Which would you prefer? 20+ years of debt-slavery

[jtuck004]

to the wealthy, or a sudden, screeching stop to it all with all the tragedy and danger that would entail? How about for your family, friends, neighbors, community?

(Actually our life and that of real slaves would be quite different. But you get the idea).

Do you remember dixiegrrrrl's OP the other day? Famous last words on raising the debt ceiling:

Remember when she asked what happens every time we raise the debt ceiling? And who is encouraging us to do that? The Bernanke, Geithner - all the folks who have been shipping money wholesale to their friends at the investment banks. (It has gotten so blatant that Goldman just turned around an invested in Facebook, in a deal where they not only violate the spirit of securities law by putting the deal under an opaque cover, but leaving the taxpayer with the risk if it fails).

I began to think about dg's post while I was reading an article on the Dr. Housing Bubble blog in which he makes an interesting case for buying a house at a lower price with a higher interest rate, as opposed to a more expensive house with a lower rate. He lays out his reasons, but then this paragraph pops up...

...
"The market is demanding a higher interest rate but only artificial intervention is keeping the rate low. But how long can this go on? We’ve already passed the $14 trillion mark with national debt and it is likely our Congress will need to raise the debt ceiling yet again. And for what? To keep housing values inflated while Americans struggle to find work? To keep rates low so banks can chase easy money around the globe and inflate the stock market? The entire economy is being held together with the duct tape that is known as Federal Reserve sponsored low interest."
...
here...

Sing with me now "This debt is your debt, this debt is my debt..." (with apologies to Woody Guthrie)

This is a merry-go-round. Or groundhog day, for those of you who really like animals. And the people that are profiting from it want us, desperately want us, to keep it going.

There is no real improvement. It's throwing thread to someone at the bottom of a very deep well and telling them that one day it will be a rope. It's a con job. 20% of the people own own 87% of ALL private wealth. Wall Street salaries are averaging in the $700,000/yr range, up from about $600,000 a couple of years ago. The top 25 hedge fund managers averaged over $1 billion EACH in 2009, and the PTB just gave them a $141 billion tax gift - that includes Democrats AND Republicans, lest you think I am singling anyone out. It is a class war, not a political war. The rich bought all those folks a long time ago.

What did you make last year? Have you checked the dollar value against what is was 10 years ago? Are you better off?

We Are Getting Poorer As A Nation, because nearly everything we do has been monetized - our homes, our schools, our streets, the freakin' parking meters in Chicago. Nearly everything you do involves paying on a debt service to a financial group somewhere. And they are working overtime to grasp anything they have missed.

Most people here understand that we are propping our economy up with a constant stream of money from the gov, rules from the FASB keeping housing prices at mythical values, etc, but there is much more. If you have been keeping track of unemployment, you know that "anemic" is probably way too kind to describe what is happening to the job market - beyond the little scraps of jobs being created, (many of which are temporary or one-time government stimulus health care and service jobs, leaving a damn tiny bit from the private sector). We lost 11 million manufacturing jobs over a couple decades and are replacing them with jobs at Dollar General, a few tech jobs that pay a bit more (but ask you to wear way more hats than any reasonable job would demand at lower pay, etc), and a raft of low-paying jobs in the service industries.

Today we hear another couple hundred thousand joined the ranks of the dis-heartened, and 40 million + are on food stamps. The refi programs aren't working for most people, so we are still doing record numbers of foreclosures. We passed a health insurance reform bill telling people that 35 million people didn't have health insurance, and now we hear there are 50 million in that boat...

Employment is getting better? Surely you aren't buying that claptrap. If we could create 250,000 jobs every month - not government-stimulus health care and service jobs, (which is more than half of all jobs being created) but real, private sector, wage-earning jobs, it would take us 16 years and 7 months to get to about 5% unemployment. That's not GOOD jobs, those are today's jobs, $20,000/yr or less. But we have NEVER created 250,000 job every month, year in and year out, in the modern history of this country. NEVER. So it is going to be more like 20 years, if ever. And that still leaves at least 1 in 3, perhaps 2 in 3, with a job that pays $20,000 a year.

Figure how you buy a house on that, or even a cheap laptop. Or send your kid to a decent school, or pay for medical care. And because we are sinking so much money into propping up the economy, over those tens of years, without wealth-building to underly it, the dollar is going to slowly but surely decrease its buying power...

You Will Be In Debt For Your Entire Life. You Will Be Paying The Giant Squid Until The Day You Die.

So my question, again, is...which way is less painful?

Do we continue on, paying debt that we NEVER pay off, because it is designed to never be paid off, as "servants" or "nutrient solutions" to creatures in a financial sector who spend their days trying to figure out how to monetize everything and turn it into debt (Think Monsanto selling seeds to farmers in India - they are having a horrific time with suicide now, because one crop failure means they can no longer borrow money to re-plant, so the life insurance on the loan pays off the bill for their family). For most of us, and certainly any children, the future will devolve into working day after day, mostly with no health care, little chance for a home, likely no retirement, (because wealthy folks have a 7 years longer average life span than people who make less, so if they raise the retirement age...), then death...

OR

Do we start some type of movement that intentionally crashes the entire structure and hope we can emerge intact on the other side? Maybe we join in the chorus and insist the debt ceiling stays, and things fold?

Is there a difference between those who wanted to enslave or conquer us in WWII and today, other than the suits they wear?

Your thoughts please?

[villager]

1. We need a national strike. Since *we* keep *their* machine going...

n/t

[Systematic Chaos]

2. With the average American's attention span and education level today?

You'd have better luck trying to herd 50,000 cats from one corner of a 20 x 20 square mile flat, empty expanse of land to the opposite corner, with a single leash and harness to work with.

Not gonna happen. :(

[Mimosa]

3. Oh heck. You made me log in again! LOL.

Darned EXCELLENT must read article, JTuck.

[Yavin4]

4. Debtors Will Do What They Did In The Past. Flee The Country

That's how nations like America came to be. If you move to another nation where they cannot collect from you, then you can re-start your life.

[jtuck004]

7. How are they gonna get out with no money? A wagon is only good to the edge of the ocean.

And where would they go where there is no nation already controlling the land?

[Yavin4]

8. Where There's A Will. There's A Way.

Humans have gone through extraordinary means to escape indebtedness, slavery, genocide, etc.

Finding a way to emigrate to Canada is heck of a lot easier than escaping slavery in the South.

[stray cat]

5. The tea party threatens to take up arms and overthrow the government -are they right then?

[jtuck004]

6. What if our hatred for them, and theirs for us, is all part of a bigger plan?

To address the subject of your post - Think about their position. Do you really think a bunch of good ol' guys and gals are going to have any luck against our military? Heck, they won't even get past our quasi-military police. First fusillade of rubber bullets and they will run screaming down the street.

But, if you would, set that aside for a moment. Is it possible that there are bigger issues than the differences between us, and that there are those that are not members of either group profiting from that loathing and hatred, and getting power from our inability to see past ourselves?

Back in the 30's and 40's the coal companies in Appalachia created what were truly company towns. They owned the land, the homes, the churches, the stores, the jobs. They doled these out at their own discretion, keeping people in a miserable state of poverty.

An organizer named Myles Horton built a training center in Tennessee called the Highlander Folk School, and invited the miners, with the intent to organize them.

But he had a really big problem. Racism ran bone-deep during that time, and there were none of the societal barriers we see today. Horton knew he had to get the miners past that to work against the power of the coal companies. So he invited miners, both black and white, to the center. Now this was Tennessee, in the summer, and it got hot. Normally whites and blacks had separate facilities which helped enforce the racism, but Horton arranged to have only one water dipper in the well. Thirst finally took over, and when he got them over that barrier he was able to engage them in conversations about how to organize against the larger power of the coal companies.

It strikes me that we are living in a "company town". The Tea Partiers, Republicans, Centrist and Left Democrats are all living in homes owned by Wall Street. Wall Street owns our churches and stores, even the commodity markets where they manipulate the price of food and fuel not based on demand but on their own manipulation to extract profit. The financial sector isn't Democrat or Republican. Notice how many hundreds of millions they have given to Clinton and Obama to get them elected? And when noises started to be made about regulation, they helped create a Tea Party and a divided Congress - a blockade - to help reduce the possibility of more effective regulatory laws being passed. They are the money party, the part of the very wealthy. They really don't care about anything but more dollars.

It is useful to them that we sit around and despise the Tea Partiers, while the Tea Partiers sit around and hate on us. But the financial sector is laughing at us, they aren't angry with us - they are manipulating us. We are nothing but a food source for their desired protein - money. And we are helping them eat by arguing with each other.

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. And you cut to the heart of the problem. Well done.

"We" and "they" are being pitted against each other in an artificial battle, over bs issues
( just LOOK at many Palin threads there are here every time she opens her brainless moouth)
and we spend all our energy railing against the "the other"
when, in truth, "we" and "they" are both victims of the people running "the company country".

But dividing to conquer is an old old gambit. One that works every time.

The only way to win is to stop playing the game.

[whattheidonot]

9. great post

Just how and where does this movement start when every body in power is in on the scam. Things are so bad that this and war is what they fall back on. Can't bring the troops home because, you guessed it, there is nothing for them to do. Another couple bubbles might finally wake up the masses. Entire sectors of the economy are going to disappear, the bottom is going to fall out.

[jtuck004]

10. Not so much a movement as a decision.

we are still paying hundreds of billions in interest to banks, they are still borrowing money at .075 interest and loaning it out at 3,5 8, 12%, homes are still artificially priced based on FASB ruling, a majority of the states are insolvent...

If Congress did not increase the ceiling, much of that might come apart.

As bad as that is, is continuing what we have now better? No one outside of the wealthier 20%, and particularly the most wealthy 2%, has any real wealth. Most people have debt. Lots of it. And they also owe what is in our national debt. That whole load is dragging us down as a country, like dragging around an 80lb ball chained to our necks.

As bad as defaulting on things would be (the "Bernank" almost alludes to the end of the world), I am unsure about which would be worse...to watch our economy spin its way down the drain, only to find at the end of 10 or 15 years that we are continuing on a downward path with a future of paying more and more debt, or to let it crash. let some banks go under and finally be closed. A lot of people would be hurt, but is that worse than slogging under an economy-busting load of debt for 20, 30, or more years with no or nearly no plan for real growth?

I find it kind of ironic that the teabaggers want this. They need to be carful what they wish for , because the results of such an action might well change our democracy into something much worse, for a time, and I am pretty sure they would not like the result.

Just thinking about the future...

Thank you