Sam Hill
2008-07-29 23:34:52 UTC
Suicide Spreads as One Solution to the Debt Crisis
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com. Posted July 29, 2008.
In a culture where credit rating is the key measure of self-worth, the
increasing response to huge debts is "Just shoot me!"
A few days before Congress passed its Housing Bill, Carlene Balderrama
of Taunton MA found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a
little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH
Mortgage Corporation -- may its name live in infamy -- was to auction
off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband's rifle.
This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in
mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay entitled "Why
No Outrage?" "One might infer from the lack of popular anger," the
famed Wall Street contrarian wrote, "that the credit crisis was God's
fault rather than the doing of the bankers and the rating agencies and
the government's snoozing watchdogs." For contrast, he cites the
spirited response to the depression of the 1890s, when lawyer/agitator
Mary Lease stirred crowds with the message that "We want the accursed
foreclosure system wiped out .... We will stand by our homes and stay
by our firesides by force if necessary"
Grant could have found even more bracing examples of resistance in the
1930s, when farmers and tenants used mob power -- and sometimes
firearms -- to fight foreclosures and evictions. For more on that, I
consulted Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the classic text Poor
People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, who told me that
in the early 30s, a number of cities were so shaken by the resistance
that they declared moratoriums on further evictions. A 1931 riot by
Chicago tenants who had fallen behind on their rent, for example, had
left three dead and three police officers injured.
According to Piven, these actions were often spontaneous. A group of
unemployed men would get word of a scheduled eviction and march
through the streets, gathering crowds as they went. Arriving at the
site of the eviction, they would move the furniture back into the
apartment and stay around to protect the threatened tenants. In one
instance in Detroit, it took 100 cops to evict a single family. Also
in Detroit, Piven said, "two families protected their apartments by
shooting their landlord and were acquitted by a sympathetic jury."
What a difference 80 years makes. When the police and the auctioneers
arrived at Balderrama's house, the family gun had already been used --
on the victim of foreclosure herself. I don't know how "worthy" a
debtor she was -- the family had been through bankruptcies before,
though probably not as a result of Caribbean vacations and closets
full of designer clothes. It was an Adjustable Rate Mortgage that did
them in, and Balderrama, who managed the family's finances, had
apparently been unwilling to tell her husband that their ever-rising
monthly mortgage payments were eating up his earnings as a plumber.
Suicide is becoming an increasingly popular response to debt. James
Scurlock's brilliant documentary, Maxed Out, features the families of
two college students who killed themselves after being overwhelmed by
credit card debt. "All the people we talked to had considered suicide
at least once," Scurlock told a gathering of the National Association
of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys in 2007. According to the Los Angeles
Times, lawyers in the audience backed him up, "describing clients who
showed up at their offices with cyanide, or threatened, 'If you don't
help me, I've got a gun in my car.'"
India may be the trend-setter here, with an estimated 150,000
debt-ridden farmers succumbing to suicide since 1997. With guns in
short supply in rural India, the desperate farmers have taken to
drinking the pesticides meant for their crops.
Dry your eyes, already: Death is an effective remedy for debt, along
with anything else that may be bothering you too. And try to think of
it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: If you can't pay your
debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in addition
-- like an ever-rising number of Americans -- you're no longer needed
at the workplace, then there's no further point to your existence. I'm
not saying that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies
actually want you dead, but in a culture where one's credit rating is
routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal self-worth, the
correct response to insoluble debt is in fact, "Just shoot me!"
The alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and
turn the guns, metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It
wasn't God, or some abstract economic climate change, that caused the
credit crisis. Actual humans -- often masked as financial institutions
-- did that, (and you can find a convenient list of names in Nomi
Prins's article in the current issue of Mother Jones.) Most of them,
except for a tiny few facing trials, are still high rollers, fattening
themselves on the blood and tears of ordinary debtors. I know it's so
1930s, but may I suggest a march on Wall Street?
