity of this belief by protesting outside of a clinic once a week, or twice a week, or even five days a week. To really believe that abortion means “children killed” requires a 24/7/365 reshaping of one’s entire life.

Forget about any thought of a normal life or even of ever getting to take a day off. Lives are at stake — children’s lives.

Anyone who really believed that could not spend hour after hour in the comments sections of blogs.

If someone really believed that children’s lives are at stake, they would be too busy chaining themselves across the front doors of hospitals to waste precious hours just talking, talking, talking — mostly about themselves and their alleged morals. Blog disputes, self-congratulation and the marking-off of tribal territory would be luxuries such a true believer could not afford when 3,300 children are about to be murdered and the clock is always ticking ticking ticking.

I have seen very, very few people whose behavior allowed me to believe that they really believed any such thing.

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By Fred Clark, February 22, 2012 12:19 pm

“There is no law against such things,” the apostle Paul wrote of “self-control.”

Silly man. People can’t be allowed to control themselves. That’s why we have all kinds of laws against such things.

Laws forbidding self-control are, in fact, the essence of contemporary American evangelicalism. Advocacy for such laws are what we have made the central, defining characteristic of our faith.

Who decides? Who will be trusted to decide? Who is in control?

Not you. You can’t be trusted to decide for yourself.

Self-control? Against such there must be a law.

s.e. smith: “Reproductive Parts“:

There is only this, the steady and escalating war for control. The reminder that the state owns us and our pieces, will carve us up and use us as it sees fit. The state has all the power in this equation. It expresses no remorse.

I feel like I am living in a speculative fiction nightmare. I snap the light by the door off and on to see if that wakes me up. I start to wonder if I’m floating in a tank somewhere and this is all being fed into my head. If I selected this from a library of entertainment options before entering hibernation mode. (Why would I have done that?) Maybe I’m actually hurtling through space, getting ready to found a colony on a distant world, waiting for landfall and the activation of the wakeup sequence.

A politician says abortion is bad for women. A politician says birth control is bad for women. A politician says he wants to ban prenatal testing. A politician says women should focus on their families. A politician says sex is for reproduction only. A politician says queers are disgusting. A politician says.

A friend in Canada asks if it’s really true.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, yes it is.”

“How is that even legal,” she says.

“Because the lawmakers say so,” I say.

Georgia state Rep. Yasmine Neal introduces the Anti-Vasectomy Act:

Thousands of children are deprived of birth in this state every year because of the lack of state regulation over vasectomies. It is patently unfair that men can avoid unwanted fatherhood by presuming that their judgment over such matters is more valid than the judgment of the General Assembly, while women’s ability to decide is constantly up for debate throughout the United States. Women, our bodies, and what we do with it are always up for debate.

This bill has been drafted for all women who have the wherewithal to choose. The day has come where men should feel the same pressure and invasion of privacy that women have faced for years. I have introduced this legislation because it is the purpose of  the General Assembly to assert an invasive state interest in the reproductive habits of the men of this state and substitute the will of the government over the will of adult men.

This bill states that vasectomies can be performed to avert the death of a man or to avert serious risk of substantial or irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the man. This bill mimics the abortion bills throughout the nation, and just like the abortion bills interfere with a woman’s right to choose, it’s only fair that the General Assembly debate the men’s right to choose, as well.

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By Fred Clark, February 21, 2012 5:58 pm

CJR’s Merrill Perlman tackles a style question regarding two newly acquired titles — “Cardinal Sins: First or middle name?”

In ceremonies filled with pomp, twenty-two men were named cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church, including two from the United States: Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York and Edwin O’Brien, emeritus archbishop of Baltimore and now the grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. (Now, that’s a title!)

Depending on where you looked, the men are addressed in different fashions: In most news reports, they were referred to as “Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan” and “Cardinal Edwin F. O’Brien.“ But on the website of the Archdiocese of New York, the new cardinal is called “Timothy Cardinal Dolan.”

And therein lies a tale.

Perlman reports that the pope and the Catholic News Agency both prefer putting the title first — “Cardinal Edwin F. O’Brien.” So there you have it.

Wajih Nuseibeh opens the door for his neighbors. (Photo from www.nuseibehfamily.net)

Perlman doesn’t explain the history or significance of that other title for O’Brien, though — “grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.”

I’ve been to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I didn’t see any horses — just a bunch of Catholic clergy exchanging hostile glances with a bunch of Orthodox clergy, while another faction of clergy on the roof (yes, seriously) kept watch for an opening.

The truth is that O’Brien’s inheritance of this old crusader title doesn’t mean much. Being “grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem” isn’t nearly as important a role as being a member of the Nuseibeh or Joudeh families. Those families are not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Coptic Orthodox or Armenian Apostolic or Syriac Orthodox or Protestant. They’re not Christians at all, but Muslims.

