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?
Mod notice: This post is kinda in the grey area of being in breach of Rule 6, but it’s a good question with decent answers, so it gets to stay.
Stay classy.
Let it stand! I see it as more of a question of how people would react to such a disaster in modern America.
Plus rule 6 is mostly there to prevent this board from being flooded with questions about whatever annoying orange did in the past 24h
Wasn’t the Great Depression a worldwide thing?
Not really, the great depression in capital letters was almost 100% in the US.
The rest of the world had a recession, a bit tougher than normal but nothing near what happen in the US
You are forgetting the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression
Their currency collapsed to the point, where a wheelbarrow of cash could not buy a bread.
I would say that is pretty significant.
That mostly has to do with the end of WWI and the reparations they had to pay. It happened near the same time, but not really related.
That isn’t true. France, for example, had to pay a larger indemnity after the Franco-Prussian war. It certainly didn’t help but blaming it all on a fairly standard post-war treaty is literally a relic of Nazi propaganda.
These events are interconnected and pretending the Great Depression didn’t affect economies world wide is revisionist nonsense.
???
The weymar hiper inflation happened almost 9 years before…
The great US depression was only a drop in a miriad of causes, it is not even in the top 3 of reasons of nazi getting the power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
That’s also partly because they printed a ton of money for reparations for losing the first world war
A story my parents shared with me as a kid, allegedly from somewhere in family history was of an individual taking a wheelbarrow of cash to the store to buy a loaf of bread, heading inside and learning the price had further increased and upon returning outside finding the cash dumped in the street and the wheelbarrow gone since that was the (relative) valueble left unattended.
The US Great Depression directly lead to hyperinflation in Weimar Germany which lead to the rise of National Socialism.
Edit: I was wrong, the hyperinflation was 9 years prior and it was a 30% unemployment rate from the crash which was a leading factor to National Socialism, not hyperinflation.
Nope, it didn’t, the hiper inflation happened almost 9 years before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
Edit: I appreciate your edit, but now mine looks out of touch :)
Seems I mixed up the unemployment from the depression with the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic.
I’ve edited my comment to say this
Part of that was linked to a great drought on US farms caused by overfarming leading to the dust bowl. That was a major part of the US GDP then. And 100 years later people still don’t believe humans can alter the environment.
The drought began 5 years after the market shit itself to death. The farms began struggling after the war.
The US at the time deported Latino citizens due to the increases racism/bigotry. Most of them were farmhands who knew how to work the land, better than the white farmers. The US realized their mistake in the middle of the depression and attempted to woo the same people back under the Vaquero program. The promise of citizenship was never fulfilled by the US.
It was but these penny auctions were mainly a US thing I think
I’m looking forward to another great depression.
I’m noticing that the main people who suffered were city folk who all of a sudden had to give up consumerism for a bit.
Are you fucking kidding? People were scalping toilet paper during a plague, ffs
nope, they would be coralled and shot by drones and police officers, bombed to shit, and all called terrorists. made an example of, to keep everyone else in check. people seeking refuge from that system would either choose to suffer in it, die attempting to change it, or join those that enforce it.
its been that way for a while now. everyone is too undereducated and isolated via technologu to create a proper resistance force, at least with numbers that matter. even fewer are actively willing to do violence for moral reasons, due to decades of brainwashing by the systems of control to view “peaceful protest” as the only vehicle for change, anything more is considered immoral.
its very useful to have us think that way, as violence is the only historical cure for fascism.
No, primarily because nobody knows their neigbors anymore
Yes, but not right away.
We can see that during Trump 2.0 is taking longer but we are growing our opposition.
Remember the Muslim ban and the immediate reaction at airports in 2017? We’re seeing similar things now (farther into the term) with reactions to ICE.
Unequivocally no.
We live in an era of being able to buy things, sight-unseen. In that era, there was no way for an investor to bid without physically showing up, so if they did, and aggressively outbid everyone else, then they already have a noose set up for them.
Now? People don’t need to be at the auction in person, there probably wouldn’t be an auction to begin with. The Bank would hire a real estate agent, who would pass it off to whomever makes the highest bid. Simple as that.
I’d like to think we would, as communities, as a society, but in this society is also money hungry, faceless corporations that will do whatever they can to make a dollar. There are so many layers of obfuscation between the person who is buying the property, and the person who ultimately owns it.
I just can’t see it happening with the Internet.
It’s also the difference between individual ownership and company ownership. Companies simply have too much power.
Society doesn’t exist anymore. Capitalism has atomized us all into individual crabs, clawing to get out of the pot, paying no heed to who we drag down in our struggles.
Some of us still try to heed our neighbors.
Unfortunately that usually results in all of us, just chilling at the bottom of the pile, because while we were helping eachother, everyone else used us as stepping stones to get closer to the brim.
I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.
I agree that this could happen as you described because of online bidding & buying. But any new owners and/or renovation crews show up, I think people could make that new purchase WAY most costly. Word would eventually get around and no one would want to accept those jobs.
