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Lone, sane voice in a credit crisis
DIDN’T anyone see this financial crisis coming? Yes, at least one man did though he wasn’t an expert or an economist – and that, perhaps, is why no one would listen to him.
Well, come to think of it, why should they have paid any attention to this slob of an American redneck – literate and fancy-talking though he is. What would he know?
But Joe Bageant sensed what was happening three years ago when he went back to his home town of Winchester in Virginia, and discovered how his old buddies in the factory where he used to work were knee-deep in mortgages and loans they couldn’t repay.
They shouldn’t have been sold them in the first instance but the shyster salesmen in Virginia didn’t care. They just wanted to make a buck, and isn’t that what the American dream is all about?
As a broker said to Bageant: “I can get a ham sandwich a home loan if the sandwich has a job.” Yes, Bageant saw it coming, as he put it: “The mortgage industry... is going to implode like a death star under the weight of these loans.”
If you want to know how this sub-prime crisis began in the US, and, moreover, if you want to know how the 50 million US rednecks will vote in the presidential elections, read Bageant’s prescient book.
Bageant is another Michael Moore. He even looks like him – baggy, overweight but with an enchanting Virginian drawl. He grew up among the poor, worked with them in factories. Unlike academics and metropolitan journalists who pop in and out of redneck territory in election times and come out with fragmented and often unreliable information, Bageant knows his people. And he’ll make you see why rednecks love voting for the Republicans.
This is one of the most important books of recent years.
John Gulliver
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