Imagine This

Poor, starving, war torn, and desperate, they borrow from the wealthiest nations and then cannot repay the loans. Their debt undermines any hope of economic recovery, which means more poverty, more starvation, more war, greater desperation. Sometimes the loans are taken out by tyrants, dictators (often "puppet regimes" placed in power by wealthy Western countries). Long after the dictator de jour is gone, the debt remains and precious monies that could alleviate suffering flow into the hands of the über rich.

Just imagine that, when your uncle died, you discovered your family had inherited his debts...

Just imagine that the banks seized your home and much of your parents’ wages, forcing you all to live on a rubbish tip...

Just imagine that you were turned away from school, because the money had been used for debt repayments...

Just imagine that when your sister went to hospital to have her baby, they turned her away too...

Just imagine that, having only polluted stream water to drink, several of your brothers and sisters sickened and died...

Just imagine that you see your parents worn out by work and worry, and you know that you will inherit the debt...

This isn’t imagination! This is the tragic reality of the lives of hundreds of millions of young people in the poorer countries. (from On Dropping the Debt)

You'll have to look high and low to find someone who knows less about third world debt, national economies, and the actual impact of debt-relief than I do. But these things I do know:

• Jesus said rich people are in a heap of trouble (Luke 6:24f; Mark 10:17-29).
  
• How we treat poor people anticipates how Jesus will treat us (Matthew 25:34ff).
  
• The spirit of Jubilee is not completely gone, amazingly (Leviticus 25).

The relief of global debt has actually been figured out. There are serious economists and bankers who have worked on this. I'm not an economist or a banker, but I have seen and talked to people in that field. They've got strategies where if you do this now, then you can do that next year, and so on. There would be ways through. Somebody said the sort of broad-brush sums we're talking about would cost, say, America roughly the amount that it spends on going to the movies each year. It would cost roughly that amount to put the whole thing back the right way around. Then we could all proceed together. What really sticks in my throat is that while all this is going on, the American government, along with my own government [UK] and several others, talk about bringing freedom and justice to the world, when we are doing the precise opposite. Use of imperial rhetoric to cover up our own consistent greed … if we have any Christian moral courage, this is what we ought to be talking about. Face it, we are in a world where two-thirds of the people are poor and crying for justice. One-third of the people are rich and wanting more sex. I want to say, what is wrong with this picture? This cannot be the way the Creator-God intended the cosmos to work. (NT Wright in an interview in the National Catholic Reporter, emphasis mine)