If a Great Depression happened again, would people still stand together like they did during the penny auctions?
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.
Theyโd 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 elseโs ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldnโt.
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?
677
Comments169
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.
That's also partly because they printed a ton of money for reparations for losing the first world war
????
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
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.
Iโve 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
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? Donโt bet on it.
A real depression wouldnโt 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.
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
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.
Source
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.
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,
source
It's right there, 2nd line of the post you're replying to.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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
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.
Society doesnโt 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.
It's also the difference between individual ownership and company ownership. Companies simply have too much power.
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)...
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.
The real question is: would they be allowed to do the same these days?
Spoiler: they wonโt.
It absolutely could not happen again, regardless of how organized the community was, because banks simply wouldn't sell the foreclosed property in an auction of community peers if they weren't getting good money for it, they'd auction it to REITs and corporations without them needing to set foot in an auction house.
blackrock would be there with their own paramilitary buying them up for the pennies
Blackrock and blackwater is the entirely plausible and terrifying outcome here.
Just need to incorporate Blackfire and Blackwind first
Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.
That noose only worked because it was a legitimate threat.
Penny auctions could happen today, but only combined with a similar legitimate threat. Thatโs the obstacle.
Wanna bet that there would be immediate police action arresting people for "credible threat to people's lives"?
Thatโs what makes it a great obstacle today.
I'd take that bet.
The key words are immediate and action. Police don't do that
The obstacle isn't just the lack of threat, it's also the lack of community. Most people know their co-workers far better then their neighbors.
Cars shuttle us in private to work, no need to see people on the street or bus. Commerce is online or in big box stores, no need to know the local business owners. All our services are online and now our relationships and friendships as well.
These abstractions have destroyed any sense of community we have, so even if a similar situation were to happen today, I doubt your neighbors would even know it's happening, let alone band together to help.
No chance if possibly only because the government would immediately crack down and boot lickers would refuse to stand up to the capitalists and government.
I think things would be different during a great depression.
Why would that matter to the people on top who can avoid the worst and control the police and government so thoroughly why would they ever allow something "illegal" like this to go unchallenged when they don't have to.
The mob rules.
Look how divided people are already. If you were close to starving, family suffering, do you think republicans and dems would get along? Not the ones I know, especially republicans. I know several that are ready for a civil war, actually prepping for it. One in particular I no longer associate with is hoping it comes to that.
I believe that we wouldn't come together because the people at the top wouldn't want that. They would stir up more drama to try and make the poor fight. That is what it comes down to. Make the poor war with themselves so the rich get ignored with their abuse of society. Always has been, always will be the motivation. Country, time doesn't matter.
This post had nothing to do with US politics. I believe communities will come together in crisis if shit hits the fan.
I respect your optimism.
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
People also sold unwanted children, we going back there too? I know a lot of Trump voters are salivating at the thought.
Reduced monthly costs AND a lump sum of money? I might have a few I'm willing to give up.
Do they have to be your own?
I mean, is this really the business to be asking questions?
For sure! I'm pro-abortion so I'm sure as heck pro-auction. The birth having already happened is just a minor detail.
Besides, if a kid's parents don't want them, I'm sure that man in the nice blackout van will give them a much better childhood.
Abortion is totally moral up to about 8 years of fetal development!
I would imagine they just auction them on online nowadays :/ cutting out any sort of human interaction.
Absolutely not. Americans are now scumbags to each other. Especially after how they monetized homes and turned them into reality tv shows. About how the take an affordable home and make it unaffordable. Scumbag Americans will fuck each other over.
5 year olds haven't been fully taught racism yet.
And a 15, 25, 35, 45, 55 year old....
In my experience young children are the most empathetic and caring people. Its surprising (also why lord of the flies is a stupid story).
Until they get parented by magats and sent to school.
I feel like this too
Nope. There's no solidarity in America anymore.
Theres nothing like a Great Depression to rally the troops.
This one's going down as The Great Desolation โso, not likely, no.