I think the only way to realistically fight back is if all the tradespeople refuse to work on a foreclosed property.
It’s possible, or the land owners could simply bring in someone from out of state (or province, or whatever it is where you are)…
I just can’t see it happening with the Internet.
This, even without the technological forces of capital swooping in to take advantage of every leveraged opportunity, even if people did rally together it would just turn into a political/performative circus and the entire thing will get lost and buried under some streamer drama that erupts from it.
Yeah, the bloated police state and anonymity of most real estate moguls makes this is logistically impossible. That being said, the reaction to the United Healthcare CEO’s killing and the number of ICE, “assaults,” that can’t get grand jury indictments makes me think this spirit is still alive.
It certainly never died.
Over time the gap on Justice has only gotten wider. The rich will literally bankrupt someone with legal fees long before any kind of judgement can be enforced; even if they’re completely in the right, they can’t get justice because companies have enough money to throw at the problem that they can effectively ensure that any judgement against them is squashed.
Most will settle out of court at best, so that the whole experience can be over, while the rich barely need to show up for court when they’re charged with anything. Their lawyers take care of everything.
The police are just an extension of the same problem. The whole idea of police has been hostile to the common man from the start. It’s basically boiled down to, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to, then we’re going to fine you money you don’t have. When you fail to pay up, we’re going to throw you in jail.
Even if you can pay, is kept on your record and held against you for years to come. Forget getting decent employment if you’re convicted of any crime.
But the rich are barely affected by any of this. Punishments are usually a joke to them, like, they need to pay a few grand? Sure, in the time they the cop decided to do that, they probably made more money than the fine is, from their investments.
Everything is balanced towards those with money are affected the least, or completely unaffected, when they commit crimes, yet for commoners and poors, we get fucked for the rest of our lives.
This is the system. Working at intended.
I’m guessing the noose wasn’t only for the benefit of outsiders. Most communities probably had one or two selfish people.
No. The auctions wouldn’t happen in person but online. Some reit or foreign money or both will bid more than the locals could afford.
Average folk probably wouldn’t even be allowed to participate. Only corporations with proof of excessive funds would be allowed to bid.
Only corporations whose name starts with the word “Black” and ends with “Rock” will be allowed to bid.
Well if there was one I don’t think everyone would submit to the banks or foreign money.
It has already happen. Look what happen in 08. The banks did the foreclosures and then just sat on the properties or sold them in mass to someone else. There wasn’t any auctions on the courthouse steps for the local populace to bid only a dollar.
Most of the tax delinquent auctions I’ve glanced at have a minimum bid of the entire assessed value of the property, which usually that assessment predates the tax delinquency so they end up being more expensive at auction than in normal property sales
I’ve not learned where to find foreclosure auctions listed yet but I would expect those to be similar
That wasn’t a great depression.
Because a depression is going to make banks sympathetic to the poors? Don’t bet on it.
A real depression wouldn’t spare anyone, everyone gets hit not just the poor.
That’s what’s going to make this one interesting. The cascade event for the great depression was a stock market crash which resulted in many of those wealthy people autodefenestrating, an event that the stock market was modified to prevent from happening in the same way in the future. It’s going to work the same as the last time for the poors, but it’s still to be determined if it’s going to hit the non-poors the same way.
autodefenestrating Thats a good word.
Why would that make banks less likely to take foreign money instead of more likely to take foreign money?
Says who? The Bush crash of 2008 destroyed a lot of lives, and the media never really covered it properly. My son still talks about how 2008 blew a whole in the lives of his entire generation, the way Covid did to the generation in 2020. The media acknowledged the decline of families during Covid, but not the Bush 2008 Crash.
It won’t be on the public web, FFS.
Why tax actions are in some places already
We’ve had worse depressions already. In 08 entire neighborhoods in Reno were totally abandoned, the whole economy seemed to be house construction and repair. At night whole neighborhoods would vanish, not a single light turning on. I knew guys in construction that suddenly couldn’t get work and went around in crews and stripped foreclosed houses of materials to resell or use on lowball job bids, I knew a pretty well off contractor with an adult disabled son who turned to pushing pyramid schemes to try and stay alive basically. I ended up living in an abandoned house for months looking for work. Between the dot Com crash and the housing market bubble my family went from poor to middle class to hoping to survive winter. I remember my dad telling me in an interview they asked him why he changed careers twice and him just laughing like ‘‘you haven’t been in town long then’’ boom and bust. That’s been the nature of things. I still have health problems from getting pneumonia that year when I was basically homeless, I had a friend drag me to a clinic to get penicillin, the doctor had me wait around a few hours so he could have multiple med students come examine me, he had never seen anyone with that advanced of a case in his whole career. And I’m lucky, I know multiple people in their 20s like me at the time that died that winter because they refused to go to the hospital. They knew they couldn’t pay and didn’t want collections. I ended up getting a medical debt bankruptcy a few years later. You live through this and on the news they say things like ‘‘economic recession’’ and ‘‘down turn’’ maybe ‘‘soft raise in unemployment’’ like they guys who used to sign my paychecks were calling me asking if I heard about any work, standing next to me in the clinic line with sunken eyes.
