Terrorism in the US:bankers get more aggressive kicking people out of their homes.

Well here’s some good news at last; the number of homeowners underwater (those who owe more on their house than the house is worth) fell by one third in the last quarter, the Wall Street Journal reports. * This news perks me up in the morning knowing that people’s lives are improving.

But wait! What’s this? The reason fewer people are underwater is that the banks are kicking them out of their homes faster. It’s from “banks getting more aggressive on home foreclosures, not from home values going up…” the Journal adds. Oh well.

About 10.8 million mortgage holders representing 22.5% of the US total (this is such a harmless term, these people are debtors, in the clutches of moneylenders) are hanging on for dear life and paying the moneylender in the hopes that they can keep their home. I know a number of them and I am sure you do too.

So the number has declined a bit because debtors were so financially, physically and emotionally exhausted that they stopped paying a moneylender interest payments for a roof over their head or the moneylender threw them out with the help of the state and its agents.

I grew up in Britain in the age of the council houses. My dad, after spending three years and nine months as a prisoner of the Japanese working for Mitsubishi during WW11 was a tenant publican in a small village; he ran away from home at 16 and joined the army in 1934 to be with horses.  He never saw any horses and ended up in Japan by 1939, involuntarily, I might add. I remember my mum trying to get on a list for a council house in the local town because it was such a good and secure deal. I had lots of friends that lived in government housing which didn’t have the stigma it does here in the US where, if you are living in the shabby government housing they generally provide you are a complete failure, lazy and a “ward of the state”. And the US capitalist class figured out a long time ago that if workers owned their own home through the moneylenders, it would be much harder for them to go on strike for fear of being evicted for non-payment of the mortgage.

Here in the US, the home has been your little piece of security, your savings account. Trillions were taken out of homes in the form of loans in the wake of the housing bubble that burst in 2007. This is what fueled consumption which is the most important thing in a capitalist economy as the commodity bought contains that magic stuff the capitalist seeks, profit; we could call it their “wages” just for simplicity. All commodities produced through human Labor power contain within them Labor power that the capitalist pays for and Labor power that they get for free.  This is possible by forcing workers to work above the time it takes to produce the value of our own wages..

It is this mentality that they push that drives people to own a home and even better if you have a decent paying job so that you can borrow more money, buy another one and have a less financially fortunate person pay the mortgage via the rent; its a con game. This worked for quite a while to the detriment of all of us.

The terrorists responsible for this, live here, and they're not Muslims

Some debtors have moved out of their homes and are renting them to others for less than their payments on the mortgage in the hope that things will turn around, hopefully they can keep their homes and eventually return. The idea that you have a “moral” responsibility to pay the moneylenders is very strong in the US although it has been weakened during this economic crisis. One debtor who paid $217,000 for a home that is presently worth $150,000 has rented out his home for $500 less than the mortgage payments is having doubts about his “moral obligation” to keep paying the mortgage. After all, it “not only doesn’t it provide us with shelter, but actually makes it almost impossible for us to pay our monthly living expenses”, he tells the WSJ.

Capitalist society forces us through pain of homelessness, sickness or death to act in an individualistic, selfish inhuman way to each other. This is how it works. But despite this, there is a powerful tendency among human beings for kindness, solidarity and fairness. The capitalist class, the class that rules this economic system of production in which we live and work, turns these feelings in to their opposite, uses them against us in order to sell their products and perpetuate their system. There are people in this country that give millions of dollars each year to religious charities in response to ads on TV about starving children in other parts of the world, something that will never end hunger, but people are sympathetic to the misery of others.

The capitalists offer us divisive choices, my child starves or yours. All normal humans want both to eat, and when we have joined forces and fought them we have made gains but if the united road forward is blocked, the unity breaks down and we make that horrible choice: “Its every man for himself”, but this is not our preference, it is the refuge of last resort.

The present economic crisis has had a dramatic affect on the consciousness of the US workers and middle class. The mood is changing and there will no doubt be more explosions ahead. The present historical multi-racial strike of prisoners in Georgia is an example of what is to come. But the ride won't be free of twists and turns.

Housing should not or ever have been an investment opportunity or a savings account. Housing is shelter, it is as important as food in the needs of human beings to live a safe and secure life. A society that depends on moneylenders for shelter is in no way a civilized society. Home ownership in the US will never be the same after this crisis. The level of home ownership has fallen back to the 1999 level and is below 40% for the first time since World war 11.

The homeowner renting out his home for less than he’s paying the moneylender in interest says it all, “It just kind of leaves you wondering what the safety net is for my generation, because it’s obviously not our home.” The history of capitalism is a “safety net” free history. Any safety nets we have were fought for with great courage and sacrifice and opposed with equally great violence and brutality by the capitalists. With the continued decline in the US of the conditions that arose in the economic upswing that followed World War 11, the future will be a stormy one but with great opportunities, as long as we take them.

Yep, “The Times They are A Changin’.”

* Fewer Underwater as Foreclosures Rise: WSJ 12-14-10