hurrengoa
you are your debt    In the US there’s one thing worse than not having any money: not having any debts. A person who doesn’t have any debts is poor. But if you have money, and you don’t have any debts you’re suspicious. US citizens and families are up to their necks in debt. That’s the normal situation for formal, well-behaved citizens. Whoever wants to go to university, whoever needs an operation, to set up a business, buy a house... Whoever wants to be a worthwhile citizen has to be tied up to a bank for life. And it’s just the same if you make some money. Well-behaved citizens ask for more credit to be able to carry on “growing” and create more.

That chain is measured in your credit history. And people can ask for your credit history anywhere. When you rent a house, when you set up a business... You could say that our debts define us. That’s why people who don’t have such a document are suspicious. What type of criminal doesn’t need to take out loans? Where did you get the money from? What type of US citizen doesn’t want to improve his or her lifestyle? Can anyone think of a better way to control society that keeping it debt-ridden?

hand money

The previous situation affects US citizens. But there are other people who don’t deserve that title even though they live in the States: "illegal" immigrants. As illegal immigrants don’t have papers, they can’t open bank accounts. They aren’t even allowed to get into debt “legally”... But as profits are more important than anything else in the States, that cheap workforce has no trouble to find badly paid jobs. And because they can’t put the money they earn into a bank, they keep it at home. Illegal immigrants handle the largest amounts of hand money.

It’s more and more difficult to live using only hand money. How can you rent or buy a house? What are the chances of buying a car? Getting hold of a phone? Paying the electricity? As they can’t pay for anything from a bank account, illegal immigrants have to go around with hand money in their pockets. People without bank accounts can’t take out loans and can’t get in debt, and that’s a bigger barrier in US society than the national frontier itself.

In the same way that taking money out of legal citizens’ hands and letting the market organize everything is an objective, making illegal citizens carry money around and removing other possibilities from them is a way of keeping the
workforce cheap. As the Reverend Billy would say, God may move in a mysterious way, but the way the demons of economic power move is easy to understand.