Debt is an age-old means of shaming and controlling poor people. The practice is so commonplace, we hardly notice it.
For many, going into debt is the only way to get an education, buy a home, or survive a medical emergency. Shaking off that debt can be impossible for those living on low-wage and insecure jobs, and those targeted by predatory lending. Still, many accept the story that debt is their fault.
Citizens of cities and even countries are shamed for their debt, and blame is used by those instituting emergency management to justify loss of self-rule, privatization of public services, and extraction of community wealth.
At this year’s Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Michigan, residents of the city and those of Puerto Rico gathered to compare notes on how debt and default have affected their regions. Both have experienced economic hardship, both are predominantly made up of people of color, and both are seeing debt used as an excuse for the selling off their common assets and to undermine their rights to self-governance.
In Detroit, the loss of industrial jobs to low-wage regions, coupled with federally subsidized white flight has left the city with the costs of operating urban services that benefit the entire region without the tax base needed to pay for them.
The 2008 financial crisis hit the city — and its African American families in particular — especially hard. Residents had been targeted for subprime mortgages, which accounted for 68 percent of all the city’s mortgages in 2005, compared to 24 percent nationwide, reported the the Detroit News. Today, more than three quarters of foreclosed homes financed through subprime lenders are in poor condition or tax foreclosed.
Shifting control to emergency management has resulted in reduced essential services to those already harmed by predatory economics. School buildings are disintegrating. Residents had their water shut off. Streetlights were shut off.
In Puerto Rico, investors took advantage of the territorial government’s high-yield, tax-exempt bonds. Wall Street reaped $900 million in fees from those bonds since 2000, Bloomberg News reported. Tax breaks for giant corporations attracted big players, until the incentives ran out and with them, the corporate jobs. One hundred and fifty schools were closed as a result of the crisis, and another 600 are on the chopping block. Puerto Rico has a poverty rate that is double that of Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, according to the US Census Bureau.
These neoliberal policies of privatization, extraction, corporate power, and austerity have undermined national economies in the Global South subjected to IMF and World Bank policies. Today, they are also being used on American and European communities.
Author and cognitive linguist George Lakoff describes two roles governments assume to maintain social control: the stern, punishing father, and the nurturing mother.
In today’s context, the stern father metaphor takes the form of authoritarianism, fundamentalism, shame, and blame. As practiced by the corporate-friendly leadership of the Democratic Party, the nurturing mother placates the powerless with corporate bailouts and a tattered social safety net to allow for the continued extraction of a community’s wealth.
Both of these parent-child metaphors are built on powerful — usually white, male — decision makers who are closely linked to corporate power and manage the affairs of a powerless citizenry. Neither offers a path to liberation.
Instead of either of these parent-child relationships, what we need are strong peer relationships, sisterhood, brotherhood, and solidarity. At the opening ceremony at the Allied Media Conference, activist, author, and doula Adrienne Maree Brown called on those gathered to “wage love.”
Instead of using debt to punish communities of color and the poor and justify the selling off of community assets, instead of emergency powers that take away self-rule, we should invest in all communities and defend our civic and natural legacies for future generations of all races.
Those who gathered for the conference in Detroit showed what waging love looks like: supporting one another in rejecting second-class citizenship and in calling instead for government to serve the needs of their citizens and to invest in a future that will work for all people.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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