Everybody gets a home!

Calls are growing across the country for a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures as several major banks including Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase are postponing foreclosures in 23 states due to fraudulent practices. The Obama administration and his friends on Wall street have rejected these calls on the grounds that a freeze on these eviction/sales would hurt the housing market and the greater economy. Let's ask ourselves who will be hurt and how? As it is there are tens of thousands of families scheduled to be kicked out of their homes by the end of the year, which also happens to be the middle of winter. BUT, if we we're to call a halt to these evictions and bank foreclosures the banks will lose money, and perhaps some real estate predators would have a harder time finding desperate people to prey on.

Remember the bank bailout of just a couple of years ago where we were told that if we didn't give the banks everything they wanted our economy would collapse? What they didn't tell us is that it would collapse anyway due to their corrupt practices and that they still would not lend money as they promised, oh, and now they want our houses too. These banks have admitted that many of these foreclosures are not valid but they're going to push them through anyway in the majority of states who don't require a court hearing. They only intend to stop potentially invalid foreclosures/evictions in those states where they stand the chance of being caught. You can't expect them to do the right thing where there's no oversight can you? It could really effect their bottom line, they need to wrongfully throw thousands of people from their homes for the sake of the economy.

They are telling us that the housing market will suffer if more people aren't homeless, as if there were a real estate god demanding human sacrifices to grant us a good harvest. The banks have done the greatest damage to the housing market in the history of real estate and now they want to inherit all of the ruins they have created while real people are swept away. They'd like us to believe that the market that is bad and getting worse will somehow get better if only they can continue to flood it with more eviction sales. And of course they know they can get anything THEY want by telling us that the "economy" will get worse if they don't get it, when just the opposite is true. The economy does not get better as more people join the ranks of the homeless and banks accumulate greater and greater wealth. Banks don't really care about the health of the economy, they only care about how much wealth they can extract from it.

It is time for the people to unite as a community and prevent ANY AND ALL EVICTIONS. This is not just about people who bought homes they could not afford, or renters who have never had the credit and/or savings to buy a house in the first place. Everybody deserves a home, just one, and nobody deserves to be homeless. I am calling for every home owner with a mortgage or house payment, and every renter to STOP PAYING FOR YOUR HOME! Come together as a community and agree to prevent anyone and everyone in your town from being kicked out of their home. It doesn't matter who thinks they own the house and property, if they aren't using the house it no longer belongs to them. If you live there it is your home, that is all that matters, that is all that is required for you to continue living there without paying a penny to anyone, especially a bank.

This is what revolution looks like and I assure you that the people who would resist this restructuring of the ownership society will not be popular and they will not want to fight their own battles. Many people who own more than one house would actually welcome this revolution because the market has turned their assets into liabilities as they try to pay taxes on properties that can no longer pay for themselves, and whose sale will inevitably be a loss. I welcome signs that the Obama administration may be considering this moratorium but I am here to take it several steps forward to it's eventual outcome. Ownership society is slowly dying by it's own methods, unchecked capitalism has followed the path of least resistance right down the drain. It is the wealthiest among us who do deserve to be evicted from all but one of their homes, and the banks, corporations, and politicians deserve to be evicted from the planet.

Everybody gets a home, you get a home, you get a home, you! Oprah for president 2012!

I'm adding this recent Democracy Now interview with Joseph Stiglitz for its' relevancy to the topic.