Bankruptcies, Foreclosures still rising. The United States of Moneylenders

Ideology is important. But ideas do not spring out of thin air. The dominant ideas in society, any society, are the ideas of the ruling class, for it is the ruling class that controls the manufacture and dissemination of ideas just like they control the manufacture of cars. They own the means of communication the universities and institutions of learning and, in league with religious institutions impose their class view on the rest of society. The dominant ideology of the feudal aristocracy that the King was King by divine right did not spring from the head of the serf.

About 1.6 million more people are expected to declare bankruptcy in the US this year. The numbers are increasing and will include some of the better off who skirted the earlier bankruptcy wave. But the severity of the ongoing economic crisis has reached in to the ranks of the middle classes disrupting their lives in a way they never thought possible. Last year, saw a 4.1% increase in debtors with college degrees and also saw an increase in income, 9.1% earned more than $60,000.

Moneylenders rule in our society. I remember at the onset of the crisis with the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry which were industry loans that were given (really forced on) the poor and people with what the moneylender’s describe as “bad credit”; the low waged or those of us unfortunate enough to have lost our jobs or fallen ill. Most bankruptcies in the US are due to medical issues we should add. So people with bad credit are those that were bled dry by the moneylenders and couldn’t pay them their blood interest any longer. Some speculators even made millions, no billions of dollars, betting that workers and the poor would collapse under this weight.

African Americans in particular were subrime borrowers and lost their homes and just about everything else they had. One financial sector CEO, said that the subrime collapse might well have been the largest loss of African American wealth in US history (1). John Gapper writing in the Financial Times also touched on the severity of the situation stating that in these communities, “…something very nasty is going down.” (2) Now when these types talk that that, they are not exaggerating. In the movies, when the bad guys talk about something nasty going down means people die. That’s exactly what happened here except death and misery on a much larger scale.

The cost of this in human suffering is catastrophic. An 89 year-old African American woman described her ordeal in the Wall Street Journal, "I just wanted to be able to eat and sleep in my house and have a roof over my head", she said, "Every day at midnight when I go to sleep, I think maybe when I wake in the morning they'll tell me to get out." (3)

Between July and September this year more than 288,000 homes were repossessed. And we should clarify; people don’t “lose” their homes, they are stolen from them, they are driven out of them. There have been 2.3 million homes re-possessed since the recession began according to RealtyTrac, so it should come as no surprise that food stamp usage has risen 59%. And what do they do along with throw people out of their homes and jobs on to food stamps? They cut social services. Osama Bin Laden is the least of our worries; he's not the only terrrorist.

The Wall Street Journal has numerous pieces today about bankruptcies and describes one debtor who was forced to file bankruptcy on $64,000 of credit card debt. He felt guilty at first but when he figured out that he’d already paid $150,000 in interest on an original $40,000 of debt, he felt “comfortable defaulting”.

The capitalist politicians in Congress blocked legislation last year that would have granted judges the power to reduce mortgage principal. So you have to pay the bastards the original no matter what the cost of your house now. The moneylenders’ complain that the borrower’s pain is pain for them also as they have to write off billions in unpaid loans. But anyone that’s owned a home, and that is a large percentage of us in this country as the system is set up to have us borrow, we see the tiny percentage of our payment going to the principal and the vast majority of it going to interest for years on end.

Imagine the trillions of dollars paid in interest already on those 2.3 million homes they’ve repossessed already; and what about the millions of us who are still paying. No, if the moneylending business was so bad they’d all be queuing up for jobs at the Post office or JC Penny. And there’s the small example in the previous paragraph of the interest paid on a loan, then there’s credit cards, etc. They never lose believe me.

The moneylenders determine whether we can get an apartment or a house. “Bad credit” will prevent you from getting either. With bad credit, you can’t get health care; you can’t get shelter. There are people in this country at the moment that purchase food using credit cards. And they call this democracy.  Greece was a democracy also---for slave owners.

And we get back here to ideology. We have been taught that this is an acceptable situation. We are told we are irresponsible and that we should learn to live within our means. All the 89 year-old woman wanted above was to have a roof over her head and they bled her dry and terrorized her through the process.

The dominant ideology in our society is that we create our own circumstances. That success is out there, all we have to do is go get it. All we have to do is work hard and it’s ours. This is poisonous ideology; it is nonsense and in our gut we know it. Racism, sexism, class origins, all affect where we end up, we know this. But the propaganda is powerful and many of us fall prey to it, temporarily anyway. If we accept this view in our own minds then when we don’t make it we only have ourselves to blame. We blame ourselves because if we worked harder, were smarter, prettier, whiter whatever, we could have succeeded. We internalize the anger and blame ourselves with very destructive consequences.

This historic crisis of capitalism will not leave consciousness untouched; the propaganda will and has weakened. But, as we used to say, consciousness tends to lag behind events, even further behind events when there is no existing ideological counteroffensive, and there is none in the US with the leaders of the workers’ organizations adopting capitalist ideology as there own and the so-called left pretty much disconnected from the working

But in the last analysis, ideas have a material base. Great lessons have been learned in the last period. Here in the US, tremendous anger exists toward the moneylenders, bankers, capitalist politicians and those whose actions continue to cause so much harm. There is a questioning of the system itself that hasn’t existed since the great depression with polls finding that 36% of the population saying they’re favorable to socialism. There will be more pain and the anger will not be contained forever, will not be channeled in to destructive or abusive behavior permanently.

The blame will fall on the heads of its rightful owners I am convinced of that.

(1) Financial Times 3-19-07
(2) Ibid
(3) Wall Street Journal 3-12-07