First, let's say you could turn back the clock about five years, give or take. You'd be back in a world where only the rich, recent inheritors, sudden stock option millionaires and previous home buyers could possibly afford a house anywhere in the country remotely fit for human habitation.

This would be what many seem to be pining for; the good old days of outrageous, unregulated speculation by all levels in the property buying food chain -- from inflated appraisals to falsified annual income to fraudulent lending practices and the whole sub-prime piracy.

Banking and financial management institutions had developed their own impressive variety of scams to lend other peoples' money to borderline indigents while skimming a nice cut off the top.

Call me an economic imbecile -- which is largely true -- but having watched the whole sorry feeding frenzy get constantly more degrading and disgusting by the year, I've no desire to repeat the same cycle. So if that was the best of all possible worlds and simply returning to that era would fix everything, then we lack the imagination to escape from our self-created capitalist prison.

And down that road a little farther, imagine a country whose people have become so isolated from each other, and from any and all institutions, that it's no longer a society at all. Instead, it's maybe 200 million disconnected, semi-autonomous city-states, constantly at war with all the rest over the same dwindling supply of goods and jobs and services and money and square feet of pavement.

Second, I'd really like to see people get past the me-first self-determinism that prevents people with nearly identical concerns from building alliances against the threats they face in common. As Franklin(?) said of the founders status as traitors: "We must hang together or we will surely hang separately." Just so.

Same shit, different day. There are better, more empowering ways to deal with the twin obscenities of rising foreclosure numbers and the spectacular sums of OUR MONEY congressional "representatives" gave their corporate sugar daddies.

So instead of feeling smug because some poor bastard down the block just had his house stolen right out from under him, maybe it's time for a little push back.

How about assembling a few hundred pissed off homeowners -- Second amendment rights advocates every single one of them -- who are or will be in foreclosure themselves fairly soon? How about showing up at the house to be stolen a couple hours before the posse and created an enforced perimeter? And repeating that model every time there's a new foreclosure notice posted on the county website.

If I could think of any other way to keep these scumbags' slimy hands off everybody's houses, I would have published a pamphlet by now. But all the decks are stacked in favor of money and power. All we have is numbers. If we're afraid or unwilling to use to combat a shared threat, this corporate crime wave will continue unchallenged.

And they'll never, ever stop because, for these parasites, there's no such thing as enough.


wp