Cancel All Debt: Occupy Main Street

600 years BC, in Ancient Athens, the great statesman, Solon, laid the pathway for the emergence of the World's first true Democracy.  The bold moves he enacted broke the back of an economic system that had managed to accumulate all wealth into the pockets of a few and had the rest enslaved in economic chains.

The boldest of his actions and the most successful, was his elimination of all debts.  Prior to his implementing and creating a clean slate, workers were bound by long term, often lifetime, contacts to the bankers and landowners of the time.  In his time, debt was effectively contracted as work owed, rather than money owed, but the principals and systems of interest were hauntingly similar to our precarious times.

In one fell swoop, Solon eliminated all debts and thus freed the population from economic enslavement.  This more than any other single action, history has shown, was the trigger to the emergence of Democracy.

I remember back in the 1970's when I was in high school, our social studies teacher taught us that for the average American, the largest investment of their lifetime would be the buying of their home and that their second largest would be the purchase of a new car.  The thing they didn't teach us back then was that on every one of those purchases, by every one of those Americans, the biggest profit maker would be neither the homeowner or the homeseller, but a third party, who was not producing or benefiting anyone: The Banks.

Consider how different our economy would look if all those hard earned dollars forked over to banks for interest weren't extracted needlessly and if those same greedy bankers, who are now tightening the chains worldwide, in an effort to further exploit and enslave the masses, simply were not part of the formula.

Solon  did.  And guess what?  The bankers collapse didn't trickle down to the masses, it liberated them and sparked one of the greatest periods of human intellectual and spiritual accomplishment in our short history. True democracy was born.

Of course, we don't have a leader that is going to step up and initiate a massive reform of such truly transformative power.  Coincidentally though, the emerging Occupy WS force is not looking for leaders to enact anything.  Consider this: What if there was a massive economic strike against the banking syndicate?  What if every home and car owner who is making payments to the banks, en masse, as a collective, simply stopped making their payments?  How long would it take for the whole banking system to collapse?

Wall street doesn't need to be occupied, it needs to be vacated, so that Main street can be reclaimed....or at least occupied.