Things You Don't Have To Worry About But We Do

Mr F and Mr Bunches are 10. Each night, when they go to sleep, we close their bedroom door and latch it shut with a hook. Their windows in their room are duct-taped shut with about four rolls of tape each. We have a baby monitor in there so we can hear if they wake up and do anything.  Each of the doors that lead to the outside of our house have a chain with a padlock on it and the keys are hidden where it would be hard to reach them.

Other doors to other rooms are also closed with a hook-and-eye, placed as high up as they can be.

"Don't you think that's excessive?" people sometimes ask us, as we wait to see if we can get some help for the very expensive cost of putting bars over the windows, and try to save for a therapy dog that would help keep Mr F from wandering away so quickly. We pay $30 a month for a GPS bracelet he wears so that if does ever get away again the police can quickly track him. We give updated pictures every now and then to our local police department.

"Don't you think that's excessive?" people repeat.

Last Sunday an 8-year-old boy with autism, nonverbal and fascinated with water (the way Mr F is too) got up sometime after 2 a.m., piled two bean-bag chairs up and unlocked the door to get out. He was last seen 1 1/2 miles from his house on a security video. Police found his pajama bottoms (he was wearing Captain America PJs) but haven't found him yet.

When we go to visit someone, one of us, Sweetie or I, follows Mr F around wherever he goes; only one parent gets to socialize at a time.

"Oh sit down," people say. "It'll be fine."

On New Year's Eve a 5-year-old boy with autism wandered out of his aunt's house during a party. Police found him dead in a canal, his tablet 30 feet away. He left barefoot and without a coat, with temperatures in the 20s.

The Strongest Little Boy In The World

'People in debt don't start companies and innovate, don't take chances, don't claim political rights."

Wolf Richter: These Debt Slaves are the Government’s Largest Asset Class, and It Will Haunt the Economy for Years

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Yves Smith

Richter’s post confirms what Matt Stoller foresaw in 2010 in A Debtcropper Society:

A lot of people forget that having debt you can’t pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control.

It’s actually baked into our culture. The phrase ‘the man’, as in ‘fight the man’, referred originally to creditors. ‘The man’ in the 19th century stood for ‘furnishing man’, the merchant that sold 19th century sharecroppers and Southern farmers their supplies for the year, usually on credit. Farmers, often illiterate and certainly unable to understand the arrangements into which they were entering, were charged interest rates of 80-100 percent a year, with a lien places on their crops. When approaching a furnishing agent, who could grant them credit for seeds, equipment, even food itself, a farmer would meekly look down nervously as his debts were marked down in a notebook. At the end of a year, due to deflation and usury, farmers usually owed more than they started the year owing. Their land was often forfeit, and eventually most of them became tenant farmers.

They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping and usury, held together by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty in Arkansas and pronounce it ’shocking’. These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage.

Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society….Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student loans, credit card debt, and mortgages. All of these are hard to pay back, often bringing with them impenetrable contracts and illegal fees. Credit card debt is difficult to discharge in bankruptcy and a default on a home loan can leave you homeless. A student loan debt is literally a claim against a life — you cannot discharge it in bankruptcy, and if you die, your parents are obligated to pay it. If the banks have their way, mortgages and deficiency judgments will follow you around forever, as they do in Spain.

Young people and what only cynics might call ‘homeowners’ have no choice but to jump on the treadmill of debt, as debtcroppers. The goal is not to have them pay off their debts, but to owe forever. Whatever a debtcropper owes, a wealthy creditor owns. And as a bonus, the heavier the debt burden of American citizenry, the less able we are able to organize and claim our democratic rights as citizens. Debtcroppers don’t start companies and innovate, they don’t take chances, and they don’t claim their political rights. Think about this when you hear the calls from ex-Morgan Stanley banker and current World Bank President Robert Zoellick and his nebulous mutterings pining for the gold standard. Or when you hear Warren Buffett partner Charlie Munger talk about how the bailouts of the wealthy were patriotic, but we mustn’t bail out homeowners for fear of ‘moral hazard’. Or when you hear Pete Peterson Foundation President and former Comptroller General David Walker yearn nostalgically for debtor’s prisons.

__________________

I got this on Naked Capitalism.