cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/54239937
During the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on farms, neighbors often showed up at the auctions together.
They’d bid only a few cents, and return the land to the family that lost it. Sometimes a noose hung nearby as a warning to outsiders not to profit from someone else’s ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldn’t.
If a collapse like that happened today, do you think people would still stand together or has that kind of solidarity disappeared? Could it happen again?
California was populated by desperate people losing their farms and homes. See: grapes of Wrath.
Penny auctions happened, but they weren’t the norm nationwide. The banks did forclose and people did lose their homes and sometimes abandoned them because the land was worthless during the dust bowl.
If America gets that desperate again, you will see pockets of solidarity and community and other examples of heartlessness and tragedy. We can’t know how much unless it happens.
Same book described farmers letting good food rot because they needed to raise prices. If they gave the food away it would drop prices lower than they already were.
Like you said, banks would take people’s homes and abandon them because they didn’t want to set the standard that you could take loans out and not pay them.
Over 100 years ago the Great Depression proved without a doubt that capitalism is a garbage system and the only safety net it has is tax payer money.
If a bank that’s “too big to fail” and they’re on a downhill path, why waste resources trying to dig themselves out when they know they’ll get a fat paycheck from the people.
It’s insane to me that there’s middle/lower class people that defend this shit.
It’s in our future again at some point, what’s going to happen when there are a million or more climate refugees forming wandering groups in the nation’s interior, like Moses wandering the desert for a place to stay and food to eat. I shall call this “retirement”