As someone who has spent more years than he cares to remember trying to figure out the mysteries of the markets, I freely acknowledge that I don't only focus on hard data like statistics and trendlines. I also think about the human element.
That is because, like most of those who have actually bought and sold securities using real money understand (and unlike many of the TV pundits or academic "experts" who think they know how markets work), there's more to trading and investing than the numbers alone.
The same goes for economic data. Statistics like GDP and industrial production aren't just cannon fodder for Wall Street paper-pushing and house-of-card building.
Indeed, in one of yesterday's posts, "Behind the (Bad) Numbers," I think I made that point pretty clear when I noted a New York Times article exploring "a few of the real world implications of what is now a fast-expanding array of negative economic indicators."
As it happens, TomDispatch.com's Nick Turse, in a commentary entitled "Tomgram: Nick Turse, Going to Extremes in America," offers up another, more sobering look at what might be described as the social fallout from the Great Unraveling.
Back in the Great Depression years of the 1930s, unemployed writers, like unemployed steelworkers, were in need of jobs, and so the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, which put all sorts of Americans back to work, did so for writers as well -- 6,500 of them in the Federal Writers' Project at approximately $20 a week. Among other things, the FWP's writers produced a series of classic guide books to American cities and states, still enjoyable to read today. (Richard Wright and John Cheever were among the crew who, for example, did The WPA Guide to New York City.) FWP workers also gathered more than 10,000 first-person oral histories of ordinary -- yet extraordinary -- Americans, relatively few of which were ever published.
Almost 30 years ago, the writer Ann Banks collected 80 of these into a deeply moving memory piece of a book entitled First-Person America. When you read through it, one thing likely to strike you about its narratives from our last spectacular economic meltdown was how many of the speakers didn't distinguish between the 1920s and the 1930s, between, that is, "the roaring twenties" of the "Jazz Age" and the Great Depression era. For lots of them, it was all tough times. As Banks wrote in her introduction: "For most of the people in this book, the Depression was not the singular event it appears in retrospect. It was one more hardship in lives made difficult by immigration, world war, and work in low-paying industries before the regulation of wages and hours. Though they spoke of living through bad times, those interviewed by the Federal Writers seldom mentioned the Depression itself."
This came to my mind recently as I read in the Washington Post about a category of crime I hadn't known existed: desperate people in a money crunch, often behind on loan payments to car dealerships, who torch their cars and then try to collect insurance on them (usually by claiming they were stolen). Washington police estimate hundreds of such cases in their region just in the past two years. Though the numbers of such attempted frauds may now be on the rise, it's a phenomenon that hardly began with the collapse of Bear Stearns, or the tanking of the stock market, or the global credit crunch that followed. I was left wondering how many people this time around won't make much of a distinction between the blow-out 1990s, the Bush years in which the President, in response to the 9/11 attacks, asked Americans to head for Disney World and shop till they drop, and the disaster that is now almost certain to follow and haunt us all.
As more people today are behind on car loans than ever before, we undoubtedly can brace ourselves for a rise in car burnings in the years ahead, just as we are already seeing a rise in all kinds of extreme acts, including suicides, as ever more Americans have their homes foreclosed and face the reality of eviction. As Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, points out, if you search carefully through local news reports nationwide, you can already see where we're heading, and it isn't pretty. Not one bit. Tom
The Rising Body Count on Main Street
The Human Fallout from the Financial Crisis
By Nick TurseOn October 4, 2008, in the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles, Karthik Rajaram, beset by financial troubles, shot his wife, mother-in-law, and three sons before turning the gun on himself. In one of his two suicide notes, Rajaram wrote that he was "broke," having incurred massive financial losses in the economic meltdown. "I understand he was unemployed, his dealings in the stock market had taken a disastrous turn for the worse," said Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Michel R. Moore.
The fallout from the current subprime mortgage debacle and the economic one that followed has thrown lives into turmoil across the country. In recent days, the Associated Press, ABC News, and others have begun to address the burgeoning body count, especially suicides attributed to the financial crisis. (Note that, months ago, Barbara Ehrenreich raised the issue in the Nation.)
Suicide is, however, just one type of extreme act for which the financial meltdown has seemingly been the catalyst. Since the beginning of the year, stories of resistance to eviction, armed self-defense, canicide, arson, self-inflicted injury, murder, as well as suicide, especially in response to the foreclosure crisis, have bubbled up into the local news, although most reports have gone unnoticed nationally -- as has any pattern to these events.
