Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes on the Christian right by saying the Bible's prohibition on usury backs her campaign for a 15% interest rate cap
- Freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the bible denounces usury so Republican Christian lawmakers should sign her new bill
- She proposed legislation, alongside Senator Bernie Sanders, last week that caps credit card interest rates at 15 per cent
- Ocasio-Cortez says Christians in Congress should uphold their principles on it- and asked if they were only actually opposed to abortion and gay marriage
- Usury is taken to mean charging excessive interest but has a controversial history of being associated with anti-Semitic tropes
Freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes Christians should back her recent credit card interest rate cap because she says the bible prohibits usury.
'Usury - aka high interest - happens to be explicitly denounced in the Bible (& in many other religions),' Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Thursday night.
'Looking forward to having the religious right uphold their principles + sign onto my bill. Unless of course they're only invoking religion to punish women + queer people,' she continued.
The representative from New York says that current credit card interest rates are unethical because they unfairly enrich the lender, a practice known as usury.
Although she did not mention any specific passages, in the second chapter of the Bible, Exodus, it states, that if someone lends money to someone else, they should not lay interest on the borrower.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that Christians should back her recent credit card interest rate cap because she claims the bible prohibits usury
The freshman representative says she is 'looking forward to having the religious right uphold their principles'
Appearing alongside Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the two proposed legislation last week that would cap credit card interest rates at 15 per cent, which Ocasio-Cortez says is still high
Ocasio-Cortez, and independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, jointly introduced legislation that would cap credit card interest rates at 15 per cent, a substantial decrease from some of the highest interest rates that could reach upwards of 30 and 40 per cent.
Current interest rates averages around 19 - 20 per cent, according to several different analyses.
The proposal from the two progressive lawmakers was introduced last Thursday at noon in a live video posted on social media.
'There is no reason a person should pay more than 15% interest in the United States,' Ocasio-Cortez, who identifies as a Democratic socialist, wrote on Twitter before the video went live.
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'It's common sense - in fact, we had these Usury laws until the 70s. (Max interest rates are record-high for ppl with excellent credit, too.) It's a debt trap for working people + it has to end,' she continued.
In her Friday tweet, Ocasio-Cortez is calling on Christians to 'uphold their principles' when it comes to usury, and made reference to Christians recently pushing for more restrictive abortion laws in some states.
Alabama passed legislation this week that would punish doctors with life in prison if they performed abortions unless 'abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk' to the mother.
It reclassifies abortion as a Class A felony.
Other states, Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa and North Dakota, have passed 'fetal heartbeat' laws, which prohibit abortions after a heartbeat can be detected.
This usually occurs around six to eight weeks, and Ocasio-Cortez noted that sometimes a woman doesn't even know she has conceived at this point in her pregnancy.
IS AOC RISKING ANOTHER ANTI-SEMITISM ROW? 'USURY'S' VERY CONTROVERSIAL HISTORY
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might simply be campaigning against excessive interest rates - but the word she uses, 'usury,' has a long and difficult history - and has been associated with anti-Semitic tropes for hundreds of years.
Literature's most notorious usurer, Shakespeare's Shylock, was a Jew, the Nazis used claims of usury in their anti-Semitic propaganda, and the Middle Ages saw Europe swept by pogroms as Christians attacked Jews, accusing them of usury.
Usurer: Shylock on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice was both Jewish and a usurer; versions of him on stage and in art were often explicitly anti-Semitic
Vile propaganda: Nazi anti-Semitic imagery played on the trope of Jews as usurers, and linked it to Communism, such as in this 1937 propaganda movie
The word's close association with anti-Semitic tropes is because of the treatment of Medieval Jews, and the Catholic Church's prohibition on charging interest for loans.
Ocasio-Cortez is right that the Bible prohibits 'usury.' Three Old Testament passages - one each in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy - forbid charging interest on loans.
The New Testament is silent on usury, but as the Catholic Church developed its own system of theology, usury developed into a sin, tightly defined as charging any interest at all.
Church law became the law of the land across Europe and by the Middle Ages it was a crime for Christians to charge interest on loans - but not for non-Christians to do so.
That meant Jews, a marginalized community who in many countries were prohibited by church and state from entering many professions, could lend money - and with few alternatives for survival, many became money lenders.
Tolerated as a 'necessary evil,' at times of economic and social crisis it made Jewish people the focus of anger and resentment - often egged on by wealthy people keen not to pay back the loans they had taken out.
Targeting Jews was easy: the Church in 1215 had ordered them to wear distinctive clothing and in some places they were ordered to live in ghettos.
The result was pogroms, which swept across Medieval Europe. In England in 1190 the Jews of York were trapped inside a tower and burned to death, those who carried out the massacre included debtors, who also destroyed the records of their debts.
Similar massacres occurred in scores of cities and towns, and some countries expelled Jews or forced them to convert to Christianity, often citing usury as the reason why they must leave or quit their faith.
And as Europe modernized and industrialized the problem did not go away; in some places anti-Semitic slurs got worse.
Along with modernizing economies came banking, and the first successful international financial institution was the Rothschild dynasty, who were Jewish.
The founder was Mayer Rothschild, who had been the 'court factor,' or financial controller in Frankfurt, a job reserved for Jews under anti-Semitic laws.
Born in a ghetto, he and his sons and their descendants went on to dominate international finance, funding Britain's war effort against Napoleon, railroads and the Suez Canal - but were also the target of ugly smears and conspiracy theories, among them the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text used by anti-Semites to this day.
Hitler and his followers enthusiastically used the usury trope as they whipped up support for Nazism, which ended in the Holocaust, but his defeat did not end the problem; the Jewish faith remains the target of tropes and the ugly underbelly of the internet has brought such slurs fresh prominence.
Ocasio-Cortez is correct that other faiths also prohibit usury.
Islam bans the charging of interest, giving rise to a sharia-law compliant bond market, and traditional Hindu texts also warn against penalizing debtors.
