March 3 Flashback: Jubilee (or else)

March 3, 2022 By Fred Clark

Stop me if you’ve read this one before.

From March 3, 2017, “Ignorant jerks abusing ‘the poor will always be with you’ will always be with you“:

Does this make Roger Marshall a bad person? That’s not for me to say. Jesus and Moses, however, had no reservations in saying, emphatically, yes, this makes Roger Marshall a bad person.

What I can say for certain is that this tells us that Marshall has never read — or, at best, never understood — Mark 14 or Deuteronomy 15. But yet, strangely, he still feels confident enough to attempt to quote them.

We’ve been over this before many times. See, for example, “Dives will always be with us — and so will selfish rich jackwagons who misquote the Bible” and “Ignorant Christians need to STFU about ‘the poor you will always have with you’ until they can be bothered to understand what Jesus actually said.” But it seems we need to go over it again.

So, then, did Jesus say, “the poor will always be with you”? Well, according to Mark 14, that’s half a sentence spoken by Jesus. What Jesus said was “For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish.”

Right away, then, it’s clear that Marshall is bungling things because he’s drawing the opposite conclusion from what Jesus says. Instead of “the poor will always be with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish” Marshall is arguing “the poor will always be with you, so you don’t ever need to bother showing kindness to them.”

But the problem is even bigger than that. Because Jesus never actually said, “The poor will always be with you.” That’s our English translation of a Greek text translating an Aramaic speaker reciting a Hebrew scripture. What Jesus actually said there in Mark 14 (and in Matthew 26), was “there will never cease to be some in need on the earth” — that’s how our English translations render this phrase when cutting out the Greek and Aramaic middle-men and translating the Hebrew original directly.

Or, if you like, Jesus didn’t say “the poor will always be with you.” Jesus said, “‘the poor will always be with you.’” See those nested quotation marks? That’s us quoting Jesus who was, in turn, quoting something else. Specifically, he was quoting Deuteronomy 15.

Jesus was quoting the Torah to his disciples, and he knew that they would know that was exactly what he was doing. He knew his disciples — first-century, second-Temple-era Jews — were so saturated in the books of Moses that they would recognize the passage he was quoting. And he therefore knew that they would recognize the harsh rebuke it entailed.

The authors of Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels, likewise, shared this assumption of basic biblical literacy for their readers. They didn’t see any need to insult their readers by inserting an explanation of this basic and obvious point — “that bit’s a quote from Deuteronomy.” Besides, this was Jesus yet again reciting (and appropriating) one of the Jubilee passages from the Torah, something Jesus did all the time. Here, at the end of their respective Gospels, Mark and Matthew can be forgiven for assuming that their readers should by now have recognized that pattern.

Alas, the Gospel writers didn’t realize that their words would also be read, thousands of years later, in translation, by stiff-necked greedheads on another continent whose culture, religious practice, and prideful obstinance would conspire to prevent them from ever noticing this massive, central theme in Jesus’ teachings.

And but so, if you want to know what Jesus meant when he quoted this bit from Deuteronomy, you need to look at this bit from Deuteronomy.

Read the whole post here.

January Jubilee (for your inbox)

January 5, 2022 By Fred Clark

• I’m trying to start a tradition or custom — heck, I’ll settle for a rumor or a superstition — of a January Jubilee for email. On New Year’s Day or in the first week of the new year, in other words, you have permission to go into your email inbox, select all, and delete.

Because you deserve a new start for the new year. And because this is something we’ve all heard about as just something that people do at this time of year. What’s that? You say you haven’t heard about this before? Well, now you have. And now you know.

And given that this is a New Year’s tradition and something that people do at this time of year, it’s wrong and silly of anyone to be upset if their mid-December (or mid-November, or late-August) email to someone else has been deleted and tossed away like last year’s paper calendar. Just send it again if it’s still important. And Happy New Year.

I can’t quite manage to extend this January Jubilee to the list of links, tabs, and articles I’ve bookmarked for future reference. So instead of just deleting all of those aged or aging 2021 links, I’m going to try to rush through them all and share them here in the days ahead.

• The idea of “deconstruction” — breaking down one’s faith to enable its sustainable reconstruction — is widely discussed these days. Jessica Gapasin Dennis doesn’t use that word in her personal testimony. She uses a different word, one of my favorites: “Jubilee.”

What then, is the proper response to this gift of life that we have been given? By our ancestors, by this God who has pitched his tent among us?

The answer, I’ve come to find out, is to live.

And that is — and has always been — enough.

