Excerpts from an article by Jon Nadler:

July 17, 2008 “Chaos and fear never sleep. This morning the first news story I read was a piece from the Los Angeles Daily News about police threatening to beat down and arrest any “disorderlies” trying to get their money out of a failed IndyMac bank branch in Pasadena, CA. Apparently, after being turned away Monday, customers began lining up at 1:30 a.m. the next morning to take out any cash they had in excess of the $100,000 maximum insured by the FDIC. The scene was reportedly emotional and tense. At another IndyMac branch in Encino, the police were called in after line jumpers threatened to turn an ordinary bank run into a full-on riot.

Yes, it’s here. Welcome to the Depression. No, don’t drop whatever it is you’re doing. Don’t get up. It’s not going anywhere. It will wait. It’s just going to sit over here in the corner and read a magazine while you do whatever it is you need to do.

Despite the seeming enormity of it in retrospect, the stock market crash of 1929 barely even registered for most Americans. The day before the crash, Time Magazine’s Oct. 28, 1929 issue was business as usual; national stories, Washington stories, a review of the newest plays opening in Manhattan, a piece on a cat washing contest in Kingston, NC.

A week later, in the wake of the stock plunge, the cover story was as far from a piece on crashing share prices as you could get - a profile of a man named Samuel Insull, the “financial father of the Chicago opera.”

It took a little more than two full years, Dec. 11, 1931, before the New York Bank of the United States would collapse, and the cover of Time was reserved for Dr. James Henry Breasted, “foremost Egyptologist of the U. S.”

On January 22, 1932 things turned desperate. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was formed to dole out government aid to banks, railroads, farm mortgage associations and all manner of failed business enterprises. Time’s cover story for this day was on playwright Philip Barry’s 11th play, “The Animal Kingdom.”

By the end of the following year, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had squeezed the Emergency Banking Act through Congress, signed the Economy Act, the Credit Act, the Reforestation Relief Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Farm Act, the Federal Securities Act, the National Cooperative Employment Service Act, the Home Owner’s Loan Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Emergency Railroad Transportation Act, created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Civil Works Administration.”

This time around, there’s no sudden stock market collapse and instead of wild inflation such as we’ve been seeing, the value of a dollar actually increased, simply because no one had any. Now, it’s about oil, overpopulation and inflation, outsourcing and moving our jobs and factories overseas. Unemployment, just as in the Great Depression, is causing massive mortgage failures nationally, which is forcing the closure of our two largest banking and lending institutions.

 Now we have an oil-based global economy instead of a dollar-based national one, and the rising demand for oil can only drive down the comparative value of the dollar. So far, our answer to that has been to print more dollars, making each one worth less than before.

Everything cycles, and prosperity will eventually come again. Right now, however, our economy is about to take an even bigger hit than it has already, as prices continue to soar at the same time that wages remain static and joblessness increases.

A depression isn’t a possibility, or pending, or will happen soon if we don’t act. It’s here.

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