Debt

Description

The many meanings of debt

From personal finance and consumer spending to ballooning national expenditures on warfare and social welfare, debt is fundamental to the dynamics of global capitalism. The contributors to this volume explore the concept of indebtedness in its various senses and from a wide range of perspectives. They observe that many views of ethics, citizenship, and governance are based on a conception of debts owed by one individual to others; that artistic and literary creativity involves the artist's dialogue with the works of the past; and that the specter of catastrophic climate change has underscored the debt those living in the present owe to future generations.

Introduction Peter Y. Paik
1. Debt Richard D. Wolff
2. "I Consider It Un-American Not to Have a Mortgage": Immigrant Homeownership in Chicago Elaine Lewinnek
3. Demonizing Debt, Naturalizing Finance Mary Poovey
4. On Debt Michael Allen Gillespie
5. The Growth Imperative: Prosperity or Poverty Joel Magnuson
6. Democracy's Debt: Capitalism and Cultural Revolution Stephen L. Gardner
7. Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart Morris Berman
8. Measures of Time: Exploring Debt, Imagination, and Real Nature Julianne Lutz Warren
9. The Time of Living Dead Species: Extinction Debt and Futurity in Madagascar Genese Marie Sodikoff
10. Unintended Consequences and the Epistemology of Fraud in Dickens and Hayek Eleanor Courtemanche
11. The Resurrection of an Economic God: Keynes Becomes Postmodern Michael Tratner
12. China and the United States: The Bonds of Debt Donald D. Hester
13. Debt's Moral Kennan Ferguson
14. Debt, Theft, Permaculture: Justice and Ecological Scale Gerry Canavan

Sujets

• Social History
• Economic History
• HISTORY
• Sociology
• General officer
• Economics
• Business
• General
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253009432
• Langue: English

Extrait

Debt is volume six in the series 21ST CENTURY STUDIES
Center for 21st Century Studies University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Richard Grusin, General Editor
DEBT
Ethics, the Environment, and the Economy
Edited by Peter Y. Paik and Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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© 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-00926-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-00938-8 (pbk) ISBN 978-0-253-00943-2 (eb)
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction \ Peter Y. Paik
   1 Debt \ Richard D. Wolff
   2 “I Consider It Un-American Not to Have a Mortgage”: Immigrant Home Ownership in Chicago \ Elaine Lewinnek
   3 Demonizing Debt, Naturalizing Finance \ Mary Poovey
   4 On Debt \ Michael Allen Gillespie
   5 The Growth Imperative: Prosperity or Poverty \ Joel Magnuson
   6 Democracy's Debt: Capitalism and Cultural Revolution \ Stephen L. Gardner
   7 Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart \ Morris Berman
   8 Measures of Time: Exploring Debt, Imagination, and Real Nature \ Julianne Lutz Warren
   9 The Time of Living Dead Species: Extinction Debt and Futurity in Madagascar \ Genese Marie Sodikoff
10 Unintended Consequences and the Epistemology of Fraud in Dickens and Hayek \ Eleanor Courtemanche
11 The Resurrection of an Economic God: Keynes Becomes Postmodern \ Michael Tratner
12 China and the United States: The Bonds of Debt \ Donald D. Hester
13 Debt's Moral \ Kennan Ferguson
14 Debt, Theft, Permaculture: Justice and Ecological Scale \ Gerry Canavan
 
