IF ROUTINE debt is the reality for most working people today, for the rich it is a source of income.

For everyone servicing a mortgage, paying off a credit card, stuck with a car loan, owing an energy “supplier,” in arrears with the rent, facing decades of student debt, or in fear of a loan shark’s enforcers, the price of participation in today’s consumer society is the privilege of contributing to the income stream and profits of the very rich.

The generations of working people who remember the days when what family items of value they possessed spent more time in the pawnshop than they did in the home may be passing, but the memory of the humiliations that poverty imposes on working people remains.