While it's impossible to know what factors, including deeply personal ones, contribute to such extreme acts, violent or otherwise, many do seem undeniably linked to the present crisis. This is hardly surprising. Rates of stress, depression, and suicide invariably climb in times of economic turmoil. As Kathleen Hall, founder and CEO of the Stress Institute in Atlanta, told USA Today's Stephanie Armour earlier this year, "Suicides are very much tied to the economy."
With predictions of a long and deep recession now commonplace, it's not too soon to begin looking for these patterns among the human tragedies already sprouting amid the financial ruins. Troubling trends are to be expected in the years ahead, especially as hundreds of thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, their families often already under enormous stress, are coming home to scenarios of joblessness and, in some cases, homelessness. Consider this, then, an attempt to look for early anecdotal signs of the fallout from hard times, the results, in this case, of a review of local press reports from across the nation, some tiny but potentially indicative of larger American tragedies, and all suggesting a pattern that is likely to grow more pronounced.
Extreme Evictions
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.
On June 3rd, agents of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) set out to inform New Orleans resident Eric Minshew that he would be evicted from his "Katrina" trailer. After Minshew threatened them, the FEMA employees called the police. When they arrived, Minshew allegedly threatened them as well and "locked himself in his partially-gutted home, adjacent to his trailer." A SWAT team was called in and tear-gassed the man. Interviewed by the Times-Picayune, local resident Tiffany Flores said, "Some SWAT members told my husband they had never seen anyone withstand that much tear gas." The standoff went on for hours before "an assault team of tactical officers" invaded the home. Though Minshew opened fire, they eventually cornered him on the upper floor. When -- they claimed -- he refused to drop his weapon, they gunned him down.
That same day, in Multnomah County, Oregon, sheriff's deputies served an eviction notice on a desperate tenant. According to Deputy Travis Gullberg, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Public Information Officer, the evictee promptly pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it at his head before being disarmed by the deputies.
Hard Times
Recently, according to the Los Angeles Times, Rich Paul, a vice president at ValueOptions Inc., which handles mental health referrals, said that over the last year stress-related calls arising from foreclosures or financial hardship had gone up 200% in California. Similarly, Dr. Mason Turner, chief of psychiatry at Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco Medical Center, reported "a fourfold increase in psychiatric admissions at his hospital during August, with roughly 60% of patients saying financial stress contributed to their problems."
Of course, many victims of the linked economic crises never receive treatment. In July, Sacramento County Sheriff's Deputy Mark Habecker told the Sacramento Bee that twice this year "homeowners about to be evicted have committed suicide as he approached to do a lockout." In another case, he said, "a fellow Sacramento deputy found a note in the home that told him where to find the foreclosed homeowner's body." The Bee reported that such cases "received no publicity when they happened," which raises the question of just how many similar suicides have gone unreported nationwide.
In July, when police delivered an eviction notice at the Middleburg, Florida home of George and Bonnie Mangum, the couple barricaded themselves inside. Eventually, George Mangum was talked into surrendering and was arrested. "He did the only thing he knew to do, protect his family, all he did was sit on the other side of the door and say I have a gun, I have a gun and that's why he's going to jail because he threatened the police," said Bonnie. The couple's daughter Robin added, "This is my home, this is all our home and I don't think it's right. My dad was a Green Beret, he's sick, how are you going to kick him out?"
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."
The day after Balderrama took her life, 50 miles away in Worcester, Massachusetts, a 64-year-old man, who had already been evicted, barricaded himself inside his former home. Police were called to the scene to find him reportedly prepared to ignite four propane tanks. "His intention was to burn the house down with him in it," Sgt. Christopher J. George told the Telegram & Gazette. With the man becoming "even more despondent" as "a moving van arrived on the street," police stormed the house to find him "holding a foot-long knife to his own chest" as a piece of paper burned near the propane. The man was disarmed and the fire extinguished.
That very same day, in Visalia, California, a Tulare County sheriff's deputy tried to serve an eviction notice to Melvin Nicks, 50. Nicks responded by stabbing the deputy with a knife and barricading himself in the house for several hours. He later surrendered.
No Way Out
Bay City, Michigan residents David and Sharron Hetzel, both 56, "lost their home to foreclosure and filed for bankruptcy protection. But they did not follow through with the Chapter 13 proceedings." On August 1st, say police reports, David Hetzel mailed a letter of apology to his family members. Later that night, according to the local police, he attacked his sleeping wife, striking her in the head with a golf club and repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife. After that, he began setting fires throughout the house before crawling into bed beside his wife and killing himself with "a single, fatal wound to his torso."
On August 12th, sheriff's deputies arrived at the Saddlebrook, New Jersey home of 88-year-old Beatrice Brennan, another victim of the mortgage crisis, who had refinanced her home and fallen behind on payments. Refusing to stand idly by while his mother was put out on the street, her 60-year-old son John pulled a .22 caliber handgun on the lawmen. That sent the movers, waiting for a court-imposed 10 a.m. deadline, scurrying for their van. Brennan was able to delay the eviction briefly before a SWAT team arrested him and his mother lost her home. "I'm heartbroken over this," Vincent Carabello, a longtime neighbor, told the local paper, the Record. "How could this happen?"
Roseville, Minnesota resident Sylvia Sieferman was under a great deal of stress and beset by financial difficulties. She worried about how she would care for her two 11-year-old daughters. On August 21st, according to police reports, Sieferman "repeatedly stabbed the girls and herself." "She reached her limit," her friend Carrie Micko told the Star Tribune. "She couldn't cope anymore… she felt that her daughters were suffering because she was failing to provide for them." As Micko further explained, "After a series of financial mishaps, she just couldn't see her way through. She was under extreme financial, emotional and spiritual distress and didn't want to fail them."
By Any Means Necessary
The Boston Globe reported that, on September 5th, "[f]our protesters trying to prevent the eviction of a Roxbury woman from her home were arrested… after they chained themselves to the steps of her back porch." As 40 protesters chanted in the street, officials from Bank of America ordered Paula Taylor out of her house. "This is our eighth blockade and the first time there have been arrests," said Soledad Lawrence, an organizer with City Life, a non-profit organization seeking to halt the large numbers of foreclosures and evictions in Boston neighborhoods. "They can be more aggressive and we'll be more aggressive," she added.
On September 25th, as politicians in Washington tried to hash out a massive bailout package for financial institutions, six Boston police officers confronted about 40 City Life activists in front of the home of Ana Esquivel, a public school employee, and her husband Raul, a construction worker, both in their fifties. The Globe reported that four protesters were arrested as police shoved their way through in order to allow a locksmith into the house to bar the Esquivels from their home. "We've been destroyed by the bank," Ana Esquivel said, sobbing. "The bank is too big for us." While the Esquivel blockade failed, Steven Meacham, a City Life organizer, told a Globe reporter that "the protests have helped to stop about nine evictions. In the successful blockades, the homeowners were given additional time by their mortgage holders to negotiate alternatives to foreclosure."
Two days earlier, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies came to the Monrovia home of 53-year-old Joanne Carter and her 67-year-old husband John to serve an eviction notice. Joanne Carter refused to accept it. According to "Monrovia spokesman" Dick Singer, as reported in the Pasadena Star-News, she "told deputies she had guns in the house and showed them a shotgun." The next day, Monrovia police officers showed up at the home after being informed that the woman "may have made threats to a workers compensation agency." Police Lieutenant Michael Lee said that Carter told them if they "tried to come in, she would defend her house at any means necessary." She and her husband then reportedly barricaded themselves inside, after which a shotgun was fired. Police from other local departments were called in. Following an hours-long standoff, the Carters surrendered and were arrested.
That same day, in northern California, Cliff Kendall, Petaluma's chief building official, shot himself with a rifle. A week earlier, Kendall had learned that he was being laid off. "He was afraid we'd lose our home, and we probably will because I can't afford to keep it," his wife Patricia, who is on disability with a back injury, told the Press Democrat. "He was extremely upset about it and hurt."
On October 3rd, the day before Karthik Rajaram's mass murder/suicide in Los Angeles, 90-year-old Addie Polk was driven to extremes by the financial crisis. With sheriff's deputies at the door, Polk evidently took the only measure she felt was left to her to avoid eviction from her foreclosed home. She tried to kill herself. Her neighbor Robert Dillon, hearing loud noises from her home, used a ladder to enter the second floor window. He found Polk lying on her bed. "Then she kind of moved toward me a little and I saw that blood, and I said, 'Oh, no. Miss Polk musta done shot herself.'" While she was in the hospital recovering from two self-inflicted gunshot wounds, Fannie Mae spokesman Brian Faith announced the mortgage association had decided to forgive her outstanding debt and give her the house "outright."
