“Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, andmortgages became derivative investments.”

“Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.”

“Engaged in a new form of serfdom---only bound now to banks and mortgage lenders instead of to lords---her more highly leveraged neighbors pore over the business section of the newspaper each day looking for some sign that the government will soon step in to “freeze” their mortgage rates where they are before a scheduled adjustment hits.”

“Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!”

“And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these “mortgage-backed securities.”

“We were taking out mortgages we couldn’t afford because they were camouflaged to look as if we had a reasonable chance of paying them back. Banks then changed the bankruptcy laws so that we could not get out of our obligations once the rates changed. Lastly, they sold us back our own mortgages, shifting back to us any of the risk through our money-market accounts and pension funds.”

“Wal-Mart’s relationship to place has become so abstracted that the company views even its own stores through the conquistador’s eyeglass. Like temporary forts built solely for purposes of territorial conquest, any one of them can be abandoned at any time.”