What in the hell …

That’s a question a lot of Americans are facing today, as a post by Edie demonstrates.

I don’t have as many friends who live in Europe as I did when I was younger, but I remember a number of times where folks really didn’t get how bad it is here for a lot of people. Ugh. Sometimes it’s hard not to think that the world is bad, and mirrors and procreation are abominable because they multiply and disseminate it. Against that sentiment, as brief as I’m able (brevity being the soul of wit, my sense of humor is clearly a vampire)…

I worked with a guy once, former steelworker and Maoist who was involved in building unemployed workers committees in Pennsylvania and Ohio, an area and time when steel mills were shutting down. He told me a story once about a campaign that pushed for the use of eminent domain to keep plants going (some of the plants were built in the first place using eminent domain). He said it worked at least once (and said a mill owner called communism). I’ve looked a bit on the interwebs and can’t find the story, unfortunately. The problem with that, of course, is that eminent domain, I think, requires paying market rate for the property, which is prohibitive.

Anyway, he also told me a story about foreclosures. A lot steelworkers were losing their jobs and were unable to keep up with their mortgage payments. Ergo, foreclosures. So a campaign was started for a moratorium on foreclosures. This worked via two prongs.

One is that in that area foreclosed or repossessed properties were sometimes auctioned off. People started working together to find out when the auctions were and to show up at them. At one point, they used a cardboard cut-out picture of a vulture, hung on a fishing pole, which they would hold over the heads of anyone who bid on the properties up for sale. The idea was to create disincentives for buying foreclosed properties. (My stepfather-in-law once told my wife when she was a kid - she’d commented a classified ad for a very cheap foreclosed house - that he wouldn’t buy foreclosed property because in some cases a bid was the mechanism that turned on the eviction process.)

The second prong made use of the fact that the sherriff (sp?), the entity that enforced evictions in foreclosure, was an elected position in that area. So there was a big campaign to smear sheriffs for evictions and to draw a lot of attention to evictions when they happened. The campaign eventually won an agreement from the sheriff’s office on a temporary eviction moratorium. Horrible that this has to be done, but good to know that some slowing of the death machine is possible, at a minimum.