(Suck it, Smaug, you whiny pile of plot hinge.)
Had to look that up as I have never read the The Hobbit. Over my head.
The GD had a somewhat clear culprit. It didn't hang on half the country voting in the cunt who ended up causing the recession, there was a very distinct group that was removed enough from the average people so they could cooperate.
Today? MAGA is solely responsible for this crash, and the whole country knows it. Anyone left of MAGA, who didn't vote for the orange clown, will NOT help MAGA. Those who cooked the stew shall eat it, and all. And I can't say it won't be deserved.
Do you have a source for your claim? I just happened to study this as an economics/history undergrad. There's a lot of disagreement.
At the time, "everyone knew" that it was the speculators on Wall Street who've caused it.
Now, how much truth is there to that - when in reality we know that a bunch of things contributed in a major way, like the Smoot-Hawley tariff (doesn't that sound familiar?), gold standard policy fuckery, and so on - doesn't matter. What matters from this perspective is that the people at the time didn't blame each other. There wasn't really a major political division that could or would be blamed.
This is a stark contrast with today's situation where 1/3 to 2/3 of the country is directly responsible for electing the orange turdsack who caused the crash (depending on if you blame those who didn't bother to vote).
short explanation for anyone who hasn't studied it, there were massive arbitrage opportunites using gold. i can't remember the specific countries involved in the trade strategy, but the US and another country (the example i use is Britain but again, i studied this 20 years ago. some details are fuzzy) had their currency at a legally mandated fixed exchange rate. example out of my ass, 1 US dollar was tradable for 2 british pounds. Each country also had the exchange rate between gold and their currency fixed by legal mandate. One country changed their currency:precious metal exchange rate (i can't remember if they went from gold standard to silver standard or just changed the gold rate). Since their currencies were fixed in relation to each other, gold was cheaper in one country than the other by their own law. As a result, gold (and thus the backing for the currency supply) drained out of the US severely constricting the money supply, severely exacerbating any existing recession. And, since the prices were legal mandates and not responsive to market conditions, the arbitrage opportunity would only end when the law changed or the entire national economy collapsed.
what had the largest effect, between the Smoot-Hawley tariff bullshit, Hoover trying to balance the federal budget, gold standard fuckery causing severe constriction to the money supply, and all the many other causes, that's a matter of academic debate. I'm kind of a monetarist so i lean toward the gold standard shit, but like they fucked up every way imaginable short of deploying troops to invade your own country and waging war against your own citizens.
aw fuck.
There are very reasonable arguments for some people in Trump's circle that are intentionally wanting a major downsizing of the fed, and an economic collapse so they can buy up a ton of stuff.
I think things would be way different in a great depression.
Because when everyoneโs broke, the whole social network changes. People stop pretending the system works for them and start relying on each other instead.
They can't. Yhey are fundamentaly broken.
The problem with this is that a lot of these people have been shitting on their neighbors and their entire neighborhoods for decades because they think they are the special snowflake who can survive anything by themselves and don't need any community.
When those fucks are also broke and they come asking for help a lot of us are going to tell them to get fucked.
Those of us who've been building intentional communities and support systems will be a little better off, but we're going to be wasting a lot of time trying to fight off raiders from the aforementioned group above. thankfully they'll probably be coming single file because they won't help each other either.
Not in the same way. There is still some anti-eviction resistance that goes on today. It's rare and never successful in undoing evictions though. For the most part, I think the US is too individualistic, and the methods of preventing and breaking solidarity too refined for broad action to be successful. I imagine that during a depression, most desperate people would rather join the feds to feed their family by committing violence against others. Even now, ICE received 150k applications in a single week, and people aren't anywhere near as desperate as they'd be in a depression. The government would have to basically collapse, and even then we'd probably end up more like the poor countries ruled by gangs and warlords that dangle the possibility of escaping poverty in exchange for extreme violence.
Labor solidarity decreased under Hoover, and only started increasing under FDR with a lot of government support. I'm skeptical we'll ever have free and fair elections again, so I don't envision a pro-union government anytime soon.
