This hard-hitting documentary investigates why so many Americans - college and high school students in particular - are being strangled by debt. Zeroing in on how the mall has replaced the factory as America's dominant economic engine, Emmy Award-winning former ABC News and CNN producer Danny Schechter shows how college students are being forces to pay higher interest on loans while graduating, on average, with more than $20,000 in consumer debt. The film empowers as it enrages, delivering an accessible and fascinating introduction to what former Reagan advisor Kevin Phillips has called "the debt-and-credit industrial complex."

(2006) 52 minutes
A Globalvision Production
A Danny Schecter Dissection
Executive Producers Steve Green and Rory O’Connor

Sections: Introduction | The Credit Card Crusader | How the Companies Operate | The Marketing Machine | How Did We Get Into This Mess? | A Nation Transformed | The Crunch is Coming | Bankruptcy Blues | The Politics of Credit | Predators at Work | What Must Be Done?

Danny Schechter is a television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes and speaks about media issues. He is the author of Falun Gong's Challenge to China, The More You Watch, The Less You Know, and News Dissector: Passions, Pieces and Polemics. He is the executive editor of the MediaChannel.org, the world's largest online media issues network.

Schechter is co-founder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company now in its 13th year, where he produced 156 editions of the award-winning series South Africa Now, co-produced Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television with Charlayne Hunter-Gault. His most recent human rights production, Globalization and Human Rights was co-produced with Rory O'Connor and shown nationally on PBS.

Schechter received his Master's degree from the London School of Economics and an honorary doctorate from Fitchburg College. He was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, where he also taught in 1969. After college, he was a full time civil rights worker and then communications director of the Northern Student Movement, worked as a community organizer in a Saul Alinsky-style War on Poverty program, and, moving from the streets to the suites, served as an assistant to the Mayor of Detroit in 1966 on a Ford Foundation grant. Schechter was a producer for CNN and a producer for ABC's 20/20, where during his eight years he won two National News Emmys.

Schechter was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. His writing has appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including the The Nation, Newsday, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Studies Journal, Detroit Free Press, Village Voice, Tikkun, Z, and many others.

FILM REVIEW: IN DEBT WE TRUST
Atlanta Progressive News | Matthew Cardinale | April 15, 2007
Click here to read review

Interviews

DEMOCRACY NOW! | April 4, 2007
Click here to listen to the show

TAVIS SMILEY | April 12, 2007
Click here to listen to the show