Good Reads
by digby
Here are three important pieces for you to read and one to listen to on a lazy, fall Sunday afternoon.
1.)Matt Stoller on the debt-cropper society:
A lot of people forget that having debt you can’t pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control.
It’s actually baked into our culture. The phrase ‘the man’, as in ‘fight the man’, referred originally to creditors. ‘The man’ in the 19th century stood for ‘furnishing man’, the merchant that sold 19th century sharecroppers and Southern farmers their supplies for the year, usually on credit. Farmers, often illiterate and certainly unable to understand the arrangements into which they were entering, were charged interest rates of 80-100 percent a year, with a lien placed on their crops. When approaching a furnishing agent, who could grant them credit for seeds, equipment, even food itself, a farmer would meekly look down nervously as his debts were marked down in a notebook. At the end of a year, due to deflation and usury, farmers usually owed more than they started the year owing. Their land was often forfeit, and eventually most of them became tenant farmers.
They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping and usury, held together by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty in Arkansas and pronounce it ’shocking’. These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage.
Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society.
The great irony in all this, is that the very people who are screeching “Freeeedom” like blue-faced Mel Gibsons are the ones who are enabling this enslavement.
2.)Michael Moore on how corporate America is pushing us over the cliff.
When someone talks about pushing you off a cliff, it’s just human nature to be curious about them. Who are these people, you wonder, and why would they want to do such a thing?
That’s what I was thinking when corporate whistleblower Wendell Potter revealed that, when “Sicko” was being released in 2007, the health insurance industry’s PR firm, APCO Worldwide, discussed their Plan B: “Pushing Michael Moore off a cliff.”
But after looking into it, it turns out it’s nothing personal! APCO wants to push everyone off a cliff.
3) Taibbi having David Gergen for lunch.
And finally, Rick Perlstein on the radio answering the question of the hour “Is there such a thing as middle ground between the two parties in power?”
Any guesses as to what he thinks?
Enjoy.
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