When airport security doesn't work, they junk it. It is time to do the same with programs that are not helping homeowners. These half-measures that are being so half-heartedly implemented are a cruel disgrace.
But if we are to solve this problem, we are going to need to press the Administration and the banks to recognize they must go further. To achieve that, we need to get back in the streets to push for what we really need: debt relief, and a moratorium on foreclosures.
Sounds radical? It isn't. There are precedents. The US government and even Republicans have backed debt forgiveness"in Africa.
There, our government and others agreed to debt forgiveness programs because it was clear that colonial powers had illegally shackled the newly independent states with an unsustainable debt burden. Those debts were imposed, suffocating unfair and illegal.
Recently, just before the earthquake, Haiti won a billion dollars in debt forgiveness and then promptly began to borrow money again. Haiti's problems may mirror our own in another way with Presidential proclamations of "help on the way" undermined by poor or non-existent delivery.
There is a moral and legal case for going beyond existing programs.
In our country, millions of people were talked into taking bogus Subprime loans that lenders knew were deceptive. According to the FBI there was "an epidemic of mortgage fraud." These loans were then securitized by Wall Street and sold worldwide with misrepresented values. Another fraud.
They were also insured by companies like AIG with shady insurance deals to guard against the defaults they knew would follow. This was not just business as usual but, in part, a criminal enterprise. There are many foreclosure relief scams too. A lawyer in Orange County California was just charged with engineering 400 foreclosure modification frauds.
Compensating victims of predatory rip-offs is only fair. Human rights should come before property rights.
An Online Legal Dictionary reminds us that the government has powers to act that it is not using: "As a function of its Police Power, a state may suspend contractual rights when public welfare, health, or safety are threatened. During the World War I housing shortage, some New York landlords raised rents to exorbitant levels and evicted tenants who failed to pay""
Some states went further imposing a debt moratorium. It happened in Minnesota during the depression when there was a sharp rise in foreclosures on farm property, "Fifty years later the Minnesota legislature responded again to public pressure to relieve farm debts by passing another Mortgage Moratorium Act (Minn. Stat. 583.03 [Supp. 1983])."
"In its view, the state had a right under its police power to declare an economic emergency," says the writer Alex Abella, who contributes to the LA Times, "to safeguard the public and promote the general welfare of the people" which necessitated the drafting and implementing of the moratorium.
Needless to say, financial interests -- banks, loan holders -- sued, losing both at the state and the federal level. When the case finally arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Charles Evans, in the case of Blaisdell versus Home Building & Loan Association upheld the constitutionality of the Moratorium as a "reasonable means to safeguard the economic structures upon which the good of all depend."
If you believe, as I do, that there is an economic emergency underway effecting the most vulnerable among us, as foreclosures grow and poverty deepens, isn't it time to start demanding debt relief, not just temporary adjustments such as questionable mortgage modifications? If we can sanction other countries for violating laws, why not crooked banks and lenders?
Some may consider this demand unrealistic, but sometimes demanding the impossible is precisely what makes the possible more possible. Remember the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King taught us: "We never get change without demanding it. We never have and we never will."
Mediachannel News Dissector Danny Schechter discusses these issues in his new book "Crime of Our Time" and a companion film. See PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com. He also directed the documentary IN DEBT WE TRUST.
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