• I read Perry Miller in seminary back in the ’90s. I did not know that the great religious intellectual historian had started out as an OSS agent specializing in psychological warfare. OK, then.

• “The Christian Peacemaker Who Left a Trail of Trauma.” Weeks ago, I bookmarked this Daniel Silliman piece for Christianity Today because it was an excellent piece of reporting, albeit on a disheartening subject. I think I’d intended to write something more about it than just that, but find now that’s pretty much all I needed to say about it — that’s it’s an excellent piece of reporting, albeit on a disheartening subject.

• “The ‘satanic’ messages within Led Zeppelin song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’” I’ve written a lot here about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s in general, including specifically how everyone my age who grew up white evangelical probably spent time spinning records backwards. What struck me, reading Mick McStarkey’s look back on all that, is how those who deliberately spread this lie remain untainted — their moral standing as the arbiters of good, Christian morality undiminished — while the neighbors against whom they willfully bore false witness remain vaguely suspect because of that lie.

McStarkey notes that one of the primary originators and spreaders of the “Stairway” nonsense was “televangelist Paul Crouch.” It’s damning that white evangelicals ever took the slanderous gossip of back-masking seriously. But it’s doubly damning that anything produced by or touched by a charlatan like Crouch wasn’t immediately rejected.

• Alan Bean gave us all a doozy of a series, discussing “The Ten Plagues that drove American White Evangelicals to madness.” These posts are memory as history — the eyewitness testimony of a Southern Baptist in Texas who watched this happen over the past 20+ years and is writing with the clarity and urgency of someone who just wants to get this all down on paper so it won’t be forgotten.

• Alan Bean was also one of the many people who recommended the four-part interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez about her book, Jesus and John Wayne, on the Holy Post podcast. Du Mez and host Skye Jethani focus mostly on the subject of the book’s subtitle: “How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.”

This is a pretty great discussion and introduction to the book. My favorite segment there is the third one, particularly the discussion of Promise Keepers and how even that group’s modest and limited efforts to promote “racial reconciliation” produced a massive whitelash.

P.P.S. (petty postscript): Happy to see Jethani recognizing the reality of the long history documented in Jesus and John Wayne, accepting that it’s not just imaginary hype created by C-list bloggers.

• Remember back during the weeks leading up to Virginia’s gubernatorial election, when Fox News and Facebook and white evangelical churches were in a full-blown moral panic about “critical race theory”? Remember how they all dropped the subject right after election day?

There’s a lesson there that we may never learn, so here’s a piece to bookmark for the weeks ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, when Fox News and Facebook and white evangelical churches and the rest of the GOP fire up the same bad-faith moral panic hoping for the same results: “Does Critical Race Theory Threaten the Gospel?” asks conservative white evangelical Warren Throckmorton. “A lot of evangelicals are saying it does but I don’t see how.”

• Back in November, historian Adam Laats wrote a terrific piece asking “Will the University of Austin Succeed?” Laats notes that “The track record of right-wing breakaway colleges is littered with instructive failures.”

If you’ve already forgotten what the “University of Austin” refers to, that’s why my answer to Laats’ question is “Yes, it already has succeeded.” The Substack glitterati who caused a big splash two months ago by announcing the creation of this “university” raised a nice chunk of change in support of the idea before they and everyone else forgot about it a few weeks later. So it was a success. It got them clicks and attention and donations — the only metrics these folks have for success and failure. Pretending to start a new university proved to be almost as “successful” as pretending to start a new social media platform.

Jubilee always makes some people angry

July 24, 2019 By Fred Clark

It’s been about a decade since the Kids for Cash scandal rocked Luzerne County in northeast Pennsylvania, revealing that judges were essentially selling children to private prisons by taking kickbacks to ensure harsh verdicts and sentences for juvenile offenders. Now a different set of Luzerne County officials have a new twist on selling Kids for Cash: threatening to place children in the foster care system if their parents don’t pay school lunch bills:

The letters sent recently to about 1,000 parents in Wyoming Valley West School District have led to complaints from parents and a stern rebuke from Luzerne County child welfare authorities.

The district says that it is trying to collect more than $20,000, and that other methods to get parents to pay have not been successful. Four parents owe at least $450 apiece.

The letter claims the unpaid bills could lead to dependency hearings and removal of their children for not providing them with food.

“You can be sent to dependency court for neglecting your child’s right to food. The result may be your child being taken from your home and placed in foster care,” the letter read.

Luzerne County seems like a great place to raise a family.

