To our modern sensitivity, seeing parents give away their children to social services because they can't pay the bills or are being foreclosed and evicted from their homes is about as morally abhorrent as giving one's children to slavery, which was a common occurrence in ancient times. Back then, there were debt jubilees. This text describes just one of them. The creditors were shamed into agreeing by a moral outrage. The moral outrage then was to cause "countrymen" or "brothers" to be enslaved. The outrage now is the lack of "solidarity". But how far does solidarity extend today? Is there "European solidarity"? I'm sure Greece contributed money to the European disaster fund that was set up after the Elbe floods of 2002. Because of European solidarity. It offends to hear the likes of Jean Claude Juncker to describe the ongoing negotiations of the second Greek "bailout" as "European solidarity" with the addendum that the Greeks still have to show they deserve it.

For fuck's sake, I'll demonize JC Juncker if I feel like it. I already said he was an idiot in February 2010 and I stand by everything I said in that thread.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker