So also the other day, Mr Indemnity and I were discussing this book he's reading about the banking crisis, which warped into a discussion of the evil credit card companies and how people's real income hasn't gone up in the past 30 years, etc etc. And I said, "Yeah, and how about the income gap between the top 5% in this country and the rest of us?" because, as you know, I never remember statistics and just make them up as I go. Mr Indemnity corrected me that it was actually the top 1% and the rest of us, and said it's the worst it's been since the Gilded Age of the 1880s. And he wondered why people weren't more outraged about that, since back then it led to the rise of the unions, also etc etc.
So I said (are you ready for this? I haven't fed y'all any of my crackpot pet theories for awhile), "Well, that's because your average 'middle class' American doesn't know they're poor. They have enormous credit card debt and they take out big car loans and huge mortgages and they're one job loss or health crisis away from bankruptcy, but because they have, ooo! a big house and ooo! a new minivan and ooo! an iPhone and a Wii and some nice shoes and some furniture from Crate and Barrel, they don't realize they actually don't own shit, the bank owns most of it. Back in the 1880s, if you were poor, you knew it, goddamn it." Consumer debt is the new opiate of the masses. Who the fuck needs religion when you can go to the mall or the car dealership?
xoxo
3 comments:
I'm with you on the opiate thing. Exploitive religion may have enjoyed a brainwashing angle, but financial indenture via revolving debt carries the advantage of legally-enforced adherence to the doctrine. (Or we'll repo your TV).
I fully expect, before I die, to wind up an outlaw because I prefer to use cash.
It's addictive, but credit's a drug that creates rather than soothes anxiety...eventually.
When a critical mass of the so-called middle class wakes up and realises just how much they've been screwed, they will really have something to howl about.
I've used cash in restaurants and any other place the credit card leaves my sight ever since my brush with identity theft (fortunately done by an idiot). In this house we carry zero credit card balance month to month and I'm sure the banks already hate us. Mr B, let me know what forest you'll run to...we can start a gang.
Quoting Steve Eisman in Michael Lewis' The Big Short (which I really liked):
"How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans"
On Household Finance, who was giving out fraudulent loans in the 80s (and had to pay a half billion dollar settlement due to it) "This was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his fucking testicles. Instead they sold the company and the CEO made a 100 million dollars... That's when I started to see the social implications... if you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you'd design it to protect middle and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least".
And reporting on a talk by the CEO of a big savings and loan, who went off the record when asked about free checking "He explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people--in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks"
Eisman asked "Are any regulators interested in this" and the CEO responded "No".
"That's when I decided the system was really, 'Fuck the poor.'"
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