Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Somebody Stole My Bootstraps!

Thoughts About Foreclosures and the Homestead Act while driving on 27

"I Need A Roof Over My Head" Sugar Minot http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ-VOROmPz4&feature=related


I know I owe my friends a post on immigration. And every time I keep writing, it becomes like 10 pages. But it is coming, I swear.

Anyway, I was driving back to Miami from my mother’s central Florida neighborhood. She moved there to retire in a community that was supposed to be vibrant, up and coming, and all those other words that should raise red flags. Families from all over the country moved into a bunch of small towns on the I-4 corridor that connects Tampa and Orlando on the premise that one day the entire region was going to merge into one big metropolitan dream world. Think of it as a giant Cigar-smoking (Ybor City) Mickey Mouse (Orlando) with a Buccaneers (Tampa) hat-on…listening to Salsa (Kissimmee)…or something.

But in the process, a lot of my mom’s new neighbors fell into foreclosure. Seeing new friends come and go and seeing people suffer the humiliation of losing a home is enough to affect anyone. But it is hard to record any of the real suffering of real people in statistics or numbers: the mother who loses her first home, the father who lives in his first homeless shelter, the Sheriff forced to oversee an eviction, the depressed son who drinks himself to death over the depression of losing all he ever worked for.

And like every crisis before it, there is always that League of Extraordinary A$$holes that tell us to put the primary blame on working and poor folks themselves. Because they should have known better, they should have invested better, taken more PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. As I was driving back down to Miami on Highway 27, passing more empty homes and boarded up businesses. I started thinking about the ghosts of social mobility, and those damn BOOTSTRAPS.

Ever since I was young, when Rakim was the greatest rapper alive, and when my mom accidentally took me to see “Fatal Attraction” in the theaters, poor and working people have been lectured into pulling themselves up by their BOOTSTRAPS.

“You have to own your own home…by any means necessary” was the typical scolding. As if having a mortgage was the equivalent of the March on Washington, or the Catholic Sacrament of Baptism. Every community forum, every talk on economic development, every discussion that had people with money talking to people without money made it seem as if renting was one of the seven deadly sins. The message was always loud and clear: To break into the middle class you have to own your own home. And contrary to popular opinion, the folks I grew up with listened. Many took out loans, saved a lot of money, did what they had to do, by any means necessary, to own a home. They thought they where being proactive. All of this was in the name of economic independence and PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and of course, those damn BOOTSTRAPS.

Whenever anyone second-guessed the wisdom of trading their souls for their own home, everyone from their pseudo financial advisor (i.e. their cousin Rufus) to that dude Cramer on CNBC would tell them to suck it up and pay way too much for a way too shitty home. Because home prices never go down…Ever.

As the housing market crashed…well I don’t need to tell you what happened. Over $10 trillion dollars of home wealth was lost. After the Banks and Wall Street got their trillion-dollar bailout, many homeowners thought help was just around the corner. But the same people that told poor and working people for years that they had to pull themselves up by their BOOTSTRAPS and own their own home, were now telling them that they should have been smarter, should have been more RESPONSIBLE when trying to buy their own/first home.

So even though I am told by people a lot smarter than me that it would have probably cost no more than $400 million dollars to help bailout homeowners that were losing their primary residence to foreclosures; even though Banks received almost a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to cover up their own mistakes in screwing over our entire economy; the only help that homeowners received was the equivalent of a token to ride the subway…after the subway stopped taking tokens.

But even after witnessing the transfer of trillion dollar welfare checks to Wall Street, the same League of Extraordinary A$$holes kept saying that bailing out homeowners was irRESPONSIBLE, even un-American. I mean what is our economic system, if people can’t pull themselves up by their BOOTSTRAPS?

If you haven’t figured out by now, I freaking hate the words BOOSTRAPS and PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. Because most a$$holes that use these words in a sentence mean it for everyone beside themselves (I mean, who the hell has BOOTSTRAPS anyway?). But I also hate it because anyone that took more than five US history classes will know that the Federal Government helping homeowners is as American as…well as American as stealing Native American land…or apple pie...or baseball…or something.

Whenever you watch those old Western movies, you sort of take for granted that people just went out West with no help from anyone…just a whole bunch of BOOTSTRAPS pulled up. But the West would not have been settled to the extent that it was without THE HOMESTEAD ACT (and the US Army declaring open war on Native Americans after trying to push them west of the Mississippi…other story, other post).

The Homestead Act
, first signed into law in 1862, basically granted Federal lands in the West to almost anyone that wanted them for FREE, provided that they file an application, improve the land, and file for deed of title. Oh and they couldn’t have ever taken up arms against the US government. As a result of the US Government basically giving land away for free, 1.6 million homesteads where granted (mostly in the west), about 420, 000 square miles. This means that about 10% of all land in the United States was settled by people who were given land for free! What’s more, the last state to give up Homestead land grants was Sarah Palin’s own Alaska, in the 1980’s!

So all this sh*t about the rugged West full of pulled up BOOTSTRAPS was a lie to hide what was probably one of the biggest socialist welfare giveaways of American history. A welfare handout that built the West and helped inspire a generation of movies about rugged individualism.

As families are suffering everyday in the worst economy since the great depression, as some five million homes fall into foreclosure, there are no big ideas: no Manifest Destinies, no Wars on Foreclosures, no Homestead Acts to offer a basic way out for families. Those big ideas where reserved for the rich, the too big to fail. But on the I-4 corridor, and in communities across America you see working people that bought the whole BOOTSTRAP bit and built their whole lives around it. Only to learn that someone else stole their BOOTSTRAPS.

I leave you with “A House is Not a Home” by Sugar Minott http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=QZa_NxNvM0M&feature=related

Questions, comments, concerns? Get at me crazyindiansk@gmail.com

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In Love and Struggle