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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 4940587" data-attributes="member: 56035">CH: Well, you have a quote in the book, I don’t know where it is, but it’s from a military recruiter where they target people who have heavy student debt quite consciously.TG: Yeah, and it, you know, it comes down to what does it mean to genuinely be free if all of our choices are determined by a form of economic coercion, whether it’s at the workplace or in our daily lives?  Can we genuinely say that we have any meaningful freedom?  So I think, not just being free from debt, but having liberating wages is--and having some kind of democracy in the workplace is key to any, like, genuine, meaningful sense of freedom.CH: The New York Times ran a piece a couple months--a few months ago where they talk precisely about the stagnation of wages, and said that if wages have been tied to productivity, which since the 1970s had--has gone up by about 77%, if I remember, the minimum wage would be at least $20 an hour.  But wages, of course, have been suppressed.  This is also an issue you address in the book by design, because the financialization of the economy with offshoring and deindustrialization has been the key mechanism by which large financial firms and banks are able to amass these profits.  And just speak about that before we go into the nature of resistance.TG: Yeah.  Part of what we really want to punch holes in and dispel is the idea that if you’re in debt, it’s because of your personal moral failings, that you didn’t work hard enough or you made poor choices.  Granted there are some people who do make poor choices, but the vast majority of us are forced into debt because we’re denied the means to live, not because we live beyond our means.  Since World War II, wages have stagnated, even though for a whole host of reasons.  The wealth that we’re producing has increased rapidly, but that wealth has been captured by the one percent.  And instead of paying us for our labor, we’re forced to go into debt to meet our basic needs, because even though our wages have remained stagnant, the cost of our basic needs like health care, housing and education, have gone up and up and up and up.  So, you know, buying a large flat screen TV, the price has gone down significantly.  But if you need to see a doctor, the price has gone up quite a bit.CH: Well, you have--this is from the book, more than 40% of indebted households use credit cards to cover basic living costs including rent, food, and utilities, some 62% of personal bankruptcies, as I mentioned in the opening, are due to.  So what you created is a system by where in order to survive subsistence level, meeting your most basic needs, requires you to go into debt for the majority of American households.[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/529893-america-debt-finance-healthcare/[/URL]</blockquote>

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