Those who remember the Depression fear its return

[babylonsister]

Those who remember the Depression fear its return

Dow suffers record point loss


By Amy Wilson | Lexington Herald-Leader


The worldwide economic depression that began on Oct. 29,1929, is still everywhere if we'd look. Our infrastructure got built, our population shifted forever, our national character was forged.

But for some reason, the lessons have been lost.

Geneva Spickard draws a long line to represent a bunch of celery and divides it into thirds. She laments that her daughter only uses the middle third.

"You can put the the leafy part into your salads and the stem into your soups. This is such a wasteful generation."

The nation's lawmakers on Monday rejected a $700 billion bailout that the Bush administration argued was needed to save the economy from ruin. Ruin is not a relative term.

For those who lived it, the Great Depression has been seared into them like a scar or worn like a talisman they can touch any time they want.

We visited a few who lived it. They remembered.

At the depths of the Depression, over one-quarter of the American workforce was out of work.

A certain teenage boy faction of Geneva Spickard's family were, she says, "natural born thieves." They were the ones who took clothes off the line, cooling pies out of windows and, once, a whole box of rock candy off a loading dock.

The loading dock was just off Rat Road near Sistruck's storage house, near where Rupp Arena is now. It was the '30s and Wallace, Willoughby and Walter, the natural born thieves, meant no real harm.

As for herself, Geneva Spickard would "bum but never steal," regularly going to Sistruck's to find the discarded kale and cabbage leaves that her family used to make a vegetable soup. Sometimes rotted apples could be salvaged. "A half an apple is better than none."

She would regularly walk to the dump to find discarded office paper to use in school.

more...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/53205.html

[Middle finga]

1. I wonder how many of them that remembers the GD voted for Bush

and the republicans?

[MercutioATC]

2. You know what they say about statistics...

"In percentage terms, it was only the 17th-biggest decline for the Dow, far less severe than the 20-plus-percent drops seen on Black Monday in 1987 and before the Great Depression."

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080929/wall_street.html


Today was #17 on the hit list in real terms....not #1.

[babylonsister]

7. That doesn't mean the fear is lessened, especially with all the

newz outlets available nowadays. I saw the talking heads freaking out today.

[MercutioATC]

10. The media feeds on fear. You know that.

It doesn't change the actual situation. Today wasn't a "crash", it was just a bad day. We'll have more of them before we start having god days on a regular basis again, but the market WILL recover....and the degree of health of that recovery will be proportional to the degree that we deny it artificial means of support.

In the words of the Encyclopedia Galactica, "Don't Panic"

[babylonsister]

12. "I" get it, but I don't remember the depression.

Maybe there's not enough good info out there for people to understand. The doom and gloom on the m$m today was palpable.

[MercutioATC]

13. Yeah, this laptop has trouble with quick doublestrokes... "good"

I know that the media feeds on this stuff and that it will try to sell it to as many people as it can. I can't control that.

What I CAN do is help people find the real facts that may alleviate some of their concerns. That's probably all that most of us can do.

The FACT is that the drop today was only #17. The more people hear that, the more they'll stop freaking out.

[AnOhioan]

3. Another post here on DU....

showed that in percentage terms.....today's loss was not even close to the number 1 slot.

[pnwmom]

8. That's partly because we CLOSED the market for an hour -- something we didn't

historically do.

There literally wasn't time for it to drop as far is it could have -- that was the point for closing the market.

And it's also because the traders probably haven't completely given up hope that Congress will pass it soon.

[MercutioATC]

11. When did we close the market for an hour??

Not today.

[babylonsister]

14. I never heard that it closed; it was tanking wildly and then recovered enough

so we could start breathing again.

[pnwmom]

4. Thanks for the reminder. As I said yesterday, Obama wouldn't be

supporting a plan that will hamstring him during his Administration, if he hadn't given it a great deal of thought and wasn't convinced it was the best we could do at this point.

Once he's elected, with a Democratic House and Senate, he can work to amend the bill.

