From the Mirage of a Middle-Class Life to the Slavery of Debt

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted March 24, 2007.

Maxed Out director James Scurlock explains how without credit cards, millions of apparently middle-class Americans would live at the poverty level.

America is very wealthy country, but one has to wonder how much of our wealth is in fact a chimera, spun of a consumerist ideal and given the appearance of solidity by a flood of easy credit? How much poverty and real economic pain is covered up by an endless succession of pay-day loans and EZ-finance rip-offs that eventually just bury people under mountains of debt from which they have little chance of digging themselves out.

Today's bankruptcy rate is ten times what it was during the Great Depression, foreclosures are at a 37-year high and the United States has a negative savings rate, yet we're told every day that the economy is going gangbusters.