Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.

Debt.  It keeps the masses in line and under their thumb.

Think about the world of possessions and material holdings.

U.S. household consumer debt profile:

Average Credit Card debt = $15,863

Average mortgage debt= $156, 584

Average student loan debt- $33, 090

In total, American consumers owe:

$11.86 TRILLION in debt

An increase of 1.9% from last year

$901 BILLION in credit card debt

$8.17 TRILLION in mortgages

$1.21 TRILLION in STUDENT loans

an increase of 8.5% from last year

source: American Household Credit

How much do you owe?  It is probably enough to keep you working at a job that has ZERO possibilities and and absolute dead end, right?

We have been raised to believe that credit is the American way of life.  It is how we buy cars (we just bought a used 2008 Chrysler Town & Country on credit), the only way for 90% of us to buy a house (though we paid cash for our modular and just owe lot rent).

Then we are told that real people NEVER default on their loans--NEVER.  We are taught various ways to be shamed and humiliated, but defaulting on a loan is the worse.  We know this is true because as soon as we do default on a line of credit, those wonderful caring humans at the collection agency immediately start calling with a full does of SHAME and HUMILIATION  intended to get us to pay whatever we can to save our reputation.

The other great side-effect (or is it by design?) of DEBT is controlling the populace.  The more we owe, the less likely we are to complain.  Since I just bought a car and now owe money, I am less likely to question my employer, challenge their requests and more likely to accept most of their requests to work late or come in early out of fear of losing my position and defaulting on a new line of credit.

Noam Chomsky has this to say about debt:

"Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free."

Noam Chomsky

Hasn’t it been too long that we have gone without the human dignity our parents and grandparents had?

Debt may be the Americanway, but so too is RESPECT, a LIVING WAGE, a 40 HOUR WORK WEEK, a PENSION that cannot be stolen and a QUALITY OF LIFE that provides us ALL with LEISURE and HAPPINESS.

So, when do we start?