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Year 2020

A prediction?  A possibility?  Fiction? 

Consider these three stories before reading this very short essay:

1)  In Jail for being in debt - that’s right a modern version of debtor prisons (debtor prisons were abolished in 19th century).  It’s happening now.

2)  Consumers still struggling with loans - we shouldn’t expect anything different with high unemployment and the next story.

3)  Lower Wages for workers who lost jobs - so if people are fortunate enough to find work it typically at a lower wage.

So if people’s wages will be lower how are we going to service existing debt?  Does this mean a much lower living standard for working class Americans?  What about the hundreds of thousands of college graduates each year who can’t find work in the areas of study?  How do they service their student loans - by working in Starbucks or Jimmy Johns?

On to the essay:

The year is 2020 and the U.S. economy just experienced a decade of meager growth and relatively high unemplopyment.  The effects of debt binge that caused the Great Recession of 2008 never really wore off - they just lingered.  Now the financial system is felling pressure again.  The financial sector over the last decade had experienced huge consolidation with more and more banks succumbing to lingering debt crisis and closing their doors.  Now, there only exists five mega banks.  The mega banks know that as a matter of survival and to feed their ginormous size they have to finally address debt crisis. 

Over the years the mega banks have tried legislative policies to force people to pay their debts.  The mega banks went so far as to pay U.S. Congress and president to re-establish debtor prisons.  But to no avail - the prison system just became more over crowded and it was not slowing down the debt defaults.  The mega banks needed to find another solution.

In October 2020, an internal memo drafted by a Chase Fargo senior executive addressed to chief legal counsel was leaked to the website Likileaks.  In the memo that senior executive detailed the problems: lower wages were causing defaults, new credit possibilities were very limited and desperate need to find a new revenue source.  The memo alludes to the social unrest that the debtor prisons were causing and a new solution has to be found quickly because their legislative and White House friends were getting very nervous.  The memo asks the legal department to review the legality and to determine what, if any, laws would have to change to make a new potential program legal.

This new program was dubbed Operation Worker Paradise.  Chase Fargo had acquired a chain of islands in the South Pacific through a sovereign debt default of a small island nation.  Operation Worker Paradise would entail opening manufacturing plants on the island.  Chase Fargo could contract with suppliers of various consumer goods, such as electronics, to manufacture these items on the island. 

The labor force would come from the United States.  Operation Worker Paradise would be marketed to U.S. workers as just that a paradise.  A place where they have a job, food and shelter and great weather (except for cyclone season).  Every thing that a worker could want or at least that’s how it would be marketed.

Chase Fargo would have a win win situation with Operation Worker Paradise.  It would have a new source of revenue in manufacturing and it would have workers working off their debts.  Plus being isolated on a chain of islands there would be no pesky regulators or human/worker rights groups that would interfere with their profit making opportunity.

But would U.S. workers buy into this paradise?  Like they really have a choice.  The memo also asked the law department to research the legal possibility of giving debtor’s the choice of debtor prison or worker paradise.  The memo closes with this interesting statement: “Now, this is free markets at there best.”

So much for freedom and liberty in the U.S. for working class Americans - but then again this is Capitalism. 

Good luck.