The American dream is a nightmare of foreclosures

Las Vegas – known best for its gambling haunts – now has a new reputation. It’s America’s No.1 city for foreclosures, with more people losing their homes here than elsewhere in the country.

Artist Emily Kennerk has created a 22-hour video installation which shows an image of every home foreclosed in 2009. (Foreclosure is the legal process whereby a bank or lender obtains a court order that terminates the borrower’s right of redemption. It is harsher than repossession).

Describing her installation, Kennerk says as you walk around the town you can’t help but see “this ghost town is forming around you. It’s broader than Las Vegas. This is the first generation that’s going to have to deal with the death of the American dream”.

More than four million US homes have been repossessed in the past three years. A website currently lists 2,304,257 foreclosed properties in the US. In the state of Nevada where unemployment stands at 14%, more than six out of ten of all home sales are currently from foreclosures.

At the start of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, back in September 2008, the US Treasury took the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac into government “conservatorship”. These two mortgage corporations were set up under Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Along with Ginnie Mae (the Government National Mortgage Association) they currently guarantee $5 trillion in US mortgages and 96.5% of all newly originated mortgages in the US.

So far the government has injected $145 billion into them to cover their losses. The mortgage market now is almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States government, according to former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volker. "Almost all the mortgages made now are insured by the government, bought by the government, and the guys at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the market . . . It’s clear Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac need to go. "

But the US is not only affected by a housing crisis. The malaise goes far, far deeper. Three trends have come together. Economists estimate that the annual incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans have risen only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years while the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled.

Thus, a “slow economic strangulation”, which began well before the Great Stagnation, now means that income mobility is declining just as inequality rises sharply. Even families with a gross joint income of $70,000 per year, are only “a pay check or two from the streets” as one Minneapolis worker puts it. Medical expenses are a nightmare. Even families on twice the US median joint income have to borrow heavily to have essential, life-saving operations.

Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, dramatised the anxieties arising from US Great Depression of the 1930s and the reliance on credit to provide necessities. During the Cold War years, such plays were seen as an attack on great American dream. But in today’s Great Stagnation, following the years of easy debt-fuelled consumer credit, which analysts call the “Great Moderation”, it’s certainly not playwrights who are pricking the dream-bubble.

The inability of the capitalist system, not only to ensure the fundamental necessities of life, but the very notion of a positive future is self-evident. Cities and states are staring at bankruptcy while trillions of government dollars have failed to revive the economy. As American comedian George Carlin quipped: “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.”

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary