There is a deeper shift underway from a society based around production,
with the factory as the symbol of American economic prowess, to a culture
driven by consumption, with the mall as its new dominant icon.
Class struggle today is assuming a new form in the conflict between
creditors and lenders that reaches into many Americans’ homes, where each
month bills are juggled and re-juggled with today’s credit card bills paid
by tomorrow’s new card. Meanwhile, with interest compounding at usurious
rates, indebtness grows and people sink even deeper into debts they cannot
manage. No wonder we are becoming a nation of scammers with consumers
using every trick they can think of against banks that then hide their own
predatory practices in legalese.
In this conflict, financial institutions function as well-organized
collection machines while individual borrowers are forced to react as
individuals. Many are browbeaten with lectures about “personal
responsibility” by corporations that only pay lip service to any form of
social responsibility while paying their own executives obscenely high
salaries.
Centuries ago, we had debtors prisons. Today, many of our own homes are
similar kinds of prisons, where debtors struggle for survival with
personal finance pressures.
Who is really responsible for this? Few of us seem to know.
And fewer appear to know what can be done about it. “They’re never going
to be repaid,” says economic historian Michael Hudson who for many years
worked at Chase Bank. “Adam Smith said that no government had ever repaid
its debts and the same can be said of the private sector. The U.S.
government does not intend to repay its trillion dollar debt to foreign
central banks and, even if it did intend to, there’s no way in which it
could. Most of the corporations now are avoiding paying their pension fund
debts and their health care debts.”
Yes, these can be complicated issues that lead to tune-out, what TV
producers call the ‘Mego Effect” — “my eyes glaze over.” Yet because so
many people are involved, it is urgent that our media push these issues
from the business pages to the front pages and humanize them so we can try
to wrestle our lives back from the ravages of a relentless debt machine.
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