America and the Great Depression

America, long before many of the folks now out there voting were born, went through what was called 'The Great Depression.' I bring this up because I am not sure what, if anything of substance, is now taught in History classes. Given that survey after survey shows that many college graduates cannot find their own state on a map of the US, I am reasonably sure that little is taught about this dreadful page in our History.

In the 1920s. America was booming. It was the Jazz Age, the time of bathtub gin (during Prohibition, a subject I may get to later), rag time music and the attitude was, 'let the good times roll.' Many folks became wealthy, on paper. Stocks were purchased 'on margin,' meaning you put down a small percentage and only paid the balance when you sold, hopefully at a substantial profit. In other words, they made their wealth on credit. Well, for reasons that are still being debated, the market crashed. Why? In part because you just cannot keep borrowing against the future; at some point you have to put up the cash to keep afloat, to expand. There is also, in such a buying scheme, the potential for great abuse, especially when the whole mess is unregulated. Insider trading and market manipulations were the order of the day. Many. me included, believe, with a substantial amount of supporting evidence, that the collapse was deliberate since it gave the really, really wealthy a chance to start buying out smaller companies and eliminating competition.

Now, notice some of the phrases I have used: credit, insider trading. unregulated, business takeovers, eliminating competition, especially credit. During our recent, and still ongoing recession, all of these things reared their ugly little heads. Again, the big boys, the real Powers that Be, tightened the noose on average Americans and they are poised to do just that again, probably sooner rather than later.

Our recession, as miserable as it was a Sunday stroll in the park compared to the Great Depression. Jobs were not scarce, they were just not there. Men (this was in the days when men worked and women tended the home) worked for nearly nothing at anything they could get, a day here and there. Former shop owners sold pencils and apples on street corners. Men fought and even killed over a chance to make a few dollars just to keep a roof over their family's heads and some food, anything, in their stomachs. Soup kitchens and bread lines were found in all cities and the lines were long. Young men, unemployed, often left home rather than burden their families with another mouth to feed and rode the rails, hoboing around the Country on freight trains ( they hopped onboard when no one was looking, if caught they were often beaten, sometimes to death). I was born after these times, but my parents remembered them well and my grandparents would often tell tales of the nightmare.

If you think this cannot happen now, you are both right and wrong. Economically, it is likely. Year after year, statistics show that fewer and fewer people in the Country and around the World (The Great Depression was not just in the US, it was Worldwide) control more and more of the wealth, so, yes, we very probably will see an economic collapse and fairly soon. But, it will not be the same; it will be worse, probably much worse.

Why? Simple, changing demographics. America and Europe, even China, have native populations that are aging. The rest of the World's population is younger and mostly male. There are no jobs, no opportunities in Nations that are already impoverished and a large, okay huge, number of their young people are headed to America and Europe where there are, you guessed it no jobs, at least no good jobs. When they do find work, they are willing to do it for a fraction of what native workers demand. They rarely do good work but big businesses really do not care as long as they get cheap labor. Americans and Europeans then not only have lost jobs and are forced into part time work or low wage jobs, they are forced to buy worse goods and services with the little money they do make. In the meantime, most all small businesses that are surviving admit that they cannot function without substantial credit lines (there is that nasty word 'credit' again). Well, as sure as I am sitting here, one day, the Powers that Be will demand that the dancers pay the fiddler and those credit debts will come due. A phony bubble, in housing, tech or some other vital area will be inflated, then, 'pop,' it will burst. Then, like a bad yeast infection, the Depression  will be back, only now you will have in  this Country and Europe, such cultural diversity that it will be almost impossible for folks to pull together and since all of those young men from 3rd World countries will have the rug yanked out from under them, look for violence. When you see the crap getting near the fan, get out of the big cities; they will be nightmarish. God can only imagine what the 3rd World countries will be like.

Is all of this inevitable? No, nothing is, but it is awfully close.

Note for anyone wanting to get an idea of how bad The Great Depression really was. Read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and try to find a copy (if it is still to found anywhere) of James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These works will give you a gut level feel for the era. Then, go to a site like Good Reads and find a list of nonfiction books on the subject ( type in 'Depression Era Books' There are many listed).