White Civil Rights : The Website for Europeans and Americans Wherever They May Live

by Jeff Davis

The Obama Depression of 2009 advances inexorably. City and government employees all across the country are getting laid off (most never to be rehired), banks are crashing, and now that great American institution, the shopping mall is going out of business.

The Bloomberg Business web site reports “General Growth Properties Inc. filed the biggest real estate bankruptcy in U.S. history after amassing $27 billion in debt during an acquisition spree that turned it into the second-largest shopping mall owner. The owner of Boston’s Faneuil Hall and the South Street Seaport in New York City ended a seven-month effort today to refinance its debt. The company listed $29.5 billion in assets and debts of about $27.3 billion in the Chapter 11 filing. General Growth will continue operating its more than 200 properties. ‘We intend to emerge as a leaner company,’ General Growth President Thomas Nolan said in an interview today.”

You can read that last quota as meaning tens of thousands of layoffs will take place around the country, mostly low-paid service staff in shopping malls and real estate management offices. Merger mania combined with a bad economy seems to have cut this bunch of would-be Donald Trumps off at the knees.

The article notes “General Growth collapsed after spending $11.3 billion to buy commercial-property developer Rouse Co. in 2004 only to get caught in the credit crunch and a U.S. recession that has cut spending and property values. Banks have reduced lending amid mortgage-related writedowns. Commercial real estate prices in the U.S. dropped 15 percent last year, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Retail sales in the U.S. fell in March as soaring job losses forced consumers to pull back.”

They probably borrowed too much money making an ill-advised expansion acquiring more malls at a time when fewer and fewer Americans are spending money (with many out of work and unable to spend) at malls as the Depression worsens.

There is no escape from the current hard times. The Obama Depression of 2009 is going to hit everyone, rich and poor. People need to own the ground under their feet, and they need to have saved up a decent nest egg. A lot of the yuppie elite earning six figure salaries could easily wind up in the same tent cities as many of the poor. Far too many Americans spend every dime they earn –even when they earn a lot of dimes. High-paid engineers and technical workers are affected as well, often replaced by Third World macacas at one third the cost (whose incompetence is only equaled by their ability to lie to their managers about their work).

Middle managers, on the other hand, seem to have an almost cockroach-like ability to survive financial disasters. That’s one of the worst things about this society: The good guys always seem to get punished the most.