No more can the politicians and media assert that the victims of the banks’ foreclosures “got in over their heads” and “should have known better.”
Until now, the banks have foreclosed the most in Latino and African-American neighborhoods — where one family out of four have lost, or are losing, their homes.
What’s new is that now middle-class Anglos are getting foreclosed on — “Americans with ordinary mortgages, whose ability to meet payments have been hit by the hard economic times,” says the news agency Reuters.
They are “the new face of the U.S. housing crisis.” Middle-class no more, they are deeply in shock. But that is wearing off, and they are getting angry, very angry. The foundation has been laid for the unity of the dispossessed.
There are signs of that already. Across the country the young people in the Occupy movement have been defending against foreclosures.
From Miami to Los Angeles, Minneapolis to Atlanta, Occupiers have occupied the homes and yards of people facing eviction by sheriff’s deputies until the deputies left.
“This cause brings together everything we are fighting against,” a member of Occupy Los Angeles told Reuters — “corporate greed, bank bail-outs, a corrupt judiciary, and corrupt government”.
Real-estate agents themselves are organizing against the corporate takeover of their industry. In Washington, the million-member National Association of Realtors rallied against the Obama administration’s plan to sell large portfolios of homes to billion-dollar bidders.
But perhaps most intriguing is the possibility of a mortgage strike in which millions would stop payment on mortgages that are underwater — higher than the house is worth. Forty million people are in that situation in the U.S. today.
Much is possible when everybody — Latinos, African-Americans, and Anglos — re unified by facing the same problems. And the first step for all is to realize that.
