In America's earliest days, there were barn-raising parties in which neighbours 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. This hard-hitting documentary investigates why so many Americans are being strangled by debt, and shows how the mall has replaced the factory as America's dominant economic engine, and how big banks and credit card companies buy Congress and drive Americans into what a former major bank economist calls modern serfdom. Americans owe trillions in consumer debt and the national debt, a large amount of it to big banks and billions to Communist China.