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New
York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the
New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing
writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com. Posted July 29, 2008.
In a culture where credit rating is the key measure of self-worth, the
increasing response to huge debts is "Just shoot me!"
A few days before Congress passed its Housing Bill, Carlene Balderrama
of Taunton MA found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a
little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH
Mortgage Corporation -- may its name live in infamy -- was to auction
off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband's rifle.
This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in
mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay entitled "Why
No Outrage?" "One might infer from the lack of popular anger," the
famed Wall Street contrarian wrote, "that the credit crisis was God's
fault rather than the doing of the bankers and the rating agencies and
the government's snoozing watchdogs." For contrast, he cites the
spirited response to the depression of the 1890s, when lawyer/agitator
Mary Lease stirred crowds with the message that "We want the accursed
foreclosure system wiped out .... We will stand by our homes and stay
by our firesides by force if necessary"
Grant could have found even more bracing examples of resistance in the
1930s, when farmers and tenants used mob power -- and sometimes
firearms -- to fight foreclosures and evictions. For more on that, I
consulted Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the classic text Poor
People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, who told me that
in the early 30s, a number of cities were so shaken by the resistance
that they declared moratoriums on further evictions. A 1931 riot by
Chicago tenants who had fallen behind on their rent, for example, had
left three dead and three police officers injured.
According to Piven, these actions were often spontaneous. A group of
unemployed men would get word of a scheduled eviction and march
through the streets, gathering crowds as they went. Arriving at the
site of the eviction, they would move the furniture back into the
apartment and stay around to protect the threatened tenants. In one
instance in Detroit, it took 100 cops to evict a single family. Also
in Detroit, Piven said, "two families protected their apartments by
shooting their landlord and were acquitted by a sympathetic jury."
What a difference 80 years makes. When the police and the auctioneers
arrived at Balderrama's house, the family gun had already been used --
on the victim of foreclosure herself. I don't know how "worthy" a
debtor she was -- the family had been through bankruptcies before,
though probably not as a result of Caribbean vacations and closets
full of designer clothes. It was an Adjustable Rate Mortgage that did
them in, and Balderrama, who managed the family's finances, had
apparently been unwilling to tell her husband that their ever-rising
monthly mortgage payments were eating up his earnings as a plumber.
Suicide is becoming an increasingly popular response to debt. James
Scurlock's brilliant documentary, Maxed Out, features the families of
two college students who killed themselves after being overwhelmed by
credit card debt. "All the people we talked to had considered suicide
at least once," Scurlock told a gathering of the National Association
of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys in 2007. According to the Los Angeles
Times, lawyers in the audience backed him up, "describing clients who
showed up at their offices with cyanide, or threatened, 'If you don't
help me, I've got a gun in my car.'"
India may be the trend-setter here, with an estimated 150,000
debt-ridden farmers succumbing to suicide since 1997. With guns in
short supply in rural India, the desperate farmers have taken to
drinking the pesticides meant for their crops.
Dry your eyes, already: Death is an effective remedy for debt, along
with anything else that may be bothering you too. And try to think of
it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: If you can't pay your
debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in addition
-- like an ever-rising number of Americans -- you're no longer needed
at the workplace, then there's no further point to your existence. I'm
not saying that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies
actually want you dead, but in a culture where one's credit rating is
routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal self-worth, the
correct response to insoluble debt is in fact, "Just shoot me!"
The alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and
turn the guns, metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It
wasn't God, or some abstract economic climate change, that caused the
credit crisis. Actual humans -- often masked as financial institutions
-- did that, (and you can find a convenient list of names in Nomi
Prins's article in the current issue of Mother Jones.) Most of them,
except for a tiny few facing trials, are still high rollers, fattening
themselves on the blood and tears of ordinary debtors. I know it's so
1930s, but may I suggest a march on Wall Street?
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New
York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the
New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing
writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.