Jubilee: Rethink Money and Forgive Debt

Forgiving debt is an ancient Hebrew practice that benefits most, and harms no one. Jubilee may enable us to reconsider the notion of money.

Jubilee: a year of emancipation and restoration provided by ancient Hebrew law to be kept every 50 years by the emancipation of Hebrew slaves, restoration of alienated lands to their former owners and omission of all cultivation of the land.

Our financial system and basis of our economics, housing, trusts and government is corrupt to the core benefiting a tiny few of greedy, selfish wealthy people who aim to keep it that way. Money and profit is exploitation at every transaction and slavery with every debt. The ethos behind money is responsible for all of our woes down to destruction of our life support system and corruption of nearly every human mind. Money has no soul, has zero empathy except for its own aggrandizement. A great movie from 2011 that reveals the the truth about money is In Time. Time is money in this movie; rent it.

Money is evil but you need it to survive in this world, how can we change that? Here is how:

Minor Reforms are Pointless

Dominion is a primary tenant of civilization. Money allows society to commoditize everything from land to labor. Reducing the importance and accumulation of money is a big step towards undermining dominion.

To give up money we have to give up everything and re-discover the original healthy support networks. Current support or economic systems mine and degrade the world, enslave and control entire populations, and perpetuate themselves through corrupt programming of humans. Civilized education and culturalization is downloading a bad virus or meme into every human mind. This education is so complete that most people do not even realize they are getting screwed and have to destroy the planet to survive. Then we pass this joyous clusterfuck on to their children as though it was sacred. Civilization and money is the biggest crock of shit, greatest destructive force and largest waste of resources in all of history.

Twenty Money and Debt Reforms:

Eliminate the Federal Reserve. There is no reason for a government that can mint its own money to borrow it from a group of wealthy bankers. How silly is that? Government borrowing creates money just the same as minting it. The only differences is that we and our children are enslaved to debt.
Jubilee, cancel all personal debt including mortgages. Free the people. A society that takes away free land and free food has the responsibility to replace it with a free replacement source of livelihood, otherwise call it what civilization and debt are: slavery. Understand that the bank you borrow your mortgage from created it out of thin air at a keyboard. Modern banks have a decreasing fractional server requirement. In the UK, banks have a reserve requirement of zero depositor funds on hand to cover loans given. The bank just goes under if it makes too many bad loans. A bankers its at a computer, presses enter and poof! You are a slave for the rest of your working life.
Replace forprofit banks with nonprofits. I used to think crypto was the future but it is too speculative. This will take more thought, but it would be great to get rid of the bank’s profit motive. Bank’s primary role is to protect money of the wealthy. If we did not have overly-wealthy people that role would shift.
Since we have locked up the food, shelter, utilities, society has a responsibility to provide a living stipend to lower income people. Incentivise employers to pay higher wages to attract people to work for more.
Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
Convert all rentals to ownership with default condo associations to manage the buildings or dwellings. The landlord didn’t have the money in the first place, they borrowed fake money from banks to build the apartments. Donald Trump’s grandfather became wealthy as a slumlord in New York City. Donald never had to work for money a day in his life. He just spent his career losing almost 70 percent of his inheritance so far. If he had put his inheritance in a stock index fund it would be $12 billion today, he only has $4 billion left instead. The moral of the story is, I can go to a bank, borrow money to build or buy an apartment building, have families move into it and become my slaves for the rest of their working lives to pay me to a walk to the bank. Renting should be a crime. Again, rent the movie, In Time.
Free land, free food and restore natural skills education. The real crime of civilization is stealing a person’s means to a livelihood by locking up the land, food and medicine then enslaving them to get it back. We lock up the land with a crime called private property and mortgage slavery. It is no coincidence that the prefix of mortgage is “mort” which means death. Mortgage is a death-loan. All or most modern medicines are derived originally from plants or fungi: aspirin from willow bark, penicillin from mold. Native American should receive all of the profit from pharmaceutical companies. Everything that was free before Columbus arrive must be free today.
End all financial instruments, derivatives and the stock market. Unearned income from doing nothing except already being wealthy is greed.
No credit cards, everyone gets money every bi-monthly anyway. Don’t spend beyond your means.
No oligarchs. Limit personal wealth to 10 million dollars. No one needs more than that. Large privately held tracks of land returns to public lands for all species.
Close the stock markets, pay stock holders up to $1 million per person. Ultra-wealthy people are generally a drag on society. Especially those that just inherit their money like our current clown and chief.
End private property. No one should be able to destroy a piece of land for their own benefit. A modern home destroys the forest it came from and the land it stands on.
Convert all company ownership back to the employees. The workers really determine the success or failure of the enterprise and should benefit from their efforts. Hiring subs-contractors to avoid diluting ownership is prohibited.
Change all corporations to public benefit corporations that have to return profits back to the nonprofits in the community. Except for initial stock offerings, money paid for stock shares never goes to the company, it goes to the prior stock owner. So why should the stock owner receive profits in the form of dividends or voting rights from the company when it actually never benefited the company?
Switch the elected politician allocation of government spending to the voters. Citizens vote every two years how their taxes are allocated. Should the funds go to education and health care, or to the military? You choose. The voter would also decide what percent of their taxes goes to federal, state, and local government. If most people want spending to be mostly local, then we have a small federal government by default. Limit a shift to two percent for stability.
Stop paying people to overpopulate. Provide give free child education, food and health care for the first child, or at most two children. More children than that, you pay to play. Incentivize one child families. Pay parents 10-20 thousand dollars, after one or two kids, for vasectomy or tubes tied.
Overturn Citizen’s United decision that enables corporations, and unions to act as people and advertise to affect elections.
Publicly fund elections. End private money interfering with elections pro and con.
Free health care and college. Healthy and well educated individuals is essential for benefit of all of society, and electorate.
Tax resource extraction 100% or more. Practices such as ecosystem destruction through clear cut logging and eating meat should be significantly be taxed to be discouraged. When society realizes that animal death camps are evil, we will have regained much of our lost compassion and empathy for all life on Earth.

