Why are Americans Slaves to Debt?
source: http://consumerist.com/5027971/debt-slavery-why-are-americans-so-willing-to-dig-themselves-d...
-
-
- Allsunday
- added this
Why are Americans so willing to do this to themselves? The article explains that as few as 40 years ago, we were a thrifty nation full of "savers," and that banks were focused on whether or not you could repay your loan and not the "fees" they could get from loans before they were sold to investors. We know that there were changes to the financial system. What happened to our values?
-
-
96thdayofrage
-
A half century ago, we were a different America. We worked hard, lived modestly, and set goals to save money. Then came the Reagan Presidency and that attitude that having it all was the American Dream. Our heroes were no longer guys with lunchpails like Ralph Cramden and Fred Flintstone. We came to emulate Blake Carrington and J.R. Ewing. We went from the Partridge family bus to Beverly Hills 90210, where every kid has his own luxury foreign coupe and wore designer clothes. Parents went from working to reasonably maintain shelter, clothing, and food, to owning over priced bungaloes in suburban gated communities, where affluent brats enjoyed the decadence of Euro Disney right there in their bedrooms, far away from urban dens of iniquity and squalor. Playing in a neighborhood with kids from families in established communities with whom we shared memories for generations gave way to the sophistocated for of abusive child isolation found in strictly arranged playdates, camps, and assorted other valueless forms of psychologically and emotionally damaging brainwashing.
That's when the religio-fascist military industrial corporatocracy began to undergo the process of deregulation that allowed userists to bleed the middle classes out of American existance through debt, creating two economic classes, broke and in debt, and afluent and socio-economincally over indulged. After all, it's not as if the corporate employed executives who have largely participated in -AFTA-esque outsourcing and downsizing deserve to be compensated 500 times better than their direct reports, teachers, civil servants, and people on whom communities still depend for survival. The average CEO makes 1600 times minimum wage, while wage earners have not enjoyed a substantial wage hike in more than thre decades. Debt has become a means by which ends are allowed to meet. Furthermore, creditors make mad cash from deregulated practices once considered to be usery from selling America debt with which we can have it all.
- 3 years ago
-
96thdayofrage
