[OPE] Update on the housing crisis in America

Reuters has a useful story about why it has to be longer-lasting:

Foreclosures mark pace of enduring U.S. housing crisis
Reuters Wed Oct 7, 2009
By Tom Brown

"Every 13 seconds in America, there is another foreclosure filing."

Text at
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE59705J20091008?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=11621

Workers thought that in buying a house, their savings would be secure. What
could be more secure and stabilizing than owning your own home, with the
blessings of the President and a signed statement from the bank? But now,
with job losses, bankruptcies and foreclosures, some residents are in fact
devaluing and blighting the assets of other residents, and it turns out
that:

"The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of
direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it
grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a
determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of
the economic community which grows up out of the production relations
themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always
the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the
direct producers - a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite
stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social
productivity - which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the
entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of
sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the
state." - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 3
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm

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Received on Thu Oct 8 11:19:28 2009