The Looming Shit Storm

Back in 1931 when the Great Depression was becoming a fact of life, my grandfather agreed to take half pay in order to keep his job. He didn’t like it, but he had few choices. The kids needed food, and clothes, and so on.
I tend to think back on this bit of family history as I look out on the growing shit storm which is about to engulf us all. A lot of middle class people had to take half pay in the Depression to keep working, and by next year we will realize that a lot more of us are going to have to do the same thing this time around; That is if we are lucky.

Most of us can’t see this dismal prospect yet because we are still caught up in a rapidly dying consensus on the nature of our individual and collective reality. We still buy into the idea that we are simply facing a “recession” that will cause some economic pain, but then will self correct. The snake oil salesmen are saying that we have reached bottom. Life will go on as usual.

For those of you who choose to cling to that particular illusion, might I direct you to an article “tax assessors boggled by the housing dip” in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The gist of the article is that housing values are falling so fast that tax assessors no longer know what property is worth

For less than the price of a decent used car, you can buy a home in Atlanta today.
Actually, real estate agents list a dozen choices for $10,000 or less. step up in price to $20,000 and your choices expand 10 fold.

The prices seem absurd but they are part of a real estate market suffering with rampant foreclosures, mortgage fraud, abandoned investor properties, a collapsing mortgage industry and other ills. The market is unlike anything seen in metro Atlanta in years and it has local tax assessors and appraisers as confused as anyone.
For most people, this situation is frightening at a selfish level because they see themselves losing value in their personal property. But just step back a minute and think about what this does to your town, county and state. What is that property worth in terms of its property tax? If the assessors need to massively downgrade these values then they have to lower the taxes that each home owes.

I can hear you now thinking that this might not be so bad. You can at least get a property tax abatement on your diminished value. Perhaps you can. However those lower taxes are going to cost you a lot more than you ever imagined.
The problem comes in when it is time for the town to pay the people who are supposed to care for your welfare and your posterity. If everyone in town is paying lower taxes, how much money will then be available to pay for the police, the firemen, the teachers and the road crews?

For just a moment think about what is going to happen when this speculative bubble fully deflates and nobody has much profit left? Who is going to pay the bills?

Sure construction workers and mortgage brokers are going to be out of work. But what about all those professionals who keep the “system” running? For a moment, forget about the stories about cops making two hundred thousand with extra duties. Sure some do, and that will be changed. But that is not the reality for most police officers. Public service doesn’t pay all that well. On average, the starting salary for a cop is $40,000 per year. Are the towns going to cut that meager salary in half to keep within their budgets? How will the cops react to that cut? How safe will you feel when their pay gets cut?

Are the teachers going to keep working at half pay? Do you want the people who are charged with mentoring your children coming to work hungry? How many potholes are going to be fixed? Who is going to tell the garbage man that he has a pay cut? What happens when your garbage is only picked up once a month? When you think about how much of your life is dependent on these “government representatives”, you will begin to get the idea of how bad this Depression is going to be next year.

This may be the time when we finally have to confront the idiocy of Ronnie Reagan’s lie that “government is the problem”.
All those issues with the mortgage industry, the banks and the home values are just the tip of the iceberg in this crisis. They are tearing a hole in the ship of state, but it is going to take a long dreary time for this Titanic to sink. Each of us are going to have to recognize the depth of our illusions, and come to terms with a new and greatly diminished reality.

I suspect the answer to this conundrum will involve all of us doing a bunch of things in our communities on a volunteer level, simply because they need to be done and there is not money to pay for them. Unfortunately, we are going to have to take time to do these efforts from our own jobs which will only be paying half what they are now.

THE BIG CRASH

Imagine you are driving along the highway, perhaps a bit above the speed limit. It doesn’t seem too big a deal since everyone is also driving the same speed. Suddenly the car to your right veers in front of you.  

You jam on the brake, too late, as you plow into the offending car.

Both cars starts spinning out into the oncoming rush. The car behind you, brakes screeching plows into your side, and just as suddenly, the car behind him adds to the growing pile up.
This is a carambolage. It is a wonderful French word for this kind of a crash; that expresses the idea of a disaster with multiple integrated causes. It is a concept which might be right at home with quantum physics. It is a word I have been using fro a few years to describe the interrelated carnage that we can all see happening around us as multiple crises overlap and accelerate each other. Its just that we don’t have a way of talking about overlapping disasters that allows us to see them with any clarity.

Instead of a careening car crash, most people are experiencing a huge historic “carambolage” of events as a cascade of ”unforeseen” events overwhelm our individual and collective sense of safety and stability. Maybe your personal scenario starts when you loose your job in financial services because of a credit freeze-up started by collapsing housing values. Sitting there fuming in a traffic jam you wonder how you will continue to pay for your gas and heating fuel. The rising prices are made worse by supply disruption connected to Global warming caused hurricane damage on the Gulf coast and possible peak in available oil supplies. As you arrive home, you are greeted by the sight of your son blankly staring at the TV eating a snack plate. This is the same son who has been staring at the TV for 23 years and even though he recently graduated from college he, along with 50% of recent graduates he can’t afford to live anywhere but at home. Your spouse starts screaming that your health insurance is no longer covers basic tests and she has found a lump on her breast. You feel like life is battering you from all angles, and you can’t get a handle on what is really happening.

Kurt Vonnegut has a maxim in his famous book, Cat’s Cradle. “Coincidence is when you weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was happening”. That pretty much explains how most people view the world. We each try to muster the energy to plod along within the demands of our jobs, and our families and perhaps the institutions that encompass those jobs and families. Everything outside that limited universe like politics, economics, environments, population, religion and technology all smack of something coincidental to our lives but not directly important. They are the things that dull wonky people talk about in newspapers or on NPR, but are rarely issues of everyday life. That is, of course, unless they come up and whack us upside the head, which is what is happening right now.

Welcome to the new world where you have to look in every direction to see what is coming next.  Its not just economics.  Its not just the climate.  Its not just energy.  Its not just any one thing, but how they all crash into each other while we aren't looking.

Well folks, its time to start looking, and wondering, and thinking about what you want to come next.  Lets have a conversation about it.