A Matter of Life and Debt

[groovedaddy]

THIS week, credit has begun to loosen, stock markets have been encouraged enough to reclaim lost ground (at least for now) and there is a collective sigh of hope that lenders will begin to trust in the financial system again.

But we’re deluding ourselves if we assume that we can recover from the crisis of 2008 so quickly and easily simply by watching the Dow creep upward. The wounds go deeper than that. To heal them, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.

Debt — who owes what to whom, or to what, and how that debt gets paid — is a subject much larger than money. It has to do with our basic sense of fairness, a sense that is embedded in all of our exchanges with our fellow human beings.

But at some point we stopped seeing debt as a simple personal relationship. The human factor became diminished. Maybe it had something to do with the sheer volume of transactions that computers have enabled. But what we seem to have forgotten is that the debtor is only one twin in a joined-at-the-hip pair, the other twin being the creditor. The whole edifice rests on a few fundamental principles that are inherent in us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/opinion/22atwood.html?th&emc=th

[Warpy]

1. Yeah, they're going to start to have to pay debtors

enough wages to pay off that debt unless they want the whole damned thing to collapse again.

We've had 40 years of ignoring the demand side of the economic equation and this is what it has brought us. It always does. Throwing money at the rich while starving everyone else might bring temporary gilded ages, but they're always fleeting ones. Once debt has reached its limit and wealth has been fully concentrated, the whole topheavy edifice comes crashing down.

Remember, their great riches are wholly dependent on our ability to pay off our debt. Unless they start recirculating that wealth, the money pump will shut down completely.

And that is what this election is all about.

[undeterred]

2. My wages dropped in March 2001

and only for one year since then have I had a job which paid comparably to what I had before that time. All of my costs have stayed the same or gone up, and I have had periods of unemployment which have caused me to build up debt. I will work for wages now that I would not have considered 10 years ago but I have more skills now than I did then. Something is totally fucked up.