Asshole Economics 101: Bulldoze Foreclosed Homes, Bulldoze Excess Supply

A lot of grocery stores do the exact same thing. If you can’t sell the food, throw it away. If you cant sell the clothes, cut them up so no one can wear them. It’s better to destroy your product than to give it to someone in need in their eyes. Profit above everything.

Not even a new policy…this practice has been in place in different forms for decades. The creation of artificial scarcity during a market glut is par for the course….especially in the housing racket. Shaving the bottom percent of houses with low value (but whose very presence combines to lower the value of other homes) is a time honored tradition. Well…maybe honor is the wrong word here…since the destruction of houses to keep artificially inflated prices high and make the books look good is a boondoggle worthy of tar and feathering. The ugly truth behind our housing crash is that it never really ended…because only slight adjustments have been permitted instead of a serious reality check. Housing prices have crashed…but with lots of cushioning to prevent a lapse into their ‘real’ value…which would utterly destroy any number of corporations…far beyond the damage thats been done already.

Imagine a million dollar home in Cali…which is actually a modest number. Its realtime value is far far less than that…and while it may have lost say, for the sake of example, thirty percent of its value and dropped to a paltry 700 K…there is very very little market for 700K houses and foreclosures are still coming…so its authentic value is even less than that…perhaps as little as 200-300K. To admit that this is the case, to accept the loss of value on paper and record such losses across the board with millions of houses in the mix…

…would lead to utter chaos. I wouldn’t mind it…since I don’t work as a mortgage broker, realtor, lender or speculator…and frankly I could give fuck all if they suffer…they certainly were happy to ride the elevator up to the top while committing fraud and collusion every step of the way. But what I am saying is that they will spend every penny they stole buying off Congress to make absolutely sure that their books keep on reflecting the ‘fake’ value their empires are invested in. It may be a little tough to prevent anything they’re doing…unless you feel like getting radical in 2012 and making third parties a reality…but I guess thats up to y’all.

Completely sociopathic. A perfect showing of why Capitalism is not only extremely wasteful but also a modern day form of slavery.

It is not Capitalism which as brought prosperity to the world; it has only brought prosperity to a very select few while enslaving most of the world and devastating the global ecology; it has only been with the fight AGAINST Capitalism that we have found some prosperity — a livable wage, safe(r) work environments, and banishing of child labor, the 8 hour work day (as opposed to the unending work days under the “free” market of the early 1900s).

As Derrick Jensen says, we live in a society where people need to pay for a place to sleep, and pay for food to eat, and if they don’t someone with a gun will come to force them to pay (or bulldoze what was their home): that’s a society based on violence.

Any society which allows anyone to suffer greatly while others live with far more than they need is pathological.

As Michael Parenti rightly states: “Wealth creates poverty.”

In the United States (and around the world as a result of the capitalism’s violence) there are millions who are suffering greatly while the power elite owning class live in a thousand laps of luxury.

Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals, describes the one characteristic that connected all the defendants: “Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Please explicate . . . if you can.

In the city of Gary there’s a whole bunch of houses standing around that have been long abandoned. I’ve watched over months as houses had their windows broken, doors knocked down, aluminum standing torn off, insides taken out for “recycling,” brick walls crumble down brick by boring brick, fires burn up houses…and they’re still standing. Tearing down some of these houses (or better yet, rehabbing them) would make more sense, but people would rather sit back and watch things fall apart in slow motion.

What a collection of morons. Rick Santelli should be drug out and shot. The other guy should just be shot and then drug out. Makes me sad.

I’ve known of fast-food places that had a time limit on how long a burger could sit under the heat lamp, and after that time they would often hand them out the back door to the local crackheads, and other homeless types until the someone sued them for “food poisoning” and that practice stopped.
Restraunts that i have worked at always re-utilized left overs. Baked potato’s were chopped up for hash browns. Roast’s were used in soups and such. It was only thrown out if it was going bad, and could potentially make someone sick.
Whether it is given to someone, or thrown out, it is still a loss, not profit, and quite frankly, good risk management in a sue happy country.

The guy on the left, Joe something, has a really weird face, and his smug smirking is awful.
He is just revolting. His house should be bulldozed down with him in it… by the government or whoever has a bulldozer handy. That might help him with his weird face and smirking problems.

many people are buying into the false argument that everyone involved in real estate is some billionaire trust fund baby, many people who work in the industry are very far from wealthy and live month to month like everyone else and face financial ruin if the properties they sell lose value, playing it up as a pure rich vs. poor class war my feel good but it is far from accurate.

Before you lefties get off on an anti-capitalistic spiel, remember that FDR did the same thing with commodities – paying farmers to burn their crops to prop up commodity prices. His Republican predecessor, Hoover, disapproved of interventionist policies. Having worked as a laborer on “tract home” developments straight out of high school, I have difficulty swallowing all this. I worked in the 100 degree heat to put the siding on homes that are actually only a mile away from the house where I am typing these comments. Those homes still stand to this day. That was in 1977. and the workers were all Americans – Anglos no less. Five years later, the same jobs were being exclusively done by illegal aliens. Is there any wonder why we the working class and the middle class (I went on to college after a stint in construction) are so broke? There is no room in this debate for SILLY lefty ideology or SHAMELESS “free market” idealism in this scenario.

to bad you cant see past you own nose!! You fucking SNOB… If the laws were just, most of the people you discriminate against in your statement wouldn’t be in prison, Yeah once your down its hard to get back up, especially in this so called free market capitalistic environment, were wealth breeds wealth and if you dont have well fuck u. But you sound like you’ve had a silver spoon shoved far up your own arse, that, seeing that fight would be abit much for you to accept. Oh ethnic groiups so your also racist, Ah rich and a racist, perfect combination = Arsehole..

Can you explain what Capitalism is?

I won’t dispute that poverty breeds to more poverty anymore than I would object to the idea that rich breeds more rich. If someone can be born on third and think they hit a triple then it’s likely that someone can be born walking back to the duggout and thinking they struck out.

My dopey platitudes aside, the rich do commit crimes – Bernie Madoff might be the best example of this. The problem is that the rich are more connected and more quiet when they commit a crime. Do a drive by and that sometimes makes a front page. Fuck up an entire world economy with “exotic” economic packages and vast fraud of your customers and that makes the front page of the economic section… If your paper has one. And if you make it past the comics to that section.

Finally, the very people put in place to regulate the industry are people who were in charge of creating the problem. In America, the economic sector and the economic regulatory sector are in bed with each other and so closely related that it would make rural West Virginia native say “Why, that ain’ right…”

HELLO?! is there any other kind?!

see, all these jobs got shipped over seas and then white people were like, hey i don’t like doing shitty jobs, and then these guys from mexico came and started doing stuff for sub-minimum wage so there was this vicious cycle cuz the middle and low-class had their job opportunities superimposed and combined into one shitty conglomerate which they had no say in. But ultimately it comes down to former Democratic presidents and ethnic groups with their damn labor-reform and “hoopties”

What about handing them over to the services that place homeless people? I don’t know.. just agrivates me.. if there is anything I hate is double standards. this is an example