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."
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?
