Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part IV By Stephen Lendman
15 May, 2009
This is the fourth in a series of articles on Ellen Brown’s superb 2007 book titled ‘Web of Debt,’ now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells ‘the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free.’ This article focuses on America’s ‘web of debt’ entrapment.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V
The Debt Spider Captures America – American Workers Consigned to Debt Serfdom
America has been trapped for over two centuries, with today’s debt level way exceeding developing nations. Like bankrupt people staying ‘afloat by making the minimum payment(s) on (their) credit card(s), the government (avoids) bankruptcy by paying just the interest on its monster debt’ – now double in size since Brown’s first edition and onerous enough for Controller of the Currency David Walker to warn earlier of its unaffordability by this year. If America can’t service the amount, it’s officially bankrupt and the economy will collapse. If it happens, IMF austerity will follow and turn America into Guatemala. Other vulnerable economies as well – permanent debt bondage and worker serfdom.
Catherine Austin Fitts was a former high-level Wall Street and government insider. She points to a ‘financial coup d’etat’ conspiracy between the two to hollow out America, centralize power and knowledge, shift wealth to the top, destroy communities and local infrastructure, create new wealth by rebuilding them, and leave human wreckage in its wake.
Earlier in 2003 this T-shirt (Fit Chick Unbelievable Knockers) became one of the best-selling items ever for the British high street fashion store French Connection. Like French Connection’s generic T-shirt ‘fcuk me’ and the World Cup inspired bestseller, ‘fcuk football’ it was a huge success. It could be seen everywhere, emblazoned across the chests of girls and young women, and competing on the street, in the club and on the tube with other similar T-shirts declaring their wearer a ‘babe ‘or ‘porn star’ or ‘up for it’, or giving instructions to ‘touch me’ or ‘squeeze here’. Even my own university, the London School of Economics, got in on the act, producing a T-shirt designed — I guess — to connote a combination of beauty and brains, sexiness and sophistication: ‘LSE BABE’.