Rushkoff on the Credit Crisis

Douglas Rushkoff handles the current financial crisis in his latest piece for Arthur magazine. Read it on his blog here. It's long, so here are some money quotes:

The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. And not by a market bear or conspiracy theorist, but by the people and institutions responsible. The record number of foreclosures, credit defaults, and, now, institutional collapses is not the result of the churn of random market forces, but rather a series of highly lobbied changes to law, highly promoted ideologies of wealth and home ownership, and monetary policies highly biased toward corporate greed.

And this:

. . . the biggest industry in America—maybe the only real industry left—is credit itself: money is lent into existence by the central bank, and then lent again to regional banks, savings and loans, and eventually to you and me. Each bank along the way takes its cut; the final borrower is the only one who has to figure out how to pay it back, with interest, by the close of the contract.

And this:

Participation in business or, in most of our cases, land or home ownership, means helping put those wheels of the credit industry in motion. And the more we push, the more momentum they gain, and the more influence they have over an increasingly large portion of our experience. Reality becomes defined by credit sectors, and our time is consumed more each day with wondering how we’re going to pay back what we’ve borrowed.