> A recent Goldman Sachs research brief cited the 'over-leveraged
> consumer,' a character I find appearing with greater regularity -
> though almost always in passing note, as if his/her existence was
> widely understood and acknowledged. Shouldn't there have been a
> national dialog on this figure's emergence?
There ought to be a Drop the Debt campaign for Americans. There is a global justice movement to drop the debt of highly indebted poor countries, but there is none to drop the debt of American workers, or at least curb usurious interest rates, proliferating high fees, and so on (cf. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/>) that impoverish us and enrich no one but banks and credit companies. Justice ought to begin at home. The weakness of American leftists is that, more often than not, activism that addresses foreign policy (debt, war, etc.) is divorced from activism that tackles domestic concerns. Those who can't make demands for themselves can't and won't make demands for others.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>