* It advocates a debt relief movement in America and argues that such a movement would have tremendous resonance across the spectrum of political life. It urges citizens to get involved and politicians to respond.
On each topic, Squeezed superbly elucidates the key issues and documents the twists and turns of the odyssey that has resulted in the early stages of the Greater Depression which we have now entered.
Near the end of the book appears a Q & A section with Schechter and Gregory Paschal Zachary of Alternet from a 2006 interview entitled "Young Borrowers Face A Life Of Debt". The portion of the dialog I found most illuminating was the interviewer's question:
Paschal Zachary: You suggest at times that there is a conspiracy to trap as many Americans as possible into crushing debt, simply in order for banks to boost profits. Is it really that bad?
Schechter: The card companies are a cartel. They collaborate as much as they compete. They use the same techniques. There are people who see techniques, and the companies who use them, as evil. I don't personally like those terms. But I think the card companies are insensitive. They are chasing revenue and they don't care how they get it. They go over the top.
While I agree with Danny's answer, what really intrigues me is the interviewer's question, again echoing that dreaded word that sends progressives screaming into the night as if their hair is on fire: conspiracy. You see, in progressive circles we can say anything about anything as long as we don't imply that anything was a conspiracy. It all just sort of happened because stuff just happens, and it's "irrational" and a bit wacky to imply otherwise.
Earlier in the book, Schechter offers a blistering paragraph that probably did set Zachary's hair on fire if he's read the e-book and if he really is as terrified of "conspiracy theory" as he sounds:
Driving this change is a growing concentration of power in the financial and banking sector. That, in turn, unleashed a process called FINANCIALIZATION with the economy dominated by a vast CREDIT AND LOAN COMPLEX every bit as insidious as the Military Industrial Complex. This Complex is shadowy and omnipresent, active in funding our politicians and lobbying for laws that benefit their businesses. At the same time, it is invisible to most of us. It operates through a fog of shadowy lobbyists, interconnected institutions and highly legalized (and hence poorly understood) rules, laws and procedures underpinning the market system and the high-speed computers that move money and buy/sell orders around the world in seconds.(xxii)
A powerful explanation indeed, but not quite specific enough in my opinion.
Within the past few days, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Catherine Austin Fitts, also formerly an investment banker on Wall St. with Dillon Read, has posted on her blog a section entitled "Who's Who In The Housing And Mortgage Bubble" in which she catalogs the major players in the housing bubble/mortgage crisis in terms of central banks, government agencies, credit rating agencies, the nation's top four auditors, and various industry associations. Given the dearth of this kind of clarity regarding the mortgage mess, Fitts's posting is priceless.
Schechter devotes one section of the book to mis-information and bogus reporting on the part of mainstream media's coverage of the current economic meltdown. In it he correctly exposes the fallacies behind rosy economic forecasts but does not address another chimera, that is, the ostensible "losses" being suffered by central banks such as Goldman Sachs, Citibank, AIG, and others. I documented the transparency of these so-called losses in my September article "Bush's Bogus Bailout", and Fitts has superbly documented them on her Solari website and on her blog. In addition, she has researched more thoroughly than anyone I know, in all of her writings and particularly at her Aristocracy Of Stock Profits website, the prodigious criminality of the American political and corporate capitalist systems.
The question that few have asked is: Who are the losers? When we see CEO's like Charles Prince leaving Citgroup with a $42 million severance package and $53 million in stock options, can we respond with anything but bemused scorn at the simplistic reportage that central banks are "losing" anything? And when Citigroup is bolstered with a $7.5 billion infusion of cash from an Abu Dhabi investor in what has become the "great American fire sale" conducted by the same corporate pimps who created the housing bubble, can we feel anything but rage at their criminality, enabled by their media accomplices? Even more egregious than media complicity is that of politicians who wallow in the spoils of the debt industry.
Schechter cites David Sirota's October, 2007 blogpost (48):
Donations plentiful to candidates in midst of possible predatory lending regulation ... Payday lenders have given nearly $64,000 to the 2008 candidates for president, with a vast majority of that going to Democrats, many of whom have accused the industry of unfair lending practices ... Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, a U.S. senator from New York, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson each has received more than $22,000 from payday lending sources, more than any other candidates during the campaign.
As Squeezed notes, these Democrats and many more also caved in on the 2005 bankruptcy bill written by and for the credit card industry.
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