A few days have passed since the gloomy Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, rife with warnings about the war in Ukraine and looming food riots, so Eric LeCompte is a welcome breath of fresh air. The leader of the Jubilee USA Network has an understated positive vibe that is quietly infectious and not exactly discernable at first.
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His career began in the mid-1990s in New York’s Catholic homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and it later took him to advocate against torture in Latin America through work at School of the Americas Watch. Now with Jubilee in Washington, he’s focused on reworking a global financial system he says is based on outdated architecture that perpetuates inequality.
There are “a few countries at the top who call the shots for the whole world,” he says, leading to his sharp focus on lower-income countries’ debt burdens.
He unabashedly does not buy into a narrative that accumulating immense wealth is virtuous, while studiously avoiding any praise of poverty. Rather, LeCompte warns equally about the strains of destitution and those of excess.
“God has created a rich and abundant world, and we are closest to God and one another when we are sharing those resources,” he tells Devex.
The lesson he takes from Hebrew and Christian scripture is “this idea that our life with God, and our life with the rest of humanity, is tied to economic rights and economic processes, where we are protected from having too little — or too much.”
LeCompte’s message is David Graeber — of Occupy Wall Street fame, often credited with coining the phrase “we are the 99%” — meets the church, combined with a shrewd eye for Washington politics.
His Christian faith gives him energy, but it’s also a practical tool at Jubilee. He proudly asserts that in Washington nowadays, few other movements dealing with economics and international relations can truly claim bipartisanship and work with both Democratic and Republican administrations.
LeCompte made headway during former President Donald Trump’s administration on talks for debt relief, and he points to ongoing dialogue with President Joe Biden’s White House on climate change — including an executive order issued last year — as proof that his coalition can get things done.
“I think it’s faith credentials, and the spirit of bipartisanship in which we work, which has given us a lot of strength and power and entree into places where others don't go. And it’s made a big difference,” he says.
He stresses that despite interreligious tensions at the global level since 9/11, Jubilee — a nonprofit alliance of religious and development advocacy groups, born out of St. John Paul II’s call for reform of the financial system — has deepened its ties to Jewish and Muslim faith groups around the world.
If you speak with him long enough, it becomes clear how well placed his organization is in political circles. Meetings with high-level officials in the U.S., Europe, and even the Vatican are the norm. However, it’s all presented through a lens of getting the job done, largely devoid of vainglory.
LeCompte is deeply enmeshed in the details of global finance, not just abstractions. He is intimately familiar with the fine print of challenges facing debtor nations, from excessive loan burdens and interest rates to corruption and trade.
He says both low- and high-income countries must improve their performances to end the cycle of indebtedness and poverty.
“The reality is, countries go into debt because they are not capturing revenue at home,” he says, noting that tackling illicit financial flows and corruption often involves leadership at both ends of the wealth spectrum. His rhetoric focuses less on blame and more on action.
For him, the idea of jubilee is based on the concept of “a world where everyone has enough.” He traces the idea back to the Bible, which dictated rules to tame excess. Every seventh day, known as the Sabbath, was set aside for rest. This concept was further expanded so that every seven years, the land would lie fallow, and after seven of these cycles — meaning every 50 years — there would be an economic reset. This represents “the ‘great jubilee’ … where we all have enough,” he says.
The idea is ancient, and even Hammurabi, the ancient ruler of Babylon, started his reign in 1792 B.C. with a debt relief measure.
LeCompte argues that not only would such a reset relieve suffering, but it would improve the economic system. The world order needs a bankruptcy process, so there are clear and regular rules, he says. As the World Bank regularly warns, there is no such process at the moment, making debt relief much harder for at least a dozen countries currently careening toward default.
“Both debtors and creditors will be more responsible” if such a permanent structure is created, LeCompte predicts. The process would also look at each troubled country’s situation and find an appropriate solution.
LeCompte says none of these ideas is new. In 1953, much of postwar Germany’s debt burden was written off and restructured at the famous London Debt Conference.
In 2010, Berlin finally made its last payment on World War I debt. Had the country been forced to come up with onerous sums each month, as many nations do now, Germany would never have become an economic powerhouse, LeCompte says.
“One of the challenges, and where the tools don’t meet the moment, is that developing middle-income countries — which are most of the world’s countries — have had the most significant job losses and increases in extreme poverty,” he says of recent years, with matters made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The war in Ukraine, he believes, has driven home that many of the wealthiest countries are only one shock away from “hell on Earth,” and this may give a renewed impetus to stalled talks on relief for the world’s poor.
“It feels like we are in a moment of urgency,” he says.
Devex, with support from our partner GHR Foundation, is exploring the intersection between faith and development. Visit the Focus on: Faith and Development page for more. Disclaimer: The views in this article do not necessarily represent the views of GHR Foundation.