I don't think the same mechanism would work these days, but we have seen people standing up to authorities on their neighbors' behalf already; often people they don't even know. Look at all the videos of people driving ICE away.
It doesn't happen every time of course, but neither did the penny auction solidarity.
Absolutely not, there'd be some TikTok influencer that would be like "Broooo you can get land so cheap!" and buy it all and sell it for massive profit.
Or Mr Beast would buy it and give it back while looking like an animatronic wearing a dead face.
He likes views, he'd make the farmer do some stupid challenge to win back some portion of the land, selling off whatever the farmer couldn't "win"
I don't really know what he does, except that he gives stuff to people. That's the full content of my Mr Beast file. That and a mugshot.
Less "he gives people stuff" and more "he exploits peoples desperation for views."
I watched part of one video a few years ago because the title said something about crashing a train and I just wanted to see what kind of equipment they were destroying and how they managed safety. Instead my main takeaways were
He doesn't give stuff to people.
It's an investment to make more money.
Damn y'all are cynical. I'm on the Hurricane Coast and people come out the woodworks to help one another after storms. It's an awe inspiring thing to see so many come to mutual aid.
Two minutes after the wind dies down, dudes are roaming the streets with chainsaws, rolling in pickups, dragging trees with chains. Those that didn't get sniped are actively searching for people to help. After Hurricane Ivan, men were going door to door, cutting trees off houses and cars. Power was out so people were cooking up their food before it went bad, grills hot, signs in the yard, "Come and get it!"
Another great example is NYC after 9/11. I'd visited Manhattan in 1992 and was utterly freaked out by how unfriendly everyone was. (Yes, I know, that was partly culture shock on my part.) After 9/11 they pulled together strong.
I've written about what all went on in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Skipping that tonight as I don't want to cry, but it was awe inspiring.
And all of those events, even in your example, were before we had the organizational abilities and reach of the modern internet.
I don't think any of this is political, cultural or otherwise dependent on the times. I wouldn't spit on my MAGA neighbor if he was on fire, but I'd work by his side if shit hit the fan. The vast majority of us jump after disasters, we evolved that way, one of the finest points in our favor.
Did the banks go out roaming the streets helping people?
I don't question if communities would band together, I question if a community banding together could still pose enough of a threat to a bank or auction to pressure such a sale.
What are a bunch of broke farmers going to do to prevent a foreign REIT from buying the property in an online auction?
You're answering to the exact situation. I'm answering in more general terms.
True, but I also think that my exact answer likely generalizes to most situations where institutions are capitalizing on the suffering of people.
IMO this post isn't about the willingness for people to help each other in times of need, it's about the willingness (and ability) for the community to organize a defense against institutions that are using the situation to exploit the community.
Very well put.
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.
This was before the federal government formed an (unconstitutional!) standing army.
I'm interested to learn how this is unconstitutional. As I understand it the clause that only allows apportionments of money to last no longer than two years is to prevent the military from coasting indefinitely without congressional approval
Youโre right that the wording in the constitution requires re-appropriating the army every two years. The obviously short time period along with the words written outside of the constitution by the people who wrote it made it very clear what a disastrous mistake having a federal standing army would be. Those guys were right.
Is there anything that would reasonably mean "you may not have a standing army"?
I agree you wonโt find those literal words in that order. There are plenty of other parts of the constitution that have been interpreted more holistically, but not the section limiting federal armies to 2 year stints. Funny how that works.
Nope, "Gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps".
The USA is no longer the USA because the core values of people who wear and live by the flag have changed. Sure, the core values of the people profiting off of them hasn't changed, but they have made sure to twist the values of the rest of society for the last couple of decades or so.
After decades of pushing individualism, not a chance.
can't hang a corporation
Can hang whoever runs the corporation, though.
Sure if you can get to Beijing.
If you believe that every corporation is run by China then you're seriously delirious.
