
Great Depression Online
Long Beach, CA
February 17, 2009
Inside This Issue You Will Discover…
*** Is it Now Time to Stockpile Food?
*** La Vida Loca
*** The Law of Must and Shall
*** And More
Is it Now Time to Stockpile Food?
“If you like to eat, you better save some [food],” was the
advice of one Thelma May Beets in a front page story titled
“Depression Lessons Last for a Lifetime,” in Sunday’s Los Angeles
Times. The 91 year-old widow, who’d come of age during the
Great Depression, was doing her weekly inventory of food she stocks
in a chest by her bed.
Sugar, pasta, soup, oats, crackers, peanut butter jars,
ground coffee, creamers…she “has long kept some food in the chest,
but as the latest recession has deepened, she’s made a point of
keeping it full.”
Another Great Depression ‘survivor,’ Lemuel Arthur Lewie
Jr., offered some memories from the 1930’s too. His father was
a dentist. And Arthur remembered how he “began to notice that
things were different when patients stopped paying cash.
‘They’d bring hams, chickens, things like that, for us,”’ he said.
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Arthur also recalled that “sections of the lawn were
replaced with rows of tomato plants, cabbage and collard greens.”
La Vida Loca
After reading the LA Times story, between edging the yard
and cutting the grass, we considered the possibility of having to
replace sections of our lawn with rows of planted vegetables.
Anything’s possible, we concluded.
For when we started this newsletter in fall 2007, we didn’t
know if we were headed for another great depression. But we
considered it a possibility. Like that of getting in a fatal
car accident, sure it’s possible…though not likely.
What we did know, was that we’d just witnessed a decade –
or more – of a world growing increasingly at odds with itself…
…people buying $4 coffees in paper cups.
…college kids driving European luxury cars.
…house prices that doubled, and then doubled again; with
median income earners lining up to buy them like funnel cakes at the
county fair.
…millionaires next door…affluence…granite counter
tops…condos in Vale
…day traders…condo flippers…loan brokers…futures
speculators…gamblers – all getting rich, all living the more
abundant life.
…the profusion of so called high rollers…the celebration of
excess…of living la vida loca.
Yet while everyone appeared to be getting rich, the
national median income hardly budged. In fact, data from the
U.S. Census Bureau tell us that, when adjusting for inflation, the
national median income increased just $2,568 between 1997 and
2007…from $47,665 to $50,233.
The Law of Must and Shall
A 5-percent increase in median income could hardly be the
catalyst for what appeared to be a vast explosion of wealth.
This incongruity of supposed wealth in the appearance of massive
consumption verses individual incomes brought us to the logical
question...
Where was all the money coming from?
By now you know, as well as we know, it was all an illusion
of wealth made possible by an ever expanding bubble of debt.
And by the law of must and shall: What must happen; shall
happen.
In other words, something had to give…and inevitably it
did.
So now that this debt bubble’s burst, and we’re now in the
early days of the Great Depression II, the government desperately
attempting to pump it back up. That’s what these bailouts and
stimulus bills are all about…pumping the system full of more debt.
But as we’ll soon discover, you can’t solve a problem that
was created by too much debt…by piling on more debt. The
futility is painfully obvious.
Yet the blockheads in D.C. go about it like zealot
donkeys…they pile on more and more debt with the pathological
stubbornness of jack and jenny asses.
Sincerely,
M.N. Gordon
Great Depression Online
P.S. The debt problem’s so bad our friend James
Davidson calls it
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