The whole point of the book of Jonah is Don’t Be Like Jonah.

School board members have now revealed that this had nothing to do with money or budgets or needing to pay the bills, even though the school district has trouble with all of those things. It was only about establishing that the creditor class has power over the debtor class.

We know this because the school board has rejected a Philly-based CEO’s offer to pay off all the debt in a kind of school-lunch jubilee, “Philly businessman rebuffed in efforts to clear Pa. kids’ school-lunch debt“:

[Todd] Carmichael had Aren Platt, a La Colombe consultant, reach out to the Wyoming Valley West School District attorney over the weekend, but got no response. Next, efforts were made to reach the superintendent. Finally, Platt found a home phone number for Mazur and called him on Monday. He made the no-strings-attached offer and said Carmichael didn’t necessarily need credit for his actions.

Mazur told Platt that he would not accept the offer, Platt said. Mazur said that he believed most of the families that owed money could afford the debt, and that it was their responsibility to pay.

“His counter was, ‘These are affluent families who just want to get something for free,’” said Platt. “This wasn’t ever about repayment of a debt. It was about shaming people.”

Carmichael agreed that the district is less concerned with its $22,000 and more concerned about humiliating people who struggle.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to do that,” said Carmichael, “to shame them because they can’t pay for mac and cheese.”

Carmichael wasn’t the only donor offering a jubilee here. “County officials told NPR that at least five donors stepped forward willing to pay the students’ debt. A prominent media figure was among those who expressed interested in donating.”

That last quote is from an NPR report that appeared while I was writing this: “Pa. School District Reverses Course and Will Now Accept Donations to Cover Lunch Debt.”

In an about-face, the Pennsylvania school district that threatened to place children in foster care over past-due cafeteria bills is now accepting donations following its initial rejection of those who offered to help, a decision that left many observers puzzled.

… People who tried to contact school officials to donate the full $22,000 that was owed said they were bewildered that they weren’t getting replies from the school district.

… State Rep. Aaron Kaufer, whose district includes the school district, visited the school’s central office in Kingston, Pa., on Wednesday and convinced school board members to welcome charitable gifts.

Kaufer said there appeared to be some infighting among the school’s board members about accepting outside money to cover the meal debt, but the precise reason for donors being ignored was not clear.

“I don’t understand either,” said Kaufer in an interview with NPR.

Kudos to Kaufer for mediating an end to this nonsense. But I think I do understand what Mazur and his fellow Dickensian villains were thinking in their preference for punishing debtors over erasing debt by Jubilee.

Their position isn’t bewildering at all to anyone who’s read the book of Jonah or any of the many parables Jesus told about this same sick, anti-Jubilee ideology. Mazur is Jonah, and the Prodigal son’s older brother, and the unforgiving servant, and the worker who spent a full day in the vineyard. Jubilee enrages him and grace offends him because he’s convinced he doesn’t need it himself. If he can pay all of his debts all on his own, then why should anybody else have their debts forgiven?

“That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”

God is gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love. This infuriates some people. Always has.

It’s the same cramped, resentful mental trap that left Jonah sulking under the desert sun. And it’s the same cramped, resentful mental trap that spawned the Tea Party, with its demand that only big banks be bailed out, not individual homeowners facing foreclosure, because why should those people — those undeserving poor with their granite countertops probably — have their debts relieved?

Kaufer ought to understand that attitude, too, because he’s a Republican state representative in Pennsylvania, and that resentment of the poor in service of the creditor class is the animating economic principle for everything his party does in Harrisburg.

Despite the devastating mockery of this attitude in Jonah and all the parables, it’s still ever-present and perniciously popular. That’s partly because it’s a spiritual disease that serves the interests of the very wealthy. They’ve fed and nurtured this sickness for so long that the “morality” of debt is now a complete perversion and inversion of what the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament Jesus (Mr. “I am Jubilee in the flesh” himself) had to say about it.

In the Bible, being in debt is not a sin. But burdening others with debt is. Usury is an abomination — the kind of sin so grievously wicked it counts as a kind of blasphemy. Jubilee, on the other hand, is a command.

Yet the loudest voices of religious moralism in America flip that around, insisting that it’s a sin not to pay all of your debts, with interest, and with interest on the interest. And they’ll fight and oppose anything that looks like Jubilee as a threat to this “morality.”

That very much serves the interests of those whose fortunes are based on their money “making” more money through the magic of interest, i.e., the sin of usury. But I don’t think that’s a consequence or a side-effect caused by all-debts-must-be-paid moralizing. I think it’s the cause and the origin of it.

