Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

(1971-THE BEGINNING . . . )
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of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they
were signing a promissory note to which every American was
to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black
men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable
Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It
is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory
note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of
honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro
people a bad check, a check which has come back marked
"insufficient funds."
One can see the great crash of 2oo8 in the same light-as the outcome
of years of political tussles between creditors and debtors, rich
and poor. True, on a certain level, it was exactly what it seemed to
be: a scam, an incredibly sophisticated Ponzi scheme designed to collapse
in the full knowledge that the perpetrators would be able to force
the victims to bail them out. On another level it could be seen as the
culmination of a battle over the very definition of money and credit.
By the end of World War II, the specter of an imminent workingclass
uprising that had so haunted the ruling classes of Europe and
North America for the previous century had largely disappeared. This
was because class war was suspended by a tacit settlement. To put it
crudely: the white working class of the North Atlantic countries, from
the United States to West Germany, were offered a deal. If they agreed
to set aside any fantasies of fundamentally changing the nature of the
system, then they would be allowed to keep their unions, enjoy a wide
variety a social benefits (pensions, vacations, health care ... ), and, perhaps
most important, through generously funded and ever-expanding
public educational institutions, know that their children had a reasonable
chance of leaving the working class entirely. One key element in
all this was a tacit guarantee that increases in workers' productivity
would be met by increases in wages: a guarantee that held good until
the late 1970s. Largely as a result, the period saw both rapidly rising
productivity and rapidly rising incomes, laying the basis for the consumer
economy of today.
Economists call this the "Keynesian era" since it was a time in
which John Maynard Keynes' economic theories, which already formed
the basis of Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States, were adopted
by industrial democracies pretty much everywhere. With them came
Keynes' rather casual attitude toward money. The reader will recall
that Keynes fully accepted that banks do, indeed, create money "out of
thin air," and that for this reason, there was no intrinsic reason that