On October 6th, in Sevier County, Tennessee, sheriff's deputies, with police in tow, arrived to evict Jimmy and Pamela Ross from their home. They heard a shot and entered the home to find 57-year-old Pamela dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. Neighbor Ruth Blakey told WVLT-TV, "I know she really hated to leave that house. She did not want to leave that house."
Wanda Dunn told neighbors she would rather die than leave her home. On October 13th, the day she was to be evicted, the 53-year-old Pasadena, California native apparently set fire to the home "where her family had lived for generations" before shooting herself in the head. "We knew it was going to happen," neighbor Steve Brooks told the Los Angeles Times. "It was nobody's fault; it was everybody's fault."
Outsourcing Suicide
In September, readers at Slate's "Explainer" column asked the following question: If the financial crisis was so dire, "how come we aren't hearing about executives jumping out of windows?" Writer Nina Shen Rastogi dutifully answered:
"Because the current situation hasn't had nearly as devastating an effect on people's personal finances. The Great Crash of 1929 -- and, to a lesser extent, the crash of 1987 -- did lead some people to commit suicide. But in nearly all of those cases, the deceased had suffered a major loss when the market collapsed. Now, due in large part to those earlier experiences, investors tend to keep their portfolios far more diversified, so as to avoid having their entire fortunes wiped out when stocks take a downturn."
Perhaps this is true. So far, at least, Wall Street's suicides seem to have been outsourced to places that its executives have probably never heard of. There, on the proverbial main streets of America, the Street's financial meltdown is beginning to be measured not only in dollars and cents, but in blood.
Right now, there are no real counts of the many extreme acts born of the financial crisis, but assuredly other murders, suicides, self-inflicted injuries, acts of arson and of armed self-defense have simply gone unnoticed outside of economically hard-hit neighborhoods in cities and small towns across America. With no end in sight for either the foreclosures or the economic turmoil, Americans may have to brace themselves for many more casualties on the home front. Unless extreme economic steps, like mortgage- and debt-forgiveness, are implemented, the number of extreme acts and the ultimate body count may be far more extreme than anyone yet wants to contemplate.
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde Diplomatique (German edition), Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly at Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website is Nick Turse.com.
While the article is largely anecdotal, I think it provides a compelling overview of what today's numbers really mean.
As someone who decided not to play "American Dream: 2000s edition", I have a slightly different perspective.
1. People don't kill themselves because they are suffering financial difficulties. They kill themselves because they have failed at what they deem to be the most important thing in their lives.
2. Somewhere along the way, the cabal of big government and big corporations has convinced Americans that there is nothing more important than working every waking minute, going in debt beyond all reason and hoping it all works out so that we can pay more taxes and buy more stuff we really don't need.
3. In the process, we destroy our families, abort our next generation, push our friendships aside, put our school aged children on Ritalin, all so that we can work more without interruption.
Hopefully more people will figure out what I figured out a long time ago. It simply isn't worth it. When you relegate finance to its rightful place in your life, that is, behind God, family, friends and the pursuit of happiness, you wouldn't dream of killing the people you hold dear for financial reason.
That is the real problem, you know, the one nobody will talk about.
Posted by: Fudd | October 20, 2008 at 06:26 PM
Financial difficulties are the most severe source of distress.
In the beginning when the numbers are still small suicide
murder, burning houses etc... will occur. When it reaches
the proportions of a National calamity people band together,
that's the stuff of revolutions or civil unrest on a massive scale.
It has nothing to do with a belief in God but everithing to do with
the economic conditions.
Posted by: roger | October 20, 2008 at 07:23 PM
Just two weeks ago my vet commented that she was seeing a surprising number of people in her office who mentioned that someone they knew - a neighbor, a family member, a coworker - had commited suicide. We have created a society that is untenable for a variety of reasons. Most people I know are just plain tired, scared, and close to feeling defeated. It's dark times, indeed.
Posted by: peggy | October 20, 2008 at 10:33 PM
I'm seeling my house in New Jersey; moving to rural South Carolina; muying a used trailer and constrcution equipment (at auction); learning to can; growing my own food; buying a small wind turbine & some solar cells (to suppliment power) and I'm going to READ while I'm Under/Un-Employed over the next several years.
Thank you for all the usefull informantion here. Michael. I've passed along what I have learned to others.
We will just have to re-evaluate what is REALLY IMPORTANT in Life.