Jubilee for Puerto Rico

September 26, 2017 By Fred Clark

The situation in Puerto Rico is very, very bad. Hurricane Maria devastated the island and it is running out of basic necessities.

Four days after a major hurricane battered Puerto Rico, leaving the entire island in a communications and power blackout, regions outside San Juan remained disconnected from the rest of the island — and the world. Juncos, in a mountainous region southeast of the capital that was slammed with Maria’s most powerful winds, remains isolated, alone, afraid.

For many residents, the challenge of accessing the essentials of modern life — gasoline, cash, food, water — began to sink in. And government officials had no answers for them. Estimates for the return of electricity and basic services will be measured not in days but in weeks and months. For those most vulnerable, far too long.

Many have been openly wondering when help will arrive, whether from local officials or from the federal government. The first thing some people ask when they see outsiders: “Are you FEMA?”

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló is warning that his government needs broader assistance from the federal government, calling on the Pentagon especially to provide more aid for law enforcement and transportation. Rosselló said he’s also worried that Congress will shortchange his island once the initial wave of emergency relief is gone.

“We still need some more help. This is clearly a critical disaster in Puerto Rico,” he said Sunday night. “It can’t be minimized and we can’t start overlooking us now that the storm passed, because the danger lurks.”

Rescue, recovery and rebuilding in Puerto Rico would be a major challenge even if we had a capable government that was interested in the task of governing — one that saw itself as responsive and responsible to all of the people of America. But we do not have such a government.

Puerto Rico is home to more than 3 million American citizens, but despite that legal, constitutional status, residents of the territory have never been treated as equals to those on the mainland, even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times. We have a white nationalist president whose “America First” motto explicitly diminishes the citizenship and humanity of nonwhite citizens — particularly of Spanish-speaking American citizens like the residents of Puerto Rico. The Trump Effect can be seen on social media, where every post pleading for the swift, proportionate assistance Puerto Rico needs right now prompts dismissive MAGA sloganeering based on the ignorant (at best) claim that Puerto Ricans are not real Americans and that assistance for those “here in America” should take priority over any afterthought of crumbs for those in the colonial territory.

AmericanFlags

Massive natural disasters do not require a “hot take.” They don’t require a “take” of any kind. Joe Romm and Joy-Ann Reid both make a compelling case that Maria’s destruction in Puerto Rico is shaping up to be “Trump’s Katrina.” The president’s belated, begrudging response has revealed him to be unconcerned and incompetent — unable to rise to the kind of leadership that this crisis requires.

But then we already knew that about Donald Trump.

Compounding the current crisis on the island, and barring any hope of near-term recovery, is Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis. It’s twisted, but Wikipedia provides a helpful overview. The territory owes, and is unable to repay, more than $70 billion. That odious debt has begun to be restructured, with a kind of bankruptcy arrangement, but it all imposes a stifling austerity on the island. The logic guiding all of this has been the contradictory moralistic nonsense that seems to guide all discussion of non-corporate bankruptcy — the claim that creditors have a moral right to profit from the risk of lending, and also a moral right to lend without risk.

That Wikipedia article attributes Puerto Rico’s debt to “decades of mismanagement” — implying the territory’s government has always practiced a form of full sovereignty that it has never been allowed to enjoy. I would say that, yes, Puerto Rico has been “mismanaged” for decades, but that the source of that mismanagement has mostly been Washington in service of Wall Street rather than San Juan in service of its people.

Assigning blame for that debt, though, is a pointless exercise now. There was some debate last year during the PROMESA negotiations as to whether Puerto Rico might ever be capable of repaying that debt — whether the billions might, over time, be carved out of the island’s schools and streets and hospitals and transferred back to Wall Street. Most thought then that it could never be repaid, but a few disagreed. No one can disagree now. Any possibility of Puerto Rico’s bondholders one day profiting from those debts was washed away in the hurricane.

So it’s time for Jubilee. Cancel the debt. Erase it from the books.

What about those creditors? Don’t they deserve to be repaid? Well, I have bad news for them. There was a hurricane. A big one. An act of God. Their investment just got blown away. That’s always a possibility and, unfortunately for them, it just happened.

Of course, that’s just the practical, pragmatic argument for debt cancellation — based, in this case, on the sheer fact of the recent storm. But the essential idea of Jubilee is more than that. Jubilee says that while, yes, creditors have a claim to repayment, debt must never be perpetual and permanent. A creditor’s claim of perpetual obligation is illegitimate. It is untrue, unreal. A lie. There is a limit on how much can be squeezed, forever, from the indebted.

Jubilee is what’s needed now. But whether or not you believe in the moral or theological case for it, Jubilee is what’s needed now because there no longer exists any real alternative.

“And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.”

January 1, 2015 — Email Jubilee

December 28, 2014 By Fred Clark

Matt Inman in right — Email is a Monster.

And lately the monster has been winning. I need a reset, a fresh start, a blank slate. I need an empty inbox.

And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.

What I need — what many of us need, I’m guessing — is a Jubilee. We need a new start for the new year.

So let us heed the words of the prophet Isaiah:

… proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
… set the oppressed free,
and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Let’s make January 1, 2015, a day of email Jubilee.

On New Year’s Day, I’m clearing out my inbox. Select all. Delete.

Or maybe I’ll archive them all to a Someday, If I Ever Manage to Get to Them folder. But in any case, as of January 1, I will have an empty inbox. And thus, as of January 1, I will have a new chance to maybe keep on top of my incoming email — a chance to read these things as they come in, to respond in a more timely and caring manner, to flag and filter out all the manymanymany lists and alerts and fundraising mass-blasts for fine causes or longshot candidates from long-ago elections.

Maybe this won’t work for long. Maybe it won’t work at all. Maybe it will just be one of those New Year’s resolutions that doesn’t survive past Martin Luther King’s birthday. But it’s worth a try.

I invite you to join me in this.

Olly olly oxen free. Come out, come out wherever you are. I call a do-over. Take a mulligan. Off-setting penalties, repeat first down. Etc.

Jubilee, in other words.

I need it. Maybe you need it, too. And maybe that’s OK.

So if you’ve sent me an email and I haven’t responded, I am sorry. Please forgive me, and please feel free to try again after January 1.

I will be trying again after January 1 — trying to do a better job of personally responding to the persons who email me (at slacktivist dot hotmail dot com) and trying to do a better job of not getting swamped under by the deluge of non-persons who have flooded my current inbox beyond repair.

Thanks.

Jubilee: Why Old Man Potter is bad for business in Bedford Falls

May 19, 2013 By Fred Clark

The Insight Center for Community Economic Development crunches the numbers and confirms what everybody in Bedford Falls already knew: Debt-slavery to Old Man Potter isn’t good for the community.

The huge fees — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau calculates the average APR on a payday loan is 392% — may make billions for lenders, but would be better for the economy if spent elsewhere.

Writes the Insight Center:

The economic activity generated by payday lending firms receiving interest payments is less than the lost economic activity from reduced household spending. Specifically, each dollar in interest paid subtracts $1.94 from the economy through reduced household spending while only adding $1.70 to the economy through spending by payday lending establishments.

As a result, for each dollar of payday lending interest paid, an estimated 24 cents is lost to the U.S. economy.

For example, a payday loan that carries an interest payment of $40.00 causes a loss of $9.60 — nearly one-quarter of the fee — from the economy.

The researchers calculate that for 2011, during which payday lenders took in an estimated $3.3 billion in interest, the net loss to the U.S. economy was $774 million, as household spending tends to outpace spending by payday lending businesses.

That’s a lot of numbers and figures and calculations, but just focus on that last line: “Household spending tends to outpace spending by payday lending businesses.”

Old Man Potter collects that $3.3 billion in interest every year and only spends part of it on his household staff, limousine maintenance, imported cigars, etc. The rest of it just sits there in giant piles that Potter sometimes swims through Scrooge-McDuck-style, but otherwise doesn’t put to any productive use.

If the working-class households had been able to use that $3.3 billion for something other than enriching the already too-rich Potter, they’d have spent all of it much more widely — circulating it throughout more of the economy where more of it would be put to productive use. They’d spend it at the butcher, the baker, the barber, Martini’s restaurant, the grocer, the deli. All of those businesses would benefit from the income and they would, in turn, spend it again elsewhere, further benefitting the whole community.

That’s the “multiplier effect” the Insight Center is trying to measure in its paper. And what they found — unsurprisingly — was that the multiplier effect was a lot less when the money landed in Potter’s vault than it was when the money stayed in the hands of members of the community.

Rolling Jubilee: Proclaim Liberty Throughout all the Land

November 13, 2012 By Fred Clark

Ezra Klein describes a scene from the documentary The Queen of Versailles:

David Siegel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, the largest time-share company in the world, is hosting a party. The party is in his huge mansion. But it’s not in his hugest mansion — the 90,000 square foot, still under-construction “Versailles” — which is, at that moment, falling into foreclosure because Siegel can’t keep up on the payments.

