� cancellation of personal debts owed by the rural population (mainly as arrears for tax-like obligations or tribute owed to royal collectors);

� return of bond-servants (family members, including slaves) who had been pledged to creditors as collateral; and

� return of land rights to holders of record as of the last clean slate.

Palaces and temples were creditors, not debtors. Public debt is a relatively modem phenomenon. There was no public debt in antiquity, and hence, no pressure to cancel them. Wars had to be fought on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Wives, daughters and household slaves were returned to their families of origin. Their labour would revert to their families rather than to their creditors. But under the World Bank/IMF plan, today's most heavily indebted economies will remain in debt bondage. Their wage levels are to remain depressed by the debt burden. Whatever labour unions may win to improve their living standards will be denominated m domestic currencies. Such gains will be undone by depreciation as payments of interest and dividends interest to foreign creditors and food suppliers will work chronically to collapse the currency's exchange rate.

In today's world, liberation of bond-servants does not apply, although entire countries are to be held in economic bondage via their indebted governments. Nor are land rights to self-support resources being discussed. There is no talk of breaking up the latifundia or giving populations a right to self-support. Entire nations remain food-dependent. Most important, they also remain deeply indebted even after the faux-Jubilee. The real celebrants should be the bankers and bondholders, not the debtors.

THE World Bank/IMF plan has left the indebted peasantry's obligations on the books. No personal or other private sector debts are to be forgiven, and no land transfers that occurred under economic distress conditions (or military force or other coercive means) are to be affected. Only a portion of the government's foreign debt is to be annulled, which has been deemed hopelessly beyond the capacity of the debt governments to pay. Nobody is speaking about a real Clean Slate, a genuine Jubilee.

Under normal conditions commercial banks and bondholders are obliged to take a second-place seat behind the IMF and World Bank, and often behind national governments as well. But these official creditors have now agreed to stand aside: the IMF, British Treasury and numerous governments have agreed to sell gold and use the profits as a book-credit against the book-debts that will be written off. More recently, after Britain's sale of gold plunged the metal's price, the plan was changed to accommodate South Africa and other gold miners. Official gold holdings will simply be revalued at current market prices, without actually being sold. This ploy of relinquishing official demands for payment will "free" indebted countries to pay international banks and bondholders.

Lost sight of altogether in this sleight of hand has been a key plan of Jubilee

type proclamations: Re-establishment of economic justice by restoring land to its former holders who forfeited it for debt arrears or sold it under economic distress conditions. A "conditionality" constantly imposed by the World Bank and IMF is that past such sales remain irreversible. There .is to be no land reform. Indeed, yet more distress sales are to occur.

A TRUE Jubilee would free the land's usufruct (along with that produced by other natural resources and public monopolies) from private debt

claims. This would leave it available to be collected by the public sector to defray the expenses of government. This is how the Babylonian Clean Slates worked that formed the model for the Jubilee Year of Leviticus. But the World Bank/IMF faux-Jubilee intends for these resources to remain in the hands of creditor nations. Whatever assets remain in public hands � any remaining public lands, mines, phone systems, transport, and every asset that naturally creates a monopoly-rent � are to be sold under pressure of foreign debt-service.

Where have the churches and biblical scholars been? Why is there no protest? How have the biblical laws been so thoroughly forgotten and flagrantly misrepresented? From time immemorial these assets and their economic rents have formed the natural revenue of governments. But henceforth, their economic rents are to be paid as dividends and interest to global private investors. The land and other natural resources, as well as public monopolies are to be sold to raise the money to pay private sector debt and remaining inter-governmental debt. Governments are to be stripped of their national patrimony. And the process is to be made irreversible.

For instance, the World Bank and IMF have insisted that Russia sell Gazprom, oil companies and other natural resources to subsidise the debts run up to finance capital flight. Sale of these resources removes their revenue from the government budget, and turns it into dividends to be paid to the new buyers. This puts chronic pressure on the exchange rate, as well as forcing the domestic tax base to be shifted onto labour.