in the 198os, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined-mainly fueled by military spending. (查看原文)
but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these payments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on. (查看原文)
What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demand ing you give him a thousand dollars of "p.otection money," and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him with a thousand-dollar "loan " ? In most ways, obviously, nothing. (查看原文)
Tell people that they are potential equals who have failed, and that therefore, even what they do have they do not deserve, that it isn't rightly theirs, and you are much more likely to inspire rage. (查看原文)
For the "vanquished" as for most people in the world, actually-the most significant life expenses were weddings and funerals. These required a good deal of money, which always had to be borrowed. In such cases it was com mon practice, Galey explains, for high-caste moneylenders to demand one of the borrower's daughters as security. Often, when a poor man had to borrow money for his daughter's marriage, the security would be the bride herself. She would be expected to report to the lender's household after her wedding night, spend a few months there as his concubine, and then, once he grew bored, be sent off to some nearby timber camp, where she would have to spend the next year or two as a prostitute working off her father's debt. Once it was paid off, she'd return to her husband and begin... (查看原文)
Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement "one has to pay one's debts" is that even according to standard economic theory, it isn't true. A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk. If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrievable--if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance-the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan? (查看原文)
If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt-above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. (查看原文)
One of the first things General Gallieni did after "pacification," as they liked to call it then, was to impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population, in part so they could reimburse the costs of having been invaded, but also, since French colonies were supposed to be fiscally self-supporting, to defray the costs of building the railroads, highways, bridges, planta tions, and so forth that the French regime wished to build. Malagasy taxpayers were never asked whether they wanted these railroads, high ways, bridges, and plantations, or allowed much input into where and how they were built.1 To the contrary: over the next half century, the French army and police slaughtered quite a number of Malagasy who objected too strongly to the arrangement (upwards of half a million, by some reports, d... (查看原文)
The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti-the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon's armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), and the resultant embargo en sured that ... (查看原文)
For the "vanquished" as for most people in the world, actually-the most significant life expenses were weddings and funerals. These required a good deal of money, which always had to be borrowed. （9） (查看原文)
In the secular world, morality consists largely of fulfilling our obligations to others, and we have a stubborn tendency to imagine those obligations as debts. (查看原文)