Siegel, slumped in a ratty armchair, is regaling some friends with a tale that is, simultaneously, a sob-story about the desperate state of his finances and an extended boast about his skill at financial engineering. As Siegel tells it, he owes the bank $18.5 million, and he can’t pay. But the bank won’t write down the loan. So Siegel tapped a third-party to approach the bank about buying the loan, which they were able to do, for a mere $3.5 million. And then Siegel bought his $18.5 million loan back from the third-party at barely more than a sixth of its original value.

It’s nice to be rich. Millionaires like Siegel, being millionaires, don’t usually have to worry about being trapped by crippling debt, but even if they find themselves in that unusual situation, they have neat little tricks like that to liberate themselves from debt for a fraction of the cost. Matt Yglesias describes how Siegel’s little scheme worked:

All kinds of debt gets “securitized” these days. Instead of a bank just lending money and collecting interest, it sells the rights to that income stream as an Asset Backed Security. By buying up a diverse array of ABS you can end up with less exposure to idiosyncratic risk than if you’re just lending. But what happens when securitized loans go bad? Well they become “distressed debt” that can be purchased for pennies on the dollar.

That’s what Siegel’s “third party” friend did. Unfortunately, that’s not a solution available to most of us — or to the people who really need it. A time-share mogul who makes a string of bad bets during a bubble can slip away from $18.5 million in debt. But a working-class family hit by job loss or injury can be permanently impoverished by an $18.5 thousand debt, with no means of escape.

Until now.

Because the merry mischief-makers of Occupy have come up with a scheme to help free working-class families from enslavement to debt by using the same tricks employed by the Siegels and Trumps of the 1 percent.

They call it Rolling Jubilee:

Rolling Jubilee is a Strike Debt project that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it. Together we can liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal. Debt resistance is just the beginning. Join us as we imagine and create a new world based on the common good, not Wall Street profits.

(Thanks to lonespark and alienbooknose and others who alerted me to this very cool idea.) So far, according to the Rolling Jubilee site, they’ve raised a little over $100,000 and used it to abolish about $2.2 million in debt — which is an even better return on investment than Siegel got. Here’s their video explaining the idea in simple terms:

Patrick Nielsen Hayden cuts to the core of what this means:

That this isn’t just an attempt to render charity to the needy; it’s an attempt to undermine a specific kind of power relationship. As understood and practiced today, debt is a kind of servitude. If you have to take on unsustainable debts — or if you have the misfortune to live in a country that took on unsustainable debts — you’re just supposed to quietly accept that your life is permanently f–ked, and that your creditors get to dictate its terms.

That’ll preach. That’s exactly what Jubilee — the biblical, theological Jubilee — is all about. It means liberation from debt — liberation from having “to quietly accept that your life is permanently f–ked.”

The quote in the title of this post is from the Jubilee passage in Leviticus 25 — the one engraved on the Liberty Bell. But it’s a mistake to think that because the biblical Jubilee first appears in Leviticus and Deuteronomy it must be some obscure and ancient law — something akin to dietary rules or sacrificial prescriptions. Jubilee is woven throughout the whole of the Bible. It’s a refrain that echoes all through Isaiah and the other prophets. Jesus announced his ministry by declaring himself the fulfillment of Jubilee. It pervades his parables. And, as Richard Beck notes, the Lord’s Prayer is a Jubilee prayer.

And spare me any bloody penal substitutionary horror scenarios, Jubilee is the essence of atonement. Jubilee is who Christ was and Jubilee is what Christ did.

All of which is to say that Jubilee is pretty important for us Christian types. And I think Bethany Keeley-Jonker is right to call the Rolling Jubilee a “beautiful step” and a reflection of “God’s economy.”

The Rolling Jubilee is limited, small and quixotic. It can’t address government-backed student loans. And, unlike Siegel’s buddy, it’s not set up in a way that lets it choose — or even know — who will benefit from its random compounding Jubilee.

Natasha Lennard also describes and anticipates some of the ways that creditors may push back to make this effort more difficult. She notes that the Rolling Jubilee is “just one tactic” but “quite a clever one”:

It might erase some crippling debts; it might forge new networks and affinities. It’s certainly an intriguing experiment.

‘God speed the year of Jubilee’: A great American on Independence Day

July 4, 2012 By Fred Clark

Frederick Douglass: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too — great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory. …

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. …

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? …

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

Read the whole thing. Read it every year.