Which is why they’re the only ones who can be trusted with keys to the place. That’s how it’s been for at least the past 800 years or so.

Because keeping the keys out of Christian hands has been the only way to keep us from killing each other over control of the shrine. (This makes it not only the traditional site of Jesus’ tomb, but also the final resting place of the meaning of Jesus’ death.)

So while the Grand Poobah of the Fraternal Order of Equestrian Odd Fellows heads home to Baltimore, the “custodian and gatekeeper” is there in the Holy Land, preparing for the Christian Lent(s) and Easter(s).

In a 2005 interview, Wajeeh Nuseibeh said he was honored to play his traditional role, keeping the peace between the shrine’s feuding factions:

“Like all brothers, they sometimes have problems. We help them settle their disputes. We are the neutral people in the church. We are the United Nations. We help preserve peace in this holy place,” he said.

… Nuseibeh said he is deeply touched by the Christian rituals and feels a close affinity with the church, but he does not pray there.

“I know every stone. It is like my home,” he said. “But I go to pray at the Omar Mosque next door.”

 

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By Fred Clark, February 21, 2012 5:04 pm

Cathleen Falsani explains the background of this interview transcript:

At 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, 2004, when I was the religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, I met then-State Sen. Barack Obama at Café Baci, a small coffee shop at 330 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, for an interview about his faith.

From the interview:

OBAMA: The way I came to Chicago in 1985 was that I was interested in community organizing and I was inspired by the Civil Rights movement. And the idea that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. And there was a group of churches out on the South Side of Chicago that had come together to form an organization to try to deal with the devastation of steel plants that had closed. And didn’t have much money, but felt that if they formed an organization and hired somebody to organize them to work on issues that affected their community, that it would strengthen the church and also strengthen the community.

So they hired me, for $13,000 a year. The princely sum. And I drove out here and I didn’t know anybody and started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on issues like creating job training programs, or after school programs for youth, or making sure that city services were fairly allocated to under served communities.

This would be in Roseland, West Pullman, Altgeld Gardens, far South Side working class and lower income communities.

And it was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual view of religion deepened because I’d be spending an enormous amount of time with church ladies, sort of surrogate mothers and fathers and everybody I was working with was 50 or 55 or 60, and here I was a 23-year-old kid running around.

I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church and it’s importance in the community.

And the power of that culture to give people strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people courage against great odds. And it moved me deeply.

So that, one of the churches I met, or one of the churches that I became involved in was Trinity United Church of Christ. And the pastor there, Jeremiah Wright, became a good friend. So I joined that church and committed myself to Christ in that church.

FALSANI: Did you actually go up for an altar call?

OBAMA: Yes. Absolutely. 
It was a daytime service, during a daytime service. And it was a powerful moment. Because, it was powerful for me because it not only confirmed my faith, it not only gave shape to my faith, but I think, also, allowed me to connect the work I had been pursuing with my faith.

FALSANI: How long ago?

OBAMA: Sixteen, 17 years ago. 1987 or 88.

FALSANI: So you got yourself born again?

OBAMA: Yeah, although I don’t — I retain from my childhood and my experiences growing up, a suspicion of dogma. And I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others.

I’m a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it’s best comes with a big dose of doubt. I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

I think that, particularly as somebody who’s now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there’s an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

FALSANI: Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA: Yep. Every week. Eleven o’clock service. Ever been there? Good service.

Go read the whole thing at Sojourners.

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By Fred Clark, February 21, 2012 12:37 pm

When the Republican bishops insist on making themselves ridiculous, honest people will provide the only appropriate response: ridicule.

Amy Poehler and Seth Myers: “Really!?! With Seth and Amy”

Jon Stewart: “Sir, your parable about the kosher deli, while delicious, makes no [frocking] sense …”

Mark Silk: “Lori’s Kosher Deli”

What’s interesting about Lori’s little jeu d’esprit is not how inept the analogy is, however, but how a proper Parable of the Kosher Deli would prove the opposite of what he’s seeking to demonstrate.

(Yes, Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport: You have made yourself a punchline. And a set-up. Congratulations.)

Katie Halper: “10 Thoughts About the House’s All-Male Panel Convened to Discuss My Vagina”

1. I guess I should give the GOP props for voting against the Violence Against Women Act, since it would be hypocritical to condemn violence against women, while at the same time advocating ultrasound rape. …

The Onion: “New Law Requires Women to Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion”

Megan Carpentier: “5 sexual health services insurance will cover … for men”

Viagra? Of course, with no objection from the bishops. And they’re unperturbed by insurance coverage for “vacuum erection devices” or for penile implants.

Laura Conaaway: “Panel Chosen to Discuss Viagra Distribution”

Semi-related rewind: “Top 10 Boston Red Sox Nicknames That Would Have Made an Even Worse Name for an Oral Contraceptive”

Update: But wait, there’s more …

John Aravosis highlights this video: “Women Hold Hearing on Men’s Reproductive Health”

Sarah Seltzer shares another video from The Daily Show.

And in comments here, of course, we’ve had performance artist Amanda Squeeze entertaining us with her Poe spoofing the wankery of anti-women trolls who just repeat the same thing, over and over and over, refusing to qualify their mechanical talking points even after their assertions have been refuted. (Amanda says she’s just trying to demonstrate how it’s impossible to regard such folks as arguing in good faith when they’re incapable of listening. I asked her to tone it down a bit with her character “Frank,” though, because it’s not as funny when the parody crosses the line into an over-the-top cartoon figure that just makes the person out to be totally unreasonable.)

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By Fred Clark, February 21, 2012 10:36 am

Here’s a bit more from David Graeber in the Boston Review:

[Debt: The First 5,000 Years] came out of the strange moral power that debt has over people. So many times you’re talking to people about the depredations of the International Monetary Fund in the third world, telling these horrible stories about the thousands of babies dying of preventable diseases because people aren’t allowed to maintain malaria-eradication campaigns or basic health services due to austerity measures and debt servicing, and people respond, “Well, yeah, but you can’t say they don’t owe the money. People have got to pay their debts, come on!” That common-sensical notion not only that it’s moral to pay one’s debt, but also that morality essentially is a matter of paying one’s debts can bring people to justify things that they would never think to justify in any other circumstance. For the most part, decent people tend not to think killing lots of babies is justifiable under any circumstances. But debt somehow changes all that. Why is that? …

… In the same way that the “ought” trumps all other values, debt trumps all other “oughts.” And I argue in the book that one reason why medieval theologians, whether Christian or Muslim, seemed so inherently suspicious about usury is because it creates a moral imperative that tends to trump all others. They recognized a potentially dangerous rival when they saw one, a moral system that would completely overwhelm their own if it was allowed full rein.

And here is C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said.

That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.

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By Fred Clark, February 21, 2012 1:22 am

Good news, glad tidings and other otherwise delightful, happy or amusing stuff from recent days.

Keith Humphreys reminds us that many men of the cloth don’t spend their days testifying before Congress in all-male panels dedicated to denying rights to women — “Christianity and the Least of Us“:

This week’s Economist article about the remarkable work of Jesuit Priest Greg Boyle could thus not be better timed. Father Boyle’s “Homeboy Industries” in Los Angeles has turned around the lives of thousands of gang members. Many of Boyle’s flock have committed terrible crimes, had terrible crimes committed against them, or both. Heart-killing time in prison figures prominently in their histories. Most people couldn’t reach these lost souls. Indeed, most people wouldn’t even try, even if the commandments of their faith so instructed them.

Comedian John Fugelsang shares the beautiful love story of a Franciscan monk and a nun — his own father and mother (via AmericaBlog).

Caleb Wilde: “Yesterday I Saw the Body of Christ at a Funeral …”

The Mt. Zion AME church is in the process of being renovated.  And this week the Mt. Zion AME church lost not one but two of their members. The Parkesburg United Methodist Church opened their doors, their sanctuary and their cafeteria hall for not one, but both funerals.

… This is how unity is supposed to work.

This is also how unity is supposed to work: “There Are So Many Different Reasons”

When I look around the waiting room I see so many men and women there for so many different reasons. I don’t know where else most of us would have to go without them.

I♥NY: Improv Everywhere invites public to “Say Something Nice” (via).

San Francisco Police Department: “It Gets Better” (via John Cole)

Good beer, good company — James Fallows on “Hero of American Capitalism: Jim Koch.”

Metrokitty: “Spider-Hyphen-Man” (via Dave Ex Machina)

Hyperbole and a Half: “The Alot Is Better Than You at Everything” (via Punning Pundit)

And for still more helpful visual aides clarifying points of grammar, see The Oatmeal.

Ed Darrell traces the history of “Standing on the shoulders of giants” (point to point, point observation …).

John J. McKay: Here There Be Monsters

Dualism, Abraham, Flannery O’Connor and the theology of flesh … just another video game review.

Good interviews Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs:

We’ve been gradually training our kids to equate dirt with vocational dissatisfaction. The real enemies of job satisfaction are drudgery and boredom, and those can be found just as readily in cubicles as they can in ditches.

Paul Bibeau: “Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years After We’ve Sucked the Life Out of You?”

Cara Hogan: “Derry park residents join forces, purchase property”

John Regal finally owns the land his home sits on.

Regal, 55, is vice president of the newly formed Foxy Terrace Cooperative, which just bought the Big W Mobile Home Park on Bypass 28 for $2.2 million.

