A small business owner friend of mine was greeted by a letter this week from a mega-bank creditor demanding full payment of a loan within one month despite the fact that he’s never missed or been late on a payment in nine years.

The demand will surely force him into bankruptcy since its balance due is more than any cash reserves he now holds. The bankruptcy might pull down his business, altogether, forcing him to let his entire workforce go, jeopardizing their families, leaving his other creditors in the lurch, and possibly compelling his home into foreclosure.

In other words, this mega-bank, one of those too big to fail, is threatening to wreak total havoc on this viable small business, ruining it and numerous people’s lives.

A few months earlier, a representative from the mega-bank, over whose signature the letter was sent, had visited my friend’s business and found it to be fully functioning and an asset to the community, and he acknowledged that.

But the visit was a sham and the banker, a barely disguised modern Mr. Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” apparently was only sizing the business up for what its door knobs and such could bring when the loan was called in.

So much for small business. So much for reining in the big banks. Right here in the shadow of the nation’s capital, every campaign promise about this from the last election is proven a shallow fraud.

This is a real life situation of real people, and in the nearby nation’s capital all the politicians, all the pundits and all the media insist that the public cares, instead, about the national debt or deficit.

People care about their lives, their jobs, their children, their health, their security. Faced with threats to all these things, they do not care one iota about all the issues that are consuming the attention of official Washington.

It’s the mega-banks that care about national debt and deficit issues, not average people. That’s what everyone in the Washington matrix doesn’t get, or if they do, they are wittingly complicit in a banking tyranny that continues relentlessly to chew up people’s lives, having created a regime of debt slavery that keeps the population in its grip from that first student loan to the grave.

Meanwhile, mega-financial institutions such as AIG have the audacity to threaten a suit against the Federal Reserve because they feel put upon for the terms of the $182 billion bailout the Fed provided to prevent their meltdown. This comes just as they spent millions on sappy, fraudulent TV ads thanking America for the bailout and claiming a central role in the maintenance of a charming American way of life.

There is a deep and fundamental wrong being perpetrated on this nation at this point in our history, and it is akin to the most onerous sin – the most grievous form of man’s inhumanity to man – condemned by our religious traditions: the sin of usury.

The idea that major national institutions are operating to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of people, to charge them ridiculously high interest rates that can only be correctly known as flagrantly usurious, reflects an fundamentally unjust social order that, in the Biblical sense, is inevitably subject to a divine judgment and its witting perpetrators singled out for a divine wrath.

Worried about the power of the gun lobby that unapologetically fights for the right of people to own automatic weapons of mass destruction? Worried about how flagrantly and effectively they have their way in our culture, despite repeated mass killings of our most vulnerable?

Frankly, that’s nothing compared to how the usury lobby runs Washington and pulls all the strings on what has become varied forms of debt and “credit rating” slavery that govern the vast majority of households in our land.

For justice to prevail in this nation, the public needs to get royally fed up with these bloodsucking usurers and throw them off.

There is a “Jubilee” movement now afoot, calling for a cancellation of all debts the way they did in old Israel every 50 years. Sounds like a great idea.