Debt has been weaponized “pretty much continually” for the last four or five millennia by “people who have access to the ability to make credit,” anthropologist, Occupy activist and anarchist David Graeber said on the “Keiser Report” TV show in late April.

“This is the great social crisis of antiquity,” he continued. “If you go back to people like Aristotle, Hammurabi, Confucius — when they imagined the great social crisis, weaponized debt was what they had in mind. That this tiny percentage of the population would essentially enslave everybody else. They would start losing their flocks, their fields, eventually they would have to start selling members of their family or even themselves into slavery. And the way I always put it — if Aristotle were alive today, he would probably see the distinction between being so deeply in debt that you have to sell yourself to work for others and being so deeply in debt that you have to rent yourself to work for others as something of a legalistic distinction.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Paul Stewart: