Interesting Ideas About The Foreclosure Crisis from Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I swear, this site called Stop Me Before I Vote again is more and more often voicing thoughts that have crossed my mind but which would normally seem incredibly politically incorrect on all alleged sides of the visible spectrum…  As was definitely the case in their post Closure = Foreclosure.

For instance, here’s one thought that’s crossed my mind a little, but which I don’t see discussed a whole lot:

 More and more people have gone into it, and decided it’s actually in their best interest to go into foreclosure because you basically get to live in the house free for a year and save up some cash while the proceedings grind on…and, because it stiffs the banks, deliberately letting your house go into foreclosure might actually be a new and innovative form of civil disobedience…

But here’s another thought - probably highly politically incorrect with the ostensible “left” - which has crossed my mind to a much greater degree:

…not to mention the fact that I’m having a really hard time summoning up any sympathy for all these people who signed onto the ARMs so they could have the cushy McMansion with the cathedral ceiling in the living room and the granite countertops in the kitchen.

The other day, when I accidentally saw ten minutes of CNN, they were running a profile of a two-earner couple who are now living at a public campsite after losing their big cushy house, featuring the wife wistfully talking about the granite countertops, and whining about how the bank hustled her and her husband into signing onto the ARM and how they were “lied to” by the bank.

Seems like the only time CNN and the like try to show any sympathy for “homeowners,” it’s these lily-white couples who went for the bamboozle because they somehow thought they were entitled to the big cushy pad.  There’s little concern for the millions of people who’ll never be able to afford the illusion of owning their own home…uh, that is, what we call “homeownership.”  These folk are lucky to even be able to afford rent on a decent apartment anywhere in this goddamn country anymore.

“Able to afford rent on a decent apartment”?  Damn, that would be a dream.

Would someone like to bail me out for the credit card debt that I incurred taking out cash advances during the last recession so that I could pay the rent on a cheap share?

(I probably shouldn’t even type that because you never know who’s watching…  Sometimes it feels as though I must live like a fugitive because I committed the crime of losing jobs to personnel cuts and layoffs.  Which just happened again a couple of months ago.)

Anyway, yes, I’ve been wondering too why even the “left” is focusing all this attention on foreclosures while we don’t hear anything about what can be done for renters who aren’t even going to be able to afford the little housing that they had as the economic crisis grows deeper.

Not that there shouldn’t be some efforts to stop foreclosures…  But as they indicated at SMBIVA, please don’t let the issue of foreclosure overshadow the issue of people who have to struggle to keep a roof over their heads though they never paid out a penny to buy anything.

Are We Really Taking “The Seven Steps to Revolution”?

Also at Stop Me Before I Vote Again (going a little further back), a post linking to an article in Campaign for America’s Future (a blog that defines itself as “the strategy center for the progressive movement”) about how present conditions are leading us down The Seven Steps To Revoluton.   According to a key passage in this article:

There’s something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air.  And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who’ve been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years.  Can it be - at long last - that Americans have, simply, had enough?  Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government - and with it, control of our own future?  Is this simply a shifting political season - the kind we get every 20 to 30 years - or is there something deeper going on here?  Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we’re going to finally win a few?  Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change?

Recently, I came across a pocket of sociological research that suggested a tantalizing answer to these questions - and also that America may be far more ready for far more change than anyone really believes is possible at this moment.  In fact, according to some sociologists, we’ve already lined up all the preconditions that have historically set the stage for full-fledged violent revolution.

Personally speaking, though, I’ve seen that speculation a few too many times already, at different stages of our unmistakable decline over the years.  Hence, I wonder if it might be a bit too optimistic.

Some people have accused me of being a bit too optimistic when I somewhat endorsed theories about the decline or decay of capitalism.  I do think there is a real systemic decline in capitalism (internationally) that goes well beyond business cycles and capital’s seemingly endless ability to recuperate.  And there is some comfort, I admit, in the belief that the system is really going down for good, rather than just becoming harsher and harsher for so many people of the world (while the ruling capitalists in the long run continue to thrive).  But that comfort is very thin, because a decline in the system does not automatically mean the birth of a new and better system to replace it (e.g., real communism or socialism).  As I’ve also said before (repeating the ideas of people who’ve been much more articulate in discussing these ideas than I am), we really could just continue sinking into barbarism.

If we are to hope for a revolution, we should make a distinction between that and the liberal notion that we will “take back our government.”  While I’ll gladly support many of the policies of people who say that we should “take back our government” (hence I’ll gladly support something like the Nader campaign, for the issues that it might bring to the public forum, and therefore the extreme limits of the major-party candidates that it might illuminate just a little), the whole idea that we can “take back” our government or “our country” conveys a perspective that is not very revolutionary.  If we want a revolution, it’s not because we want to return to some mythical better days (especially not days under the present system), but because we want to move forward into a system that is better than ours has been all along.  And one problem with our system all along is that we never really had “our government” or America to take back.  We may have had a worsening of conditions in the Bush years, but in many ways, that has simply been in an increase in tendencies that have existed for a much, much longer time. 

Put more succinctly,  a revolution would not be ”taking back” things that we thought we once had but lost recently (because of those evil Republicans, etc.); it would be finally taking things that we never had.

And will our country ever be on the road such a revolutionary change?  (Or, a better question might be, will the world be ready? - since “revolution in one country” is an idea that has been discredited somewhat over the years.)   It’s hard to say, but I’m not feeling optimistic.  I don’t see the consciousness and awareness out there.  There might be a lot of mounting dissatisfaction, which will make it more difficult for our political and economic rulers to carry out their policies with any appearance of public consent.  That’s kind of like a silver lining in some very thick clouds.  (Though even that tendency could be set back, in the short term, by widespread illusions about some corporate-controlled, politically “centrist” leader (which means a very conservative leader on the world spectrum) who talks a lot about “change.”  Albeit, it looks less likely that those illusions will take hold the way they seemed to be doing a month or two ago.)  But I think any talk about how we’re following these historic steps to revolution might be awfully premature.  I wouldn’t say I’m certain about that - revolutions historically have happened when many people least expected them.  But based on what I see and know myself, I certainly wouldn’t predict it right now. 

“The Un-Uncola” (from Stop Me Before I Vote Again)

I love this passage from one of my favorite blogs of coverage on the primaries, Stop Me Beofore I Vote Again.  About The Un-Uncola:

I’ve had a few conversations with Obama supporters.  These folks are not, admittedly, the perfervid young True Believers depicted in will.i.am’s You-Tube videos - more like grizzled old liberals still hoping, hoping, for a break in the weather, a break that hasn’t come since the ’40s and certainly doesn’t appear to be imminent.

What these folks always end up saying is something like this:  Well, he’s better than Hillary, isn’t he?

Of course they’re right.  It would be hard to be worse.  But note that we now have a recursion of lesser-evillism.  We vote for the Democrats because they’re “not as bad” as the Republicans - and among Democrats, we support Obama because he’s “not as bad” as Hillary.  The Democrats are the un-Republicans, and Barak is the un-Hillary - a double-Un!

There’s a nightmarish Achilles-and-the-tortoise quality to this reasoning - the sort of vertiginous slide down through orders of magnitude that you get in fever dreams.  How small could these distinctions get before quantum effects would begin to be felt?