Forever In Your Debt

Interesting post at the BBC by Adam Curtis (Power of Nightmares, Century of the Self) with an interesting conspiracy theory on how the neoliberal debt economy was potentially grown out of a need to satiate a public au courant of growing class inequalities. The idea is that if you create an economy where the poor can afford to climb up the ladder by wafting through a mountain of debt, it'll keep them out of the streets. Credit was the great equalizer, except that it inordinately made rich banks richer and indebted consumers bankrupt.

He shows some videos from the Beeb too that bear witness to the old attitude, which painted people spending "beyond their means" as terrible people (ie, they didn't recognize their place in the lower castes). You see this puritanical sentiment reiterated consistently among the Adbusters left (ie, we should all simplify our lives, consume less, not enjoy the excess products of a corrupt/exploitative system, and ignore culture to build some kind of utopian alterna-capitalism with no real stakes against its rival power structure), preaching an ascetics that kind of functions as the countercultural equivalent of catholic guilt. One kept help but suggest that the prevalence of this attitude is one reason the radical left has remained relatively impotent amidst the vast neoliberal takeover of the public and semi-public sectors. More prominently, you saw this attitude as the immediate defense of the CNBC crowd in the wake of the recession of '08 (ie, Rick Santelli's admonishment of the "losers" who couldn't pay back their adjustable-rate loans). The money of these awful people was, of course, welcome by Wall Street and incorporated into the deluge of nubureacracy that showed perpetual growth where there was none, a falsified public relations paperwork complex whose sole design was the recursive expansion of itself as prognostic mechanism.