[ixion]

5. no one wants to go through a depression... but perhaps we should have thought about that

in the 80's, when this really started to snowball out of control. There were people, like myself, who claimed that the ponzi scheme could not last forever. Well, now the bill has come due. We can spend another trillion and put it off for awhile, ultimately making it worse, or we can learn from our mistakes, take our lumps, pay the bill and move forward, hopefully with more intelligence than the last time.

If history serves, though, we'll just keep doing this again and again. It's been going on this way for thousands of years, and we never seem to catch on, collectively speaking.

[fla nocount]

17. Delete-Dupe

[fla nocount]

18. It's better to fall from 10 ft. than 20 ft. anyday.

The difference is exponential...like tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. It's like taking off a band-aid, quick, down and dirty. It hurts less and heals quicker.

So they're going to repossess the Hummer that you can't afford to fuel. Payment, insurance, fuel=12-14 hundred dollars a month, you're rich already. Credit history, just a piece of paper like the Constitution. They're trying to steal a trillion dollars from us to loan back us. Our credit is going to be as fresh as a baby's ass belonging to a mother who loves her baby's ass.

The nebulous "they" have made a deal that they cannot make good on without screwing us again. Stand up from your bent position, slap your knees together and say, "No Moar, it hurts and it makes me feel dirty."

[postmanisu]

6. 4 more years and jobs overseas.

[roamer65]

9. The leafy part of celery is good.

I eat it when people haven't carved it off.

I didn't go through the Great Depression, but I went through the next nastiest downturn, the 1979-82 double dip recession. Unemployment was around 17% where I grew up during that time.

We couldn't afford heating oil, so I had to chop wood to heat the house. I remember complaining about it to my dad and he said, "You like heat, don't you??" Austerity builds character, IMHO. As the saying goes, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger".

[IndyOp]

15. What is the percentage drop? Overall volume in 2008 is very different from 2001 and earlier. (n/t)

[babylonsister]

16. I read 7% for us. Last I checked, Japan had dropped 5%, AUS-4%.

And their markets just recently opened.

[erinlough]

19. Both my parents grew up in the Depression era

I am glad they are not here to see this situation, it would have terrified them thinking they might have to go through it all again.

Both my parents were 9 when the stock market crashed. My Father was just in the country for one year and his mother had just died in childbirth. He recalled his father working at a foundry about 2 miles away from their home. There were 6 children including a new born motherless baby. Because his father was unable to take care of the newborn he gave it to his brother and his wife, for good. The five children left ranged in age from 11 to 2. My dad often said that if it weren't for the kind neighbor ladies, who would make large kettles of potato soup for the kids and feed them once a day, they would have starved.

My mother's family had a bakery in a small town in Michigan. My grandfather, the baker, kept it open as long as he could. Everyone in town had paid him with IOU's and he kept baking until the sugar and flour were gone and then he closed the doors for good. They moved to my grandmother's aunt's farm and tried their hand at that but in despair my Grandfather fell into drinking. My mother grew up in abject poverty. The kids were sent home from school because of inadequate clothing and they had no paper or pencils to do their work. None of the seven children in the family finished school except for my mother.

Out of this my parents decided they would never let their children feel the despair of poverty. They used everything they had; brains, brawn, long days of hard work, to make a secure home for their family. They made sure we all finished school and even paid for their youngest, me, to go to college. When they died they had saved a considerable, but not outrageous, amount of money and had a 20 acre farm free and clear.

The only argument my father and I had in his last year was that he got it in his head to travel 10 miles to fill up his car with gas because he could save 4 cents per gallon. To do this he had to travel on a busy road, which was dangerous to anyone he was on the road with. He watched for sales and ask us to shop at Goodwill when he needed new clothes because he had lost so much weight due to his illness. He said there was no need wasting good money on new clothes since he wouldn't be around that long.

We can not even imagine what an impact that crash must have had on the people who lived through it. I hope our children do not have to have that impact on their lives.

[Snarkoleptic]

20. kick for later read