Monday, January 26, 2009

Modern Jubilee Discussions Beginning on the Internet

I have actually found a couple discussions of the merits of a modern Jubilee Year on the web.

The idea got major publicity through an article in the British press, by a keen economic commentator writing for the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans Pritchard.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/4285187/Biblical-debt-jubilee-may-be-the-only-answer.html
Reading the British press is about the only place you can find hard hitting and honest discussions of the economy. The American press is clearly covering up discussion of what is going on, as well as how bad it is getting in other countries.

The other discussion I found is on an Amazon politics forum.

http://www.amazon.com/tag/politics/forum?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1S3QSZRUL93V8&cdThread=Tx23BRCHUJ9CSO1

It is good to see the idea being discussed. Unfortunately, most people are initially very negative towards the idea, and there has been little attempt to systematically explain how and why it would work.

I am mining the comments sections of those two articles for common objections, which I can then address systematically. We who go forth with the gospel of Jubilee need to be well-prepared for the inevitable common questions and objections. I have already started to address some objections in a previous post (Addressing Objections to Jubilee) and will expand those arguments in upcoming posts.

Accordingly, the appearance and focus of this blog will be changing. When I started this blog last fall, much of the press was still publishing happy face optimism trying to cover up the severity of the crisis. That has changed drastically in the past month. Everyone, even in the popular press like MSNBC, is openly discussing the possibility of this being as bad as the Great Depression. The establishment is now openly admitting that the turnaround will be years away, although they often throw out 3 or 4 years as a timeline, which is painfully overoptimistic.

Since the bad news is now firmly established, I will be focusing more on the nuts of bolts of how the Jubilee needs to be carried out, and why it will work. As the magnitude of this GD2 continues to set in and deepen, open calls for a modern Jubilee Year will become louder, and will begin to make a lot more sense to a lot more people, but they need the theoretical ammunition to drive their point home.

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