In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts – DVD

In America’s earliest days, there were barn-raising parties in which neighbors helped each other build up their farms. Today, in some churches, there are debt liquidation revivals in which parishioners chip in to free each other from growing credit card debts that are driving American families to bankruptcy and desperation.

In Debt We Trust is the latest film from Danny Schechter, “The News Dissector,” director of the internationally distributed and award-winning WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), an expose of the media’s role in the Iraq War. The Emmy-winning former ABC News and CNN producer’s new hard-hitting documentary investigates why so many Americans are being strangled by debt. It is a journalistic confrontation with what former Reagan advisor Kevin Phillips calls ‘Financialization’–the “powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex.”

While many Americans may be “maxing out” on credit cards, there is a deeper story: power is shifting into fewer hands…..with frightening consequences.

In Debt We Trust is a startling film about the debt burden that millions of Americans are struggling with and a forecast of the fiscal crisis that faces our country when the ballooning national debt comes due. Our addiction to consumption and debt as a national pastime is an issue that cuts across political, racial, class and generational lines. Over time Congress has virtually legalized loan sharking by financial institutions leaving hard working Americans at the short end of a bad deal. This film is about fighting back.

“I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest of dangers. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.” -Thomas Jefferson

Extras include:
· In Debt We Trust trailer
· Interview with the filmmakers
· Interview with actor Lorraine Bracco

Run time: 89 minutes