Posted by: Doug W | October 21, 2008 at 09:26 AM
Sobering post. Funny how people are so unprepared to scale down their lives to fit their means, there are worse things in life then being broke. I spent 15 years of my young adult life living week to week and hoping I could stretch my grocery money out, all during this lovely credit bubble while people were living high on the hog.
I put myself thru college during this period because I knew I had to be proactive.....I think this all boils down to attitudes and belief systems. I have always been optimistic and believed with enouph hard work and smart decisions I would make it and I still do.
Posted by: David | October 21, 2008 at 09:58 AM
I was just wondering if anyone believes in destiny?
www.GodYesOrNo.com
Posted by: Prophecy | October 21, 2008 at 12:59 PM
I think Wanda Dunn's story is the most individually tragic (those that decided to kill their family members upset me in greater, different ways). If her family lived in the house for generations, the house should have been paid off long ago. This implies that she found the need to take out a home equity loan and was unable to pay it back. Imagine having the security of a paid off house, only to lose it a few years later. She had (I'm guessing) the guilt of not only failing herself, but failing multiple generations of her family. It must be extremely difficult to regain perspective in a situation like that.
I remember learning about mortgages, credit, and leverage when I was in junior high. My mother used them to motivate a math lesson in percentages and compound interest (yeah, life's exciting when your mother is a math teacher). The lesson evolved into a discussion of margin and risk, and even touched on topics like the 1929 stock market crash and the growing national debt--which, compared to now, was ridiculously small. I learned how to evaluate the risk/reward of leverage, but also gained an emotional barrier to acquiring debt. I took that lesson for granted until around 2005 when I saw the local housing market hit unsustainable levels. I personally knew many people who could not afford their ARMs if they ever reset. Fortunately, my fear of debt beat out the fear of "getting priced out of the market" that so many people caved to. Now I feel incredible pity for so many people who could have avoided their dire situations if they had simply learned a junior high math lesson.
Posted by: Nutjob | October 21, 2008 at 02:41 PM
Rather than blame these people's tragedies on abortion and a lack of following God, why not look at the damage done to this country by the coalition of evangelical Christians and right wing demagogues who have conspired to take over the government and create a conformist society that financially benefits the most wealthy at the expense of everyone else. There's absolutely nothing Godly about it.
Posted by: anonymous | October 21, 2008 at 03:27 PM
"Outsourcing suicide"
Catchy phrase. You should develop this.
Posted by: Dan | October 21, 2008 at 04:30 PM
Outsourcing suicide or suicide by cop, either way it's nothing new. These days though it seems to be the terminal condition of affluenza. If you wanna see some "extreme evictions" you should check out reports from the Darfur region of Somalia.
Posted by: whiskey | October 21, 2008 at 07:46 PM
Oops, Darfur region of _Sudan_.
Posted by: whiskey | October 21, 2008 at 07:52 PM
I was struck by the mention in this article of people's recollections of life in the 1920's being indistinguishable from life during the 1930's. I was taught in history class in high school that rural America was suffering from an economic depression several years before the market crash of 1929. Indeed, while doing some family history research, a graveyard caretaker pointed out to me that I would not find very many gravestones from the 1920's in that particular cemetery because people could not afford them back then.
Financial system crashes do not just "happen" overnight. Like the farmers in the 1920's, a lot of people were suffering in this decade well before Lehman Brothers et al crashed and burned. I don't know how they managed to do this, but until fairly recently, people were able to pull out all sorts of charts and graphs "proving" that all of our economic indicators were firing on all cylinders. Only Michael Panzner and a few others were saying what was really happening all along.
Posted by: Lady From Middle America | October 22, 2008 at 02:10 AM
All these occurrences are sad but basically everyone is responsible for his own life and, whatever decision he takes, it is his choice and he must bear whatever consequences that choice entails.What emerges though is
the failure of human beings to empathize with others
because,essentially,in our exchange system,is not everybody cheating one another to achieve more benefit to the detriment of the other?
Posted by: TTS | October 22, 2008 at 03:25 PM
Whisky,
Financial system crashes do not just "happen" overnight. Like the farmers in the 1920's, a lot of people were suffering in this decade well before Lehman Brothers et al crashed and burned. I don't know how they managed to do this, but until fairly recently, people were able to pull out all sorts of charts and graphs "proving" that all of our economic indicators were firing on all cylinders.
They didn't have HELOCs and CCs to continue spending when their incomes stagnated/dropped.
Posted by: TDiver | October 22, 2008 at 04:54 PM