Repost – How the Depression…

I found this in someone else’ group blog page. The narrative is an excerpt from the writer’s post. It describes one piece of How the Second Great Depression has iterated itself.

-walter
http://bottledwalter.wordpress.com

http://alicetiara.livejournal.com/friends
post by kdotdammit

It goes like this in Arizona. Mega developer buys massive desert acreage on the cheap. They plow it up, kill the plants and animals then plaster the ground with as many houses as they can build. Their salesmen sell the houses like so many automobiles and they force the loans through the developers own fly-by-night mortgage companies. The mortgage companies immediately sell the loans to a bank. The developer gets the cash. The bank gets the loan. The people move into the house and struggle to make the astronomical payment. In the meanwhile, they have a new house, so consumer culture teaches them they should fill it with new things. They take their credit cards to Home Depot, Best Buy, and Target. They fill their house with shit they don’t need and put it on credit cards they can’t pay. When I first moved to Tucson and bought a house, I can’t tell you how many people asked me if I bought patio furniture yet. I was shocked. Why the fuck would I buy patio furniture? But apparently one of the first things that people do here when they buy a house is take their credit card to the store and buy $1,000 patio sets. They also buy $500 barbecues. They fill their houses with thousands of dollars of new furniture. All on credit. They are writing empty checks with money they don’t have. Not me. I never did, and on election night 2004 I understood why. I felt the forces closing in on my very home, trying to strangle my economic independence and my choices. So now what do we have? We have a bunch of banks who were sold a bunch of bad credit from a bunch of people who were convinced to buy a bunch of things they didn’t need and couldn’t afford. And where did that money go? The people don’t have the money. The banks don’t have the money. The corporate interests who sold the original products (houses, TVs, patio sets) have the money. The banks gave it to them and the people couldn’t pay the banks. Where are the developers and the corporate interests during the “great bailout”? What we have is a whole culture that conditioned people to spend and to live some kind of life of faux luxury based on consumer products when they didn’t have any money to spend. It conditioned people to believe they needed things they didn’t need and that they had to buy the things from the places that were cannibalizing our economic stability. I cannot begin to tell you how much consumer waste I see in Arizona. It’s no surprise Arizona is on the top of the list of states in crisis.