Occupy Bank Houses

It is time to take back the houses.

Every day, most Americans drive by houses that stand empty. Houses foreclosed, their inhabitants moved on to a relative's couch if they are lucky, and a tent if they are not. Maybe the people who lived there made a bad choice, or did not fully understand what kind of mortgage they were getting into, maybe they even knew full well thy could not afford the house. But more often, they got hit with a medical bill that ruined them, or lost their job, or were talked into a predatory loan. The bank, rather than work out a way to work it out, foreclosed and took the house.

Every day, most Americans drive by homeless people, although we're getting to the point where we do not even notice. Begging at traffic lights, hidden and huddled in a tent tucked in the woods, or milling about outside food banks, shelters and churches. No job, and often as not no prospects, they are waiting. For veterans' benefits, for cans of beans, for a chance to take a shower, for enough money to buy something to dull the pain or ease the boredom.

These are two phenomena in need of a merger. While the Right rails about us being a Christian nation, they reveal their deeper devotion to Mammon by enshrining these empty homes as the domain of conniving corporations. Love thy neighbor? Well, if he has no house, then technically he is not a neighbor, so the logic goes, and the lucky ones (often as not thinking themselves Chosen or Righteous) feel no responsibility to the wretched, no compulsion to charity. Maybe the Bible should have been a little more clear in that requirement, like the Koran.

But I digress. The issue is more fundamental than religion. There are homes standing empty and people standing in the cold. Both are symptoms of the immense transfer of wealth over the past few decades from people who work for money to people who simple collect interest, dividends, capital gains, and of course, rent. If I thought the greedy were smarter than they are, I'd say this was by design, that loans were made with the express purpose of collecting interest for a couple of years before taking possession of the property. But instead, the housing market collapse has more to do with stupid greed than anything else, CDOs, derivatives that may have involved some high-dollar math, but no sense.

So should we reward mindless greed with property? No. Should we allow our neighborhoods to sink into the squalor of abandonment? No. Should we let people suffer when a solution is at hand? No.

Some of you will think this is radical, but it isn't. What is radical is to cut and cut and cut away at our social safety net the way we have for years, so that tax cut for the wealthy can become wealthier. Radical is insisting that a cold family stay cold because the global investor class not experience a minor decline of prospects.

Sheriffs across the country have decided that it's not radical, and are refusing to evict people. Some politicians have urged constituents being foreclosed on to stay put. Those of us commoners with common sense would rather see someone in a house than the house be abandoned and people be homeless.

I pay a monthly mortgage--to a credit union, and not a Wall Street bank--and don't plan on stopping. Houses should not be stolen, or taken by brute force. But as an interim measure, while people are out of work and houses are not selling anyway, house occupation seems both reasonable and humane. If five years from now there is a problem with people refusing to work and occupying someone else's property, then we can deal with it then, but now there is an urgency to our societal dilemma that justifies occupation.

Besides, as a political message, it works. It is easy enough to find out which houses belong to Wall Street, and occupying those houses is a far more direct confrontation than occupying public parks. Thus far, occupations of banks themselves end rapidly with arrests, but the legal process will be slower with bank-owned houses. The same muddled state of sliced-and-diced mortgage-backed securities that allows banks to say the cannot trace the actual mortgage holders to arrange a re-finance should be used to slow down re-evictions. Also, we are learning that the initial foreclosures often do not stand up to scrutiny, having by-passed some legal requirements before being robo-signed.

Not everyone wants to make a statement, and for them, I suggest the back door. Quietly move in. The banks have so many foreclosed properties that it will take them a while to notice you are there and arrange for your removal.

We live in an age rife with symbolic acts, and if we run out of people who need a house to occupy, we can still make a statement. Replace the "For Sale" sign with one that says "Foreclosed by Bank of America." Or "Property of Saudi Investors. Trespassers May Be Beheaded." Or just, "Your Neighbors Used to Live Here." Or "Abandoned by Citigroup." Call the banks that own the places and demand better upkeep.

We used to live in a nation where we knew our neighbors and helped them out. We raised barns together, and paid taxes that helped the poorest among us get a leg up. We expected those who were born well off, those who had money to spare, to spread the wealth and not try to maximize it at the expense of the rest of us. We did not stand by while people were kicked to the curb. It's time to move back in.

Unoccupy Wall Street

My last post expressed some doubt as to the sustainability and soundness of the Occupy protests happening. It is only fair to suggest alternatives, or be branded a do-nothing whiner.

So, let's Unoccupy Wall Street. Denizens of the financial district are not among the readers here, so we can begin by claiming success in terms of the physical place, but you know that's not what I'm getting at. Divest. Don't let your money occupy their vaults.

You live near a credit union that can take care of your banking needs from saving pennies to getting a home mortgage, and they won't Lincoln and Hamilton you to death with fees. You'll be a member, sharing in the profits and governance of a financial entity beholden to a broader ownership and longer time horizon than profit-obsessed big banks. You may also have a local bank that has a stake in a healthy community and treats its customers decently. Either choice beats parking your money in an institution prisoner to quarterly profits, sophisticated (yet still fundamentally stupid) gambles, publicly-funded bail-outs, exalted executives, and just plain greed.

But I don't need to convince you why, just that you should take that step if you already have not, and make your personal finances Unoccupy Wall Street. This November, vote with your finances. While media images of hippies and anarchists doing everything from wearing sinister masks to making love easily lend themselves to dismissal or discrediting of the Occupy movement, it would be hard to misinterpret the image of a run on the banks, a line of people in front of Bank of America waiting to withdraw their funds. If I had the audience to pull it off, I'd call for November to be Vote With Your Money month, a coordinated action. Doing an Unoccupy Wall Street event during the election month (or maybe the cyclical, slower-building version of the plan: Withdrawal Wednesdays), seems like a decent strategy to focus attention and impact on the action.

The financial effect to the big financial players would be negligible to begin with, and the power would be in the perception that we commoners are sick of playing their game. But as was the case with ending South African Apartheid, a few humble divestitures can lead to a few more, and eventually reach a tipping point where continuing business as usual becomes too costly, and real progress happens. You can be the beginning.

Meanwhile, it's a matter of retreating from the various corporate territories you occupy. Get food that was grown closer to you (your own yard would be a good place to start), and processed less; go to restaurants run by local families. Clothe yourself at thrift stores and yard sales, so even if that shirt was made for a famous name brand, they don't get a cent on the transaction. Keep driving the same old car (repaired by your unemployed neighbor or a local shop) or hop on a bike or bus. Disconnect the cable and just use your phone for phone calls instead of incessantly connecting to the corporate web. Make your gifts.

So really, unoccupying Wall Street turns out to be a bunch of small, easy steps. You'll find that you end up saving money. You will be more free of the corporate matrix, and at the same time more connected to your community and interested in its welfare. In the short term, divesting improves your life. If enough people unoccupy Wall Street, then in time our nation's life will take a turn for the better. Try it.