Which is more likely, that someone made an offhand remark in an attempt to make a joke or that someone believes all corporations exist in China?
Jokes have that pesky requisite of, you know, being funny. Your statement can't be asserted as such in any manner.
I beg to differ
Honestly, this is why I fled suburbia for someplace more integrated and communal.
I looked around and realized that I barely knew who lived there, and nobody had my back. Likewise, if someone was in trouble, I would never hear about it. I'm not unfriendly by any means, it's just the whole tract-housing setup with no communal space is practically engineered to divide people up. Heap work hours and commute time on top of that, and all you know is someone keeps a car in so many driveways overnight; you never see any people. Everyone there really kept to themselves, as the environment made that easy to do.
I'm happy to say that I'm in a place now that would likely band together if it came down to it.
I'm guessing the noose wasn't only for the benefit of outsiders. Most communities probably had one or two selfish people.
"People" is a very broad category. A lot of people in the world are kind, loving and caring and would absolutely stand together
Most likely no. People nowadays have no empathy. Don't care about others. No unity.
I had to look that up. I'm surprised it worked even then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_auction_(foreclosure)
They would try but they would be prevented by lethal force.
No. The world and people are way too divided. We have litteral groups of people that life in a different reality, the conspiricy theory nut jobs.
Lol no.
I don't mean exactly like that, surely there are newer tactics.
Lol no.
Correct as all the negative comments may be, I really think we canโt know what shape it would take. Things change quickly when people get hungry. Only class consciousness can save us.
During the penny auction times farmers were still poor white folks. Now it is only rich white republicans owning all the farms. They all salivate at the idea of owning all the land around them.
Are you fucking kidding? People were scalping toilet paper during a plague, ffs
They are doing this in some areas. Little Tokyo in Los Angeles had a whole bunch of people buy out buildings so rent wouldn't go up and they could subsidiZe some of the older standing businesses. Humans are still mostly good.
Community isn't like what it was back then. I'm guessing hell no.
No, primarily because nobody knows their neigbors anymore
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.
Recession will happen in 2029 to celebrate the anniversary of the Great Depression.
I bet we'll get that gift a bit early.
No, because farmers knew each other back then and it was a society transitioning from agrarian to fully industrial. Different values.
They also had a connection to reality that we don't have, they used their hands directly on physical objects, we all think we're Johnny Mnemonic (ever see those stupid SAS vaiya or whatever ads?).
No
You might be right.
I don't know that those small family farms are really a thing anymore. I think those pretty much went away in the 80s.
Hell, no. If the word went around that there was an auction, there will always be those who decide to buy their neighbors' land.
Theyโd grab anyoneโs house just like they grabbed the Capitol on Jan 6.
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.
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.
No chance. Everyone is "me, me, me, me!" now. Even the loudest voices around the internet, banging on about LGBT rights, and immigrants being harassed by ICE, and every other social justice issue, is only doing so for what it gives them. Worthless internet points.
And these the supposedly the very best of us. The rest? They'll be on all the auction sites, buying up foreclosed and then punting them on ebay for a massive profit. Covid showed us who most of us really are. And it wasnt pretty. Hell, some of us cant even leave kids in peace to collect pokemon cards. No, some of us have to buy them all up, and then sell them on ebay at a markup.
We are mostly, very scummy people. In order to get what we see here in these old pictures, is community. And we dont really have that anymore. We are all at each other throats over everything now. Community has become niche. Calling people cunts because you slightly disagree with them about something has become the baseline.
Are right wing people right to seek a unified culture so that people would be willing to stand together with their peers?
Or is the left wing approach the answer where everybody but fascists is supported and the right wing people have to be convinced to join?
Is that seriously a question? "Is it right to create an in-group or should we just help everyone who gives a shit about the social contract?"
Yes. It's the underlying problem. Even your summary is a valid question. People standing together means everybody has to be part of the in-group, or if there are various groups, they still have to find a common social contract. Otherwise somebody will use the situation for their benefit.