The Reality of the Economic Crisis

By Danny Mendlow

Here’s where we’re at folks. The end of the line.

“The end of free-market capitalism”

I’ve heard it called.

“The sub-prime mortgage crisis”

Some blame it on.

“A global economic meltdown”

Time for some major change.

So, our entire way of life is exposed as a rickety, weak, hollow, card house that collapses in a heartbeat, so what do we do? We throw money at it! We actually try and prop this mangled, pathetic card house back up with the exact cause of the collapse!

Kind of like tossing a bucket of water on a tsunami.

Kind of like throwing a candle at a forest fire.

Sort of the equivalent of throwing a snow ball at an avalanche.

Bail outs? Our solution is bail-outs?!?! And regulation? But please, don’t get me wrong, the other side of the coin is just as, if not more retarded. Tax breaks and the same freewheeling market that got us here? Those are the only two “solutions” on the table. Let me give you a hint. They are both wrong.

Here’s my solution. It’s time to re-think where we’re at and where we need to be going and what we need to do to get there. It’s time to realize that money got us to where we are, and it was helpful in doing so. The market pushed us to produce, innovate and it kept us waking up in the morning. It served a purpose at a time, but that time has long passed. And no government or bank or wall street finance expert or CEO will ever realize that. They will fight with every fiber in their being to defend the only thing they know. They will scratch and claw to keep themselves important.

They are all irrelevant.

It is up to regular people to figure that out and to do something about it. Don’t hold your breath for your senator and your congressman and your boss and your bank to get it. They won’t. Get it yourself, and then act.

The reality is this. The housing market crashed because a house is built so that people can live in it. Not so that real estate tycoons can buy and sell them like stocks and bonds pushing their ‘value’ into the stratosphere. A home is a tangible structure which at one time was priced according to what working people could afford. It was. Until, like everything else in our society, they became merely another pawn in the profit game, and all the humanity was squeezed mercilessly out of the house.

They stopped being homes, and started being ‘the housing market.’

I work full-time and couldn’t dream of ever owning a home. It cost me more to attend one year of school than my parents paid for a 5 acre property with a house on it merely one generation ago. That’s not inflation, that’s sucking the right to live in a real house out of an entire generation. My boss, a professional of ten years, can’t dream of ever owning a home. He lives with room-mates. Your boss shouldn’t live with room-mates. I don’t know a single person within ten years of me who can aspire to do anything other than inherit their parents or grandparents property. It’s like we’re all just sitting around waiting for them to die and hoping we were the good child. The beneficiary lottery. It’s a sad, demoralizing and completely ridiculous way to live. Why? Because houses aren’t built for people to live in any more. There is no correlation between real, human wages, and the price of a home. And you’ll never see a piece of legislation introduced that keeps those two interdependent things in line with each other. Ever.

Every year my rent increases, no questions asked. That’s just what happens. Well that’s just what’s been happening for too long. Now I’m paying $1000 a month for a one bedroom apartment. And not a very nice one either. I know people paying close to $2000. Two people working full-time jobs in a one bedroom apartment should not be living in poverty and barely making rent every month. How is a single mother supposed to survive in this world? We are all systematically being driven mercilessly into poverty where our only choice is to sign up for the credit being dangled at us. This is not frivolous spending. This is survival spending. This is rent and food and getting to work every day. That’s all I do. I don’t drink, I don’t party, I rarely leave my house. I don’t do anything. Not because I don’t want to. Because I can’t. Every single action costs money, and lots of it. Every year the price goes up. On everything. And every pay-cheque we’re going backwards. The credit card interest piles up, adding on to the already extortionist cost of simply having a place to sleep. This is the life that almost everyone I know in all walks of life is living right now. Engineers, doctors, barely scraping by. People who have done what they’re ’supposed to do’ – gone to good schools, gotten good jobs. These aren’t deadbeats, so why are they forced to live like one and feel like one? You cannot sustain a society where every single person in it is perpetually plummeting further and further into debt. You cannot fix that issue by propping up those same credit companies with taxes on those same people who are already drowning in debt.

We cannot tax, subsidize, credit and bail-out our way out of this. We also can’t cut taxes, wage wars and let the free market run free to get out of this. BOTH ARE EQUALLY STUPID AND OUTDATED SOLUTIONS. They are not solutions, they are the cause of the problems.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

I see this quote thrown around a lot. But I don’t see it applied very often.

The economy collapsed because the same lack of forward thinking swallowed up our jobs too. A job is not just something you do every day to keep the stock afloat so that a handful of gamblers can buy and trade shares in your company. A job is a contribution to your society in which you are given a fair compensation, so that you can live in a home, eat food and purchase the goods produced by others in your society. At least it was. The extreme of this we are now witnessing. We have highly trained, well-educated, useful people being forced to work menial, pointless positions at the fifteen mega chain stores that dominate every town and every city to pay off their ridiculously expensive education. For what? For who? For Wall Street? For a couple of CEO’s?

Humanity has become a machine. There is no humanity left. And there won’t be until human beings realize it, and demand more of themselves, for themselves and by themselves.

Stop defending a system that ritualistically fucks you in the ass on a daily basis, suppresses your potential and denies your ability to live a respectable and decent life.

Stop pretending all is well and all will be made well through legislation and banking.

Start taking some pride in your existence and your self worth. Start caring. Stop shrugging your shoulder and saying “That’s just the way it is.”

It doesn’t have to be. And the only reason it is that way, is because you and me let it get that way, and continue to let it get worse.

Every day.