Chris Hedges On Debt And Exploitation

Chris Hedges – a former minister and foreign correspondent — has described himself as a socialist and  anarchist. His interviews and blog posts are always stimulating.

 He points out:

“Workers who are unable to meet their debts are far more likely to remain submissive and compliant.

Debt peonage has always been a form of political control:

1. Native Americans, who  were forced by the U.S. government onto tribal agencies, were required to buy their goods on credit at the agency stores.

 2. Coal miners in southern West Virginia and Kentucky were paid in scrip by the coal companies — and kept in perpetual debt servitude by the company store. 

3. African-Americans in the cotton fields in the South were forced to borrow during the agricultural season from their white landlords for their seed and farm equipment — creating a life of perpetual debt. 

Being a member of the today’s working poor, as  the late Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in her  book “Nickel and Dimed,” is  “acute distress… It is a daily and weekly lurching from crisis to crisis. The stress, the suffering, the humiliation and the job insecurity means that workers are reduced to doing little more than eating, sleeping—never enough—and working. 

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you…. she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

 The “working poor,”  are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high

To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”