With foreclosures and overwhelming personal debt ravaging American society, I was surprised that I had not come across more about rising suicide rates. Apparently this is because few people want to know about it. "The Rising Body Count on Main Street: The Human Fallout from the Financial Crisis" By Nick Turse examines some of these stories that peek out behind the better-covered macro view.

I've personally experienced the depths of desperation evoked by rising debt. It is an ugly, dead-end feeling, hopeless and bottomless. It's not like I'm an extravagant spender. I'm childless and my vices are few: used books (not rare books), magazines, and used CDs (yes, I still buy music CDs; is my age showing?) I don't buy gadgets or console/computer games. My cell phone is 7 years old. So here are some excerpts from the article.

In February, when a sheriff's deputy went to serve an eviction notice on a home owner in Greeley, Colorado, he found the man had slashed his wrists and was lying in a pool of blood. Rushed to a nearby hospital, the man survived, while the Sheriff's office tried to downplay economic reasons for the incident, saying, according to the Denver Post, that "it wasn't linking the suicide attempt to the eviction because the man had known for a week that he was to be kicked out."

In March, Ocala, Florida resident Roland Gore killed his dog and his wife, set fire to his home which was in foreclosure, and then killed himself.

In April, Robert McGuinness, a 24-year-old process server, arrived at the Marion County, Florida doorstep of Frank W. Conrad. According to an article in the local Star Banner, the 82-year-old Conrad was reportedly "cordial" at first. When McGuinness produced the foreclosure notice, however, Conrad got angry and left the room. He returned with a .38 caliber pistol and announced, "You have two seconds to get off my property or you will go to the hospital." Marion County sheriff's deputies later arrested Conrad....

Pinellas Park, Florida resident Dallas Dwayne Carter was a 44-year-old disabled, single dad who lost his job, fell into debt, and was faced with eviction. "He always talked about needing help -- financially and help with the kids," neighbor Kevin Luster told the St. Petersburg Times. On July 19th, Carter apparently called the police to say he was armed and disturbed. When they arrived, Carter fired his pistol and rifle inside the apartment, before emerging and pointing his weapons at the officers on the scene. Police say they ordered him to drop them. When he didn't, they killed him in a 10-round fusillade.

On July 23d, about 90 minutes before her foreclosed Taunton, Massachusetts home was scheduled to be sold at auction, Carlene Balderrama faxed a letter to her mortgage company, letting them know that "by the time they foreclosed on the house today she'd be dead." She continued, "I hope you're more compassionate with my husband and son than you were with me." After that, she took a high-powered rifle and, according to the Boston Globe, shot herself. In an interview with the Associated Press, Balderrama's husband John said, "I had no clue." His wife handled the finances and had been intercepting letters from the mortgage company for months. "She put in her suicide note that it got overwhelming for her," he said. In the letter, she wrote, "take the [life] insurance money and pay for the house."

Labels: crisis, debt, finances

I continue to be amazed at the limitations of US politics and the narrowness of acceptable solutions by politicians. To use an entirely overworn metaphor, our political options remain in a box controlled tightly by the media and "elites".* Solutions "outside the box" are usually dismissed without serious consideration and usually without ever even seeing the media light of day.

So it is with our current economic crisis. Instead of acknowledging the flaws in our policies that led to our current problems and acting to correct them, we are left with applying emergency fixes in a crisis. Thus we have bailouts of huge private economic linchpins allowed to grow unregulated until our economy is dependent on them. De-regulation of areas of financial markets turns into the sub-prime fiasco.

Yet we hear from many pundits that it is those people who got these sub-prime loans who are to blame for poor fiscal responsibility, for getting loans they knew they couldn't pay back. What's lacking in this analysis is the economic optimism encouraged by American society since WWII. Until relatively recently, Americans were used to thinking of themselves as continually moving up the economic ladder. Hard work leads to advancement and increased pay.

This hasn't been true for a long time but the attitude remains a core value and assumption for many American workers. Never mind that wage stagnation has been the rule for many years, the future's so bright I need sunglasses, right?

So what solutions do we hear proposed? Crisis band-aids and studiously forgetting the role money managers might have played in creating the problem. Top management keeps its billions of dollars in pay and bonuses despite their evident culpability while homeowners lose homes for want of a few thousand dollars.

We live in a kind of pyramid scheme called Capitalism. Where do those wealthy top 1% get their money? Conventional thought is that it comes from their bold investment of money with the risk of loss on a large scale. In other words, what most people do all the time when they make large purchases like an automobile or a home. The difference is that when those at the bottom of the pyramid make a poor decision, it is personally catastrophic.

One pundit recently said when some people end up defaulting on mortgages, they just put the keys in the mailbox and walk away, leaving the bank with the problem. I find that a fascinating perspective. I have to wonder how many people in today's society can actually just "walk away" from a bad debt. Unless they somehow have a new identity waiting, debt tends to follow someone around for a long time in one form or another. People don't just get disapproving looks for bad debt; they get phone harassment, revoking of credit lines, raising of credit card interest rates, and much more.

I seem to have strayed far from my initial subject but perhaps not too far. Our politicians seem bound by political expediency and fear of upsetting the big ticket contributors to their campaign coffers. So don't say the problem is de-regulation and overdependence on complex shuffling of paper money. The problem is the borrowers because the borrowers have all the power in the situation, right?

When the house of cards comes down, we are left wondering why our politicians didn't see it coming years ago. In a way, they did. Their solution was to focus on the "War on Terror". Iraq. Afghanistan. Because we still live with the post-WWII prosperity idea that wars benefit our economy. And wars did help our economy when we produced real goods. In a services economy like we've got today, not so much.

Wars do distract the population, though, keeping them from demanding too much or the right things.

*I use "elites" here to mean practically all national politicians and 98% of the "authorities" seen on any TV news or commentary.

Labels: debt, economy, elites, jobs, politics, war