I will say, at that time people were very open handed, you never needed to call someone to help you get your car out of the road, people would jump out and push you to the side, even put some gas in your tank to get home, I used to drive around with gas cans and a tow line especially in the snow, I used to have sand bags too, people would bend over backwards in a second when they saw your situation, it was a time of a lot of social closeness. And no one ever asked in you had a damm job. My god. No one ever said that shit. ‘‘Get a job?’’ Someone might shoot you for that.
Private equity will buy everything with no public sale.
Indeed, backed by the force of the state no less.
Assuming they don’t completely collapse on their own due to their bad investments. This might actually happen from how things are going. Unfortunately, it’ll also kick off a larger recession/depression
No no they’ll get bailouts. Billions in corporate welfare for donating a few million to whatever grift Trump is running at that moment.
God forbid anyone say anything remotely optimistic on here
Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.
No.
50% of voting Americans deify a pathological lying pedophile rapist treasonous traitorous insurrectionist diaper-wearing convicted felon.
So, “No”.Only 40%.
Still terrifyingly high.
Trump won the national popular vote with a plurality of 49.8%, making him the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.
Damn, so what you’re saying is that it still isn’t 50%. Crazy.
If you think the .2% matters I’m going to start listing propaganda talking points from the 2024 presidential election cycle.
lol.
No he didn’t. They cheated, and we ALL know it. Perhaps the greatest crime of appeasement the Dems have done so far has been to let MAGA get away with the biggest election fraud in American history.
Election fraud?
Let’s be real here, majority of Americans are stupid, particularly the Latino and black male voters that swung right this election. You reap what you sow
Yeah, election fraud. You claim it was disgruntled male black and Hispanic voters. Others claim it was young people refusing to vote over Israel. Others think it was a massive vote boycott because they were pissed that Harris didn’t go through a primary process. Everybody is grasping at any explanation that is NOT Election Fraud.
The OFFICIAL excuse that BOTH sides like to point to, are millions of ballots that were straight Democratic tickets, with Trump at the top, and ALL in the Swing States. Supposedly, there are MILLIONS of them, so many that they turned the election.
Apparently the Swing States have lots of these Trump-loving Democrats, and they don’t live anywhere else but those 7 states. I’d love to see one of these people get interviewed, and explain their thinking, but I’ve never seen such an interview. I’ve never heard of such a person. I, personally, have never spoken to anyone who voted like that, although MAGAs, and weak Democrats, claim that it’s 100% true.
I don’t believe those people exist at all. I think the Trump/ Musk/ Putin Election Scheme was simple - just change the Presidential pick on enough ballots, in only the seven Swing States, to win AND, since they can adjust the switch parameters to any percentage they want, they made it big enough that he could finally be the first Republican to claim the popular vote in almost 40 years.
Rigging one election in only 7 states was pretty easy, once they had control of the voting machines, but it is far more difficult to rig hundreds of Congressional and Senate races. Doing that same sort of vote-switching would be much more difficult for Congressional and Senate races, where the elections are spread out everywhere, there are alternative methods of voting, and the vote counts are much smaller and harder to camouflage.
The best way to avoid getting clobbered in the 2026 Midterms, is to make sure there isn’t a 2026 Midterms. That will happen at the end of next summer. Expect all three rings to be chaotic at next summer’s circus, before the impose Martial Law, and suspend elections for the first time in American history.
Then our Democracy has officially ended, and it’s on.
Well, if digging a moat was the goal the US certainly is there. Canada will have a field day with European tourists during football world cup.
77,302,580 people is not half of America. It is 49.8% of the folks that bothered to vote.
More usefully,
In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
50% of VOTING Americans
It’s right there, 2nd line of the post you’re replying to.
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”
They wouldn’t have penny auctions. They would be virtual so they couldn’t be bullied into not bidding and the bidders would be global so they wouldn’t give a shit about the person whose land it was.
Bullying doesnt have to stop after the sale.
But the community might object. Things are a lot different during a depression, something none of us have experienced.
The ‘community’ can object as much as they want but the auction site (assuming it would even be a live auction and not some algorithm api thing) would sell off the property to some mega-conglomerate on behalf of the holding company and nobody Un the community would even be aware until the sheriff kicks out and locks the poor sap out.
I’d imagine in such a scenario it would be pretty easy for community members to take direct action to make the property extremely expensive for the outside investor though. Releasing animals into the property, quietly installing holes in the envelope to allow for water and wildlife ingress, stink bombing, etc. Really anything that slowly destroys the value while preventing an insurance payout
Raise the risk profile enough and outside investors will go for something else