Index
Contributors
Acknowledgments
T HIS COLLECTION OF essays began life as a conference held at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The idea for a major conference on the theme of debt came about from the effort to find a term that could tie together the various crises—economic, environmental, and ethical—affecting the nation and the world. The proposal for what became the conference was submitted at the end of September 2008, two weeks after the historic bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers shocked the global markets and sent them into a tailspin. The global financial crisis unfolded under the shadow of ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and of alarms sounded by scientists about the devastating impact of greenhouse gases on the environment. Debt, both in the financial sense and in the sense of obligation and responsibility, seemed to be a thread running through the three crises, and so promised to open up productive standpoints from which to examine the present.
The conference provided two days of stimulating papers and engaging discussion. The presentations had a timeliness and a sense of energy which made possible striking points of convergence between scholars working in a wide variety of fields. The success of the event owed much to the resourcefulness and dedication of the staff at the Center for 21st Century Studies: Deputy Director Kate Kramer, Associate Director John Blum, and graduate student assistants Kris Knisely and Lea Gnat. John Blum also provided invaluable editorial assistance in putting together the manuscript. The editors also wish to thank Rebecca Tolen of Indiana University Press for her steadfast support of this essay collection. Finally, a deep and abiding debt is owed to Nan Kim, whose thoughtfulness and sagacity provided the inspiration for undertaking an intellectual exploration of the concept and experience of debt.
Introduction
Peter Y. Paik
T HIS VOLUME HAS its origins in a conference on the subject of debt that took place at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in late April 2010. The planning for the event began during the fall of 2008, under the shadow of the cataclysmic events that imperiled the entire global financial system. The sudden collapse in housing prices in the United States, triggered by a wave of foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market, wiped out the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which has proven to be the largest bankruptcy in history. The contagion threatened to spread to other financial institutions and was met by massive infusions of taxpayer money to prevent further meltdowns. The insurance company AIG, which had insured the risky securities that were backed up by subprime loans, turned to the Federal Reserve for emergency loans that amounted to the largest corporate bailout in history. 1 The US government nationalized the mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while arranging the takeover of troubled firms like Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Mortgage by Bank of America. The situation was no less dire across the Atlantic. Iceland, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, became the first developed nation since 1976 to turn to the IMF for help after all of its banks collapsed and the value of its currency plummeted, freezing its foreign currency reserves. 2 In the United Kingdom, where the financial sector took up a greater share of the economy than in the United States, the cost of bailing out the failing banks was accordingly higher, but these rescue packages came with a stronger set of restrictions.
The tense and unnerving days of the crisis, when the contagion of defaults and bankruptcies brought the global economy to the edge of collapse, have given way in many places to a diffuse and inchoate sense of despair. Although official economic indicators state that the recession came to an end in mid-2009, rates of joblessness have remained stubbornly high, the already vast income disparities have continued to widen between the super-rich and the middle class, and declining tax revenues have forced governments to make painful cuts to social programs. The global financial system may have been saved by government intervention on a massive scale, but in the United States, efforts to help the poor and the middle class in the form of mortgage relief and job creation have proven paltry and inadequate. The global economy continues to lurch forward into this strange recovery, in which taxpayer funds have not only rescued the financial sector but enabled the banks to reap enormous profits, while increasing numbers of people in the United States fall out of the middle class into low-wage jobs that leave them exposed to the possibility of penury in the event of an accident or a health emergency.
These worsening inequalities and the disappearance for many of the chance to achieve or maintain a middle-class way of life have spawned protest movements across the globe. Mass demonstrations forced Iceland's promarket Independence Party from power, enabling a coalition of left-wing parties to take over. But in other countries, like Spain, Greece, and the United States, the protests were undertaken by groups expressing a fundamental discontent with the existing political system itself, a frustration over its apparent helplessness to provide a remedy for deepening economic disparities. The Occupy movement, which set up camps in the major cities across the United States, often near the city's financial center, arose in large part in response to the fateful decisions of the Obama administration neither to reform the financial industry nor to hold accountable any of the heads of the big banks whose exotic financial instruments brought about the catastrophic meltdown. Indeed, the bailouts of the major financial institutions were also a spark for the rage igniting the Tea Party, a right-wing populist movement with libertarian tendencies that champions drastic reductions in government spending.
The most heated and violent demonstrations in response to austerity measures aimed at reducing government deficits have taken place in Greece, where mass layoffs of state workers, deep cuts to salaries and pensions, and sizable tax hikes have threatened hundreds of thousands of Greeks with destitution. Although rioting in Greece has led to fatalities, the demonstrations there have had a clear political significance. The same cannot be said of the rioting and looting that swept the United Kingdom during the summer of 2011, in which looters attacked fellow residents and businesses in their own or nearby neighborhoods. The self-destructive and pointless violence of the rioters was divorced from any recognizable political demand, making their rage as excluded consumers more virulent than the responses of protesters issuing concrete demands, however difficult their realization. 3 The status quo is not only coming under the pressure of political movements cal