America Is Turning Into One Big Prison for People in Debt
http://www.alternet.org/economy/america-turning-one-big-prison-people-debt
Shakespeare’s Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Many of our nation’s Founding Fathers emphatically saw it otherwise. They often lived by the maxim: always a borrower, never a lender be. As tobacco and rice planters, slave traders, and merchants, as well as land and currency speculators, they depended upon long lines of credit to finance their livelihoods and splendid ways of life. So, too, in those days, did shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, and farmers, as well as casual laborers and sailors. Without debt, the seedlings of a commercial economy could never have grown to maturity.
Ben Franklin, however, was wary on the subject. “Rather go to bed supperless than rise in debt” was his warning, and even now his cautionary words carry great moral weight. We worry about debt, yet we can’t live without it.
Debt remains, as it long has been, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of capitalism. For a small minority, it’s a blessing; for others a curse. For some the moral burden of carrying debt is a heavy one, and no one lets them forget it. For privileged others, debt bears no moral baggage at all, presents itself as an opportunity to prosper, and if things go wrong can be dumped without a qualm.
Those who view debt with a smiley face as the royal road to wealth accumulation and tend to be forgiven if their default is large enough almost invariably come from the top rungs of the economic hierarchy. Then there are the rest of us, who get scolded for our impecunious ways, foreclosed upon and dispossessed, leaving behind scars that never fade away and wounds that disable our futures.
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I was watching the new PBS documentary on Ford last night, and it sounds like it might have been part of his anti-Semitic ranting. On the show they mentioned the years when he bought and published The Dearborn Independent and distributed it not only by subscription but through Ford showrooms nationwide. The very first Ford-published issue began with a Hitler-worthy screed hitting all the usual charges made by those charges a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, include their alleged control of the banking system. (He also printed the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion;" he later apologized publicly, but in private continued to complain about "the Jews."
Casual Googling did not find the source for me, and only one preceding line...
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.”
The quote seems to be extremely popular on conspiracy theory sites.
It could well be from The Dearborn Independent, judging from this line from [link:http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ford1.html|a summary of what Ford published there:
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So we are free!
