WIMBERLEY, Texas – The grass in the pasture stands tall. The Blanco River runs clear and full now, and the tourists return to the town square. A wet winter and cold spring have broken the grip of a two-year drought in Texas.

But this plenty camouflages a drought of another sort: the economic one.

Texas was slow to be swept up by the Great Recession. But now its pain has come home to big cities and small towns, as the lagging effects of the recession batter the ranchers, storekeepers and families who all withstood — until now.

While Washington’s fury is directed toward the Gulf oil spill, it has largely lost sight of the recession. Yet Congress continues to weigh financial reform, and it would do well to remember the human cost of the Great Recession, triggered by the titans of Wall Street but borne heavily by everyday people.

Since the crisis began and through the first quarter of this year, more than $2 trillion in mutual funds have been wiped out, 4.5 million homes have gone into foreclosure and 6.8 million jobs have been lost.

With its art, eclectic character and natural beauty, ours is one of the best little towns in the nation to visit; it says so right in the pages of The New York Times and Travel Holiday Magazine.

But for those of us who live here, a quiet crisis whispers of impending poverty. A merchant confides he can’t take another year like the last two. A Mexican stonemason tells me that a single project tided his family through winter. A Realtor relays that all over town, people who never took a mortgage they couldn’t afford are looking to give up, sell out and move on.

The alternative is tallied and cataloged at the stately 102-year-old, brick-and-limestone county courthouse over in San Marcos. Jack Hays, for whom this county was named, was a living legend for his exploits as a Texas Ranger, namely for fighting the Comanche. Today, people are losing their homes not to raiding parties but to banks. There were 157 up for auction in April alone.

For 15 withering months there have been 100 or more foreclosures per month, according to the San Marcos Daily Record. The list carries the names of familiar ranches, springs and creeks. Yet the tale of Hays County is, sadly, more emblematic than unique in the vast landscape that stretches westward beyond the Hudson and the Potomac. Up in Austin, $6.5 billion in real estate value has been wiped out as if by a tornado. The resultant cuts in money for teachers, cops and services in the city are likely just around the corner.

In Austin and elsewhere, the conservative cultural boosterism of Texas initially downplayed the recession. Heir to George W. Bush’s original political office and many of his finest traditions, Republican Gov. Rick Perry quipped of the recession in 2009, “We’re in one?” It was his so-far-overlooked Katrina moment as time proved that bravado as prematurely false as that of his predecessor.

“Texas has been hit much harder by the 2008-09 recession than previous ones,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Starting with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate at the beginning of the crisis, the job market fell throughout last year to end 2009 at an 8.2 percent unemployment rate. This year, manufacturing orders picked up but the job creation rate stood stubbornly at zero in the first quarter.

Today in Texas, one in five people struggle to feed themselves and one in five children live in poverty, according to the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin, founded by Benedictine nuns.However, this is not a Texas story but an American one, told in fiscal crises that stretch from California to Illinois, from Alabama to New York. It is in Washington where the Great Recession will be justly dealt with — or not.

Realistically, after all, Congress and the regulators have assiduously polished their reputations as hand-maidens of the banks at least since the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.

It doesn’t take an expert to understand that much of the legislation in Congress is mere cover for the politicians and the big banks. It isn’t designed to redress the latest crisis or stop the next one. It puts matters in the hands of regulators who consistently failed, to, well, regulate.

Regardless of party, the politicians will let the big banks go on gambling with other people’s money.

The only real solution is reinstate Glass-Steagall and break up the big banks. Only one senator, Democrat Ted Kaufman of Delaware, railed for that and against something dressed up in the Orwellian costume of “reform.”

Back here in Texas, I have taken what I have left and squirreled it away in a small Hill Country bank. But I, too, have to face the inevitable: I ask my 16-year old, Olivia, what she thinks about selling our little place high in the oaks and cedars over the Blanco. She looks at her sister, Isabel, and reflects, then replies: “We’ve made a lot of good memories here.” I nod. So we have. So I will wait until, or unless, this drought forces my hand, too.

 

Richard Parker is a journalist and publisher in Wimberley, Texas. Researcher Molly Maroney contributed to this article. Readers may write to Parker at infoparker-media.com.