Residents bought the property last week and became the 100th mobile home community in the state owned by a co-op group of residents.

Residents contacted the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund five years ago, he said, because they wanted to buy the property and improve their living conditions.

“The rent was constantly escalating and nothing was really put back into the community,” he said. “The money was going back into the landlord’s pockets. We got in contact with the loan fund and they helped us over the years with a purchase and sales agreement to submit to the landlord.”

See also: “Resident-bought mobile home park is New Hampshire’s 100th.” (ROC USA, the nonprofit advocating resident-owned communities, is based in the Granite State.)

Now streaming: “September” from the Shins’ forthcoming album Port of Morrow.

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By Fred Clark, February 20, 2012 1:01 am

Internet Monk just celebrated “Jubilee Week: All Grace All the Time!”

Jubilee is one of my favorite things. Debts are cancelled. Slaves are set free. Olly olly oxen free.

What could be better?

First thing that Jesus talked about in his public ministry? Jubilee. It pervades his parables. It’s right there in the prayer he taught us to pray — “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Jubilee is rarely included in discussions of “theories of atonement.” My advice is to avoid discussions of theories of atonement (key word there: theories). But if you must speculate, then I suggest you start with Jubilee.

Jubilee seems like a pipe-dream, an idealistic religious fantasy. We’re not sure if the year of Jubilee prescribed in Moses’ law was ever actually celebrated.

But it’s not just a religious ideal. It’s more than just a sectarian notion from the Hebrew scriptures that was later reinterpreted and reworked as a sectarian notion in the Christian scriptures.

It’s also an immensely practical idea, all scriptures aside. It would be good policy.

It may even be necessary policy. Now. Today.

It’s necessary in Jefferson County, Ala., as Mary Williams Walsh reports in The New York Times, “When a County Runs Off the Cliff“:

The county roads here need paving, and the tax collector needs help.

There is no money for them, either.

There is no money for a lot of things around here, not since Jefferson County, population 658,000, went bankrupt last fall. There is no money for holiday D.U.I. checkpoints, litter patrols or overtime pay at the courthouse. None for crews to pull weeds or pick up road kill — not even when, as happened recently, an unlucky cow was hit near the town of Wylam.

“We don’t do that any more,” E. Wayne Sullivan, director of the roads and transportation department, said of such roadside cleanup.

This is life today in Jefferson County — Bankrupt, U.S.A. For all the talk in Washington about taxes and deficits, here is a place where government finances, and government itself, have simply broken down. The county, which includes the city of Birmingham, is drowning under $4 billion in debt, the legacy of a big sewer project and corrupt financial dealings that sent 17 people to prison.

The county owes $4 billion — debt created by corrupt political officials in cahoots with corrupt lenders. The county doesn’t have $4 billion. It cannot repay this debt.

As with Greece, there will be talk of a bailout — but no one will really suggest “bailing out” Jefferson County any more than they are really talking about bailing out Greece. What they mean is a bailout for the creditors, not the debtors.

That’s the opposite of Jubilee. The creditors will be paid, but the debtors will never be freed of their debt.

That’s immoral. It’s also impractical. Greece and Jefferson County are not isolated entities. They’re part of an interconnected global economy and a network of mutuality. To satisfy their creditors without liberating or restoring them means that they will continue to limp along, and all those who are affected by them will continue to suffer as well.

David Graeber points to a different solution — a better solution — in a recent interview with David V. Johnson of The Boston Review (via zunguzungu). Graeber even uses the J-word:

Boston Consulting Group, I believe, ran a model recently and came to the conclusion that, while having a debt jubilee would cause great economic disruption, not having one would create even more. The situation we have basically isn’t viable. Some kind of radical solution is going to be required at some point; the question is what form it’s going to take.

This time around, they might consider doing it in a form that actually helps ordinary people. It would have been perfectly feasible to take the trillions of dollars that they essentially printed to bail out the banks and give it to mortgage holders, because what the banks had were mortgage-based securities that were no good anymore. If they just paid the mortgages using the same money, that in effect would have bailed out the banks.

… It would have had the same effect as a debt cancellation, because they would have printed money to pay the debts. The irony is that they chose instead to give the money directly to the banks and not bail out the mortgage-holders. Which is a pattern that you see over and over again in world history — one of the more dramatic consistencies I’ve noticed in the history of debt: debts between equals are not the same as debts between people who are not equals.

Debts between either poor people or rich people, that they have with each other, can be renegotiated or forgiven. People can be extraordinarily generous, understanding, forgiving when dealing with others like themselves. But debts between social classes, between the rich and the poor, suddenly become a matter of absolute morality. And that’s what we saw; it’s a very, very old pattern.

See also: “Student loan debt is approaching $1 trillion“