History Lesson for Context

When Columbus was found lost at sea, he and his fellow slaver traders stumbled upon two entire continents filled with 100 million people living in harmony with the earth. There were no banks, jails, mental health care, police, military, money, profit, civilization or accountants. Native American cultures possessed a technology impossible for our twisted civilized minds to comprehend. It’s called nature, animism, letting go, living as one, taking no more than you can, be one with all species. You don’t own the land, the land owns you. You can’t take the land with you but it will eat you when you die and pass your fire of life on to another regardless of your religion.

Any transaction was a fair exchange with no exploitation. The earth was whole with an fecundity of biodiversity, buffalo herds and passenger pigeon flocks in the millions. Forests of ancient trees a thousand of years old from coast to coast. Giant 400 to 600 year old Valley oaks in the California central valley. One oak, yes just one tree, provided 500 pounds of food, enough for several families for a year. The Camas and Willamette valleys in Oregon were covered by perennial camas plans with edible bulbs. This was food as far as they could see. The great planes were covered with perennials and grasses as tall as a man on a horse. All of our coastal and lake fisheries were abundant, salmon runs and beavers for hundreds of miles inland on every river, an entire sheet of life flowing up river. Land, food, housing and clothing all free. Everyone had cradle to grave security from their tribe.

This was all here, that is until civilization destroyed it for profit. The greatest crime of humanity was to destroy thousands of working cultures just to make money. Genocide on the grandest scale unimaginable of human and millions of other species just so we could have our houses, roads, malls and lattes. We should be ashamed and beg forgiveness on our knees every time we see a native American. We should burn our houses down and throw civilization on the trash heap of history as the “Great Disaster”.

Remember, the problem is not humanity. Humanity has lived fine on the earth for millions of years. The problem is a new culture called civilization which causes humans to destroy the earth and exploit one another to live.

But then there will be no economy. Really?

Humanity thrived without all of these evils for millions of years. If business need capital, they can borrow it from people and have to pay them back. GoFundMe for business. No more stock funny business that can be resold on and on after the business already company raised the capital.

The premise is to shift money creation away from banks to the individual. One would argue that banks know better where to allocate capital. I argue that the individual is the expert on themselves and they know where their capital should be allocated. The most worthy, companies will receive the capital anyway. A person is also the expert on where they want their funds spent in the government. If you are a government for and by the people, this plan is for you.

One More Thing

I am not just some ranting radical. I have a Bachelor of Accounting, MBA in Finance, founded several profitable business with sales over $30 in todays dollars, have seen the inside of Fortune 100 companies, interned in the US Trade Representative’s office for President Reagan, founded two nonprofits, served on serval environmental nonprofit boards, taught permaculture for 10 years, founded an heirloom seed company, am a vegetable plant breeder and retired at age 39 after selling my software company. I am someone well educated, on the inside and I know what I am talking about.

I can run the numbers and trends in my head into the future. There is no future in money, profit or civilization short of destruction for all. We need to start turning around now, rejoining the earth or there will be endless resource wars and worse. Wrap your head around this fact. There were $1 billion people 100 years ago when we first started using oil in earnest. So 7.5 billion people are here because of oil and oil is going away. Stop and reread that sentence. We have to radically shift from an exploitive economy back to the regenerative one we had before Columbus arrived here with the mother of mind diseases be carried called civilization.

We need to start making huge changes in the way we live not just hoping to solve our problems by recycling or voting for one clueless political party or another. These ideas only seem radical because we do not get much of an education, nor are we allowed to look or live outside of the box. Let’s throw away the box called civilization and money. We are doing this for our children’s children.

Coronavirus Update

Today is April 3, 2020. The COVID-19 virus is spreading quickly, and shutting down much of the world’s economy. Can we get by without debt and money?

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To see how all of the dots are connected to one cause and only one solution. Read Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution by Chuck Burr. More articles online at culturequake.com. Updated December 16, 2025.

Post Editor, Beth Brown — Beth is a lifestyle writer and former assistant news editor of the Easley Progress. She graduated from Columbia College with a focus on Writing and Public Affairs. She is a singer/songwriter/musician, yogi, activist and Love Warrior for Mother Earth.

Image: Travel Japan Blog.

Images: NPR, Planet Money, Jubilee Debt Campaign.