Debtors Prison

Max Keiser!  He is always coming up with the greatest outlandish stuff:  It is called reality and he is reluctant to describe it.  He does it in an exceptional way.

This by Max:  How the Gulag Casino Economy Works.

What he says ties into something my sister mentioned recently.  After the slaves were free there was a growth in prison chain gangs in the south.  Prison work groups.  Prisoners working off their debt to society.  A prison sentence imposed for some infraction of the law.  Probably being unemployed with some window dressing put on that fact like vagrancy.  No visible means of support while being black.

Chain gangs became the new forced labor pool.  The old one was abolished as slavery.  What fundamentally changed?

One of the comments on Max's statement linked to this:

The Prison System in the Victorian Age

Debtors Prison:  Debtors prison was a place where they took people who couldn't pay their taxes, rent or debts. These places were commonly workhouses where they would make potato sacks, baskets and other mass-produced items. These are very similar to the ones in the Charles Dickens novel "Oliver Twist". A debtor's prison could also be a small jailhouse resembling a small house or shed. This would be a place for debtors and their families to stay in for a short sentence. Normally, if a debtor had family, then they would accompany him in prison. 

My idea of debtors prison was a place a person was put until they could pay their debts.  More of a joke than a reality because how could they pay their debts if they were in prison and could not work?  The only way would be for someone outside the prison (family, friend) to pay the  debt for them.  Wrong idea!

Prison was a place where they could work to pay off debt.  It was a work house.  A cheap source of labor.  Especially if the rate of debt payment in return for work could be set by prison.  I wonder if the prisoners had to pay room and board?

Prisons have evolved to a place where a debt to society is paid and perhaps the progressive idea of rehabilitation is applied.  Rehabilitation that some might view as society paying its debt to the prisoner because if we did not have such a dysfuntional society they would not be there in the first place.  Prisoner as victim that is owed.

Are we all in prison.  We are a debt society,  Everybody owes.  We cannot pay to reduce the total debt.  Total debt keeps growing.  Greece cannot pay its total debt.  There was not enough money to pay total debts due in the Great Financial Crises.  The Fed had to create trillion dollars of debt money out of nothing in order to pay debts due.

Are we all in a debtor prison that is nothing but a work house in which we are forced to work to pay off debts and are charged by the prison system for room an board.  Paid by what the imprisoning system sets as well as what it charges?  The same imprisoning system that loaned us the money in the first place.  The system that loans us more money (debt) with which to gamble for winning reduction of our time in debt in terms of years, months, days?

A hell of a way to look at things but debt money is a hell of a system.

Nice touch to how you said it Max:

America will be surprised to wake up one day and find that each one of them owes these creditors hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of the hundreds of thousans they alrady owe on mortgages, credit cards and cars.  Aiding in this ‘bait and switch’ will be the religious supremacists in America who will push a revisionist message transforming the meaning of the concept of ‘original sin’ to be interpreted as ‘original debt’ meaning that to be born into debt is to be disabused of any doubt of God’s (read: Visa’s) existence.


By God!  You must pay your debts.  In Debt We Trust.