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?

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[–] 265 points 1 year ago (14 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Well if there was one I don't think everyone would submit to the banks or foreign money.

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  • [–] 74 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [+] [S] -18 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    That wasn't a great depression.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Because a depression is going to make banks sympathetic to the poors? Don’t bet on it.

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  • [+] [S] -8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    A real depression wouldn’t spare anyone, everyone gets hit not just the poor.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 114 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    No.
    50% of voting Americans deify a pathological lying pedophile rapist treasonous traitorous insurrectionist diaper-wearing convicted felon.
    So, "No".

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Only 40%.

    Still terrifyingly high.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    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.

    Source

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    77,302,580 people is not half of America. It is 49.8% of the folks that bothered to vote.

    More usefully,

    In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

    source

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  • [–] 75 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    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"

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 64 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    But the community might object. Things are a lot different during a depression, something none of us have experienced.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 49 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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)...

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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.

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    [–] 37 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    blackrock would be there with their own paramilitary buying them up for the pennies

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    That noose only worked because it was a legitimate threat.

    Penny auctions could happen today, but only combined with a similar legitimate threat. That’s the obstacle.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Wanna bet that there would be immediate police action arresting people for "credible threat to people's lives"?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago

    Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I think things would be different during a great depression.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 48 points 1 year ago

    The real question is: would they be allowed to do the same these days?

    Spoiler: they won’t.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Private equity will buy everything with no public sale.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago

    I would imagine they just auction them on online nowadays :/ cutting out any sort of human interaction.

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  • [–] [M] 173 points 1 year ago* (18 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    Wasn't the Great Depression a worldwide thing?

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    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

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    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 :)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Nope. There's no solidarity in America anymore.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Theres nothing like a Great Depression to rally the troops.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    The GD had a somewhat clear culprit

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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).

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  • gold standard policy fuckery

    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.

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  • [+] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I think things would be way different in a great depression.

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] [S] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Because when everyone’s broke, the whole social network changes. People stop pretending the system works for them and start relying on each other instead.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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