Failure to recognise the importance of freeing the land and natural resources from indebtedness to private creditors violates the spirit of Jubilee proclamations. To. understand how drastically today's World Bank/IMF rhetoric diverges from these proclamations from Sumer and Babylonia through Judah and other Near Eastern regions, their logic needs to be understood.

Their core was fiscal policy. From the third millennium onward, private creditors waged a struggle to obtain the land's crop usufruct at the expense of the palace. Rulers restored the land's usufruct from private creditors to its traditional holders and cultivators so that the latter once again could pay the crop usufruct to the palace. Private creditors had lent money against this usufruct or economic surplus, and claimed the crop usufruct as interest.

The Babylonian and Assyrian word for these royal proclamations was andurarum, a cognate to the Hebrew deror used in Lev.25. What made the Biblical version different was that the Jewish authors found that kingship had become more in the character of military overlordships than the "divine kingship" by which Bronze Age Mesopotamian rulers had restored order and promoted equity. Jewish leaders accordingly took clean slates out of the hands of kings and made them part of the Mosaic covenant.

In the process, these clean slates were made chronologically regular rather than being left to the inauguration of each new ruler's reign or to his discretion as military or environmental conditions dictated.

FAMILIES ran into debt for several reasons, such as crop failure. All they had to pledge was the value of their crop. Nearly every early form of fees or taxes to the palace or contributions to the temples had to be paid out of the land's usufruct.

But the IMF and World Bank insist on just the opposite policy being pursued. The banking systems are to be based on mortgage lending as the land-rent is privatised. Land, mineral rights and monopoly rents society's "unearned income", which forms the natural basis for funding governments are to be taken by creditors. What is to be taxed is labour, not property.

Debtor countries are told to increase their export earnings by shifting land away from producing food that supports their populations. They are to add to the world's oversupply of plantation export crops and cattle herds. Just as "sheep displaced men" in England's enclosure movements, so the World Bank's "agricultural" loans have been to large export plantations, typically foreign-owned.

The latifundia/microfundia land patterns create a rural exodus to the cities, affording low-priced labour. But unlike the case of the Industrial Revolution, this labour no longer can serve as loom-fodder. Women may work for low-wage garment firms, but men remain unemployed, their lives and potential wasted.

This is what the IMF calls "structural adjustment". It means to keep living standards so low that labour cannot afford to import enough to share in the living standards achieved in the creditor

nations. If labour's wages rise, their purchasing power is to be depreciated by devaluing the currency's exchange rate. The raw materials export earnings of these "hewers of wood and drawers of water" is to be used to service their debt.

The semantic root of "service" is servitude and bondage. So we are back to what the original Babylonian clean slates and biblical Jubilee were designed to rectify. But now such servitude is being imposed under the program of Jubilee 2000. This is not an auspicious start to the new millennium.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr Hudson is a former balance-of-payments analyst for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Andersen. He helped establish the world's first sovereign-debt mutual fund (offshore) through Scudder.. Stevens & Clark in 1989.

The background on Bronze Age and biblical clean lutes is described in his 'The Economic Roots: of the Jubilee,'' Bible Review 15 (Feb. 1999). For the use of land-rent as the ancient tax base, and how rulers restored this; by annulling private-sector claims for interest. see his chapter in. R.V. Andelson (ed.), Land Value Taxation Around .the.. World (New York: Schalkenbach Foundation), 1998, and Urbanization and Land ownership in the Ancient Near East (ed: Michael Hudson and Baruch Levine), Cambridge, Mass Peabody Museum (Harvard); 1999.

For a critique of the World Bank's anti-development strategies, see Dr Hudson's Super-Imperialism (Holt Rinehart & Winston 1972) and Global Fracture (Harper & Row, 1977).

--from Land & Liberty, Winter 1999

[Missing from this analysis is consideration of the role of our global debt-money system in creating these debts. �BL]