Every eight minutes in Spain somebody loses their home to the banks. In the U.K. tens of thousands of people are evicted from their homes every year. But that’s nothing compared to the U.S., where over 9 million households (potentially as many as 30 million people) have lost their homes since the financial crisis began.
What’s more, many of those people have been foreclosed on unlawfully. As the robosigning scandal in the U.S. has shown, in many cases banks no longer own the loans on which evictions are executed, having already repackaged them into mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and sold them on to unsuspecting investors around the world. That didn’t stop them, though, from instigating a chain of fraud and deception that led to millions of lawful homeowners being shown the door.
In Spain, people are not only being deprived of the roofs over their head but are also being saddled with tens of thousands of euros in outstanding debt as the banks rush to sell of their properties at bargain basement prices, often to international property speculators.
In fact, the crisis in Spain, which, lest we forget, was primarily caused by an orgy of reckless lending by the country’s biggest banks, has helped transform those same banks into the biggest property developers in the country – and at huge social cost, as people of all ages, including the elderly, are turfed out on to the streets. To avoid such a fate, some people have gone so far as to take their own lives, throwing themselves off their own apartment balconies in one final act of defiance.
Such tragedies have, quite understandably, ignited a wave of popular protest against the banks’ practice of “desahuicios” (evictions). Indeed, so great has been the scale and intensity of public outrage that it recently forced the Spanish government into a humiliating u-turn on homeowner evictions, as it grudgingly agreed to introduce rules to protect families from eviction. The first video below (in Spanish) – a short clip of the ball-busting Spanish journalist Jordi Évole’s visit to a real estate trade fair in Barcelona – is as good an introduction to the issue as you’ll find.
The clip features an interview with the director of the trade fair, who predictably defends the banks, arguing that they are not charities – and he’s right. But they are charity cases, having received millions upon millions of millions of euros and dollars of our money to keep themselves afloat. Indeed, a recent Bloomberg investigation showed that pretty much all the profits reported by banks in the U.S. are a direct result of corporate welfare programs:
“The banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry – with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy – would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.”
At the same time, the very same banks that are greedily sucking on the teat of the over burdened tax payer are aggressively pushing for people who owe them thousands, or, at most, hundreds of thousands of dollars or euros, to be dispossessed of their homes.
As Thomas Jefferson presciently warned, if the “(American) people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
Surely it’s time that we, the people – especially those of us who have a mortgage – began opening our eyes and paying attention to what is being done by the banks and their agents in government against many of our neighbours, often in complete contravention of the laws of the land?
As the second video below shows, bailiffs in the U.K. not only use incomplete documentation to evict people from their home (which, it’s worth noting, is illegal), but also sometimes resort to the use or threat of force to achieve their ends (also illegal). The quality of the footage may not be the best, but the video is still well worth a watch, if only to get a glimpse of the species of thuggish troll the banks are paying to do their bidding.
As the British historian Lord Acton said in 1875, “the issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”
Here’s hoping that it’s sooner, rather than later!
