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
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.
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.
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.
Why would that make banks less likely to take foreign money instead of more likely to take foreign money?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.
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 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.
…dude half of my neighbors want to see me killed because of things like me refusing to worship that dead neonazi that recently got himself shot in the neck.
They’d buy off my possessions just so they could see my reaction as they set them ablaze.
No, not in my country (US). People will not band together like that again, possibly ever.
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.
Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.
Private equity will buy everything with no public sale.
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
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.
Scumbag murican checking in: The difference between a 65 year old and a 5 year old is nearly non-existent nowadays. Xenophobia is a hell of a drug.
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
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.
