[lbo-talk] the over-leveraged consumer

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Oct 16 06:58:33 PDT 2005



> Willy Greenfields wrote:
>
> >the 'over-leveraged consumer,'
>
> And how about those lines in front of the bankruptcy courts, racing
> to beat the new code taking effect on Monday? The bread line for
> the 2000s?
>
> Doug

What's interesting about the "bankruptcy reform" is that it won't adversely affect the richest of the rich, for whom bankruptcy is still a weapon that they can use to take away pensions, health benefits, etc. that unions won in the past, and the poorest of the poor, who either haven't got any credit or are so often jobless and hence wageless that even creditors backed by courts can't take away what they don't have. It's an attack on the great swathes of middling sorts (regularly employed proletarians who have and can expect to earn quite a bit more than minimum wages, small business owners, small farmers, etc.), who have things (like cars, houses, nest eggs, etc.) to lose and whose lack of class consciousness makes America what it is. Credit and bankruptcy have been the twin pillars of late-capitalist Americanism. Now the ruling class destroyed one of the pillar, just at the moment when the Federal Reserve is taking a wrecking ball to the other pillar by raising interest rates.

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>



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