Where is your CVC code?
On January 26, a group of activists with Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing is a Human Right and Occupy Wall Street interrupted another foreclosure action in Brooklyn with their singing. (Frida Berrigan reported on the first of these actions back in October.) As you can see from the above video, after selling only one house out of four, the auction was aborted and 39 people were arrested.
In an email interview with Karen Gargamelli, an attorney with Common Law who is involved with O4O, she explains why they have chosen this melodic tactic:
We sing because it is non-violent and because it is beautiful. We hope to confound the systems that evict New Yorkers (the courts) and the elected officials that refuse to regulate the big banks with loveliness.
With this easy-to-learn song, O4O hopes these blockades will spread across the country, and effect what Gargamelli called “a people’s moratorium” that would create “real negotiating power between homeowners and lenders.” The next singing auction blockade is planned for February 17th in Queens.
I admire and support peaceful civil disobedience. However, this protest appears to be counter-intuitive.
If the houses were already foreclosed, then they were owned by the lender and they were attempting to sell the properties like anyone has a right to do.
By stopping the sales, the only thing the protest did was stop the economy from rebounding. A home sale to owners who can afford the property means that taxes are paid to municipalities, which means government can run; schools can hire teachers, or first responders, or even website developers, etc.
While I think the issues of lack of control and oversight of the mortgage market got us into this mess (in part) – stopping the sales at this juncture for the sake of protest in this case really makes no logical sense except to those who made the protest.
The houses won’t be going back to their original note holders and most foreclosures take months or years to process – so it seems that by impeding the sales the protesters really are hurting not the banks, but everyday citizens who just want the economy to improve.
I see what you’re saying David, but as someone who has participated in these singing auction protests multiple times, I have to say that these protests transcend the mechanisms of how (we are told) the housing recovery works, and they are instead a protest against the idea that court systems should spend incredible amounts of energy facilitating the sale of families homes. If courts are supposed to engage in justice, what is just about this?
The way we understand housing in the U.S. is now so out-of-whack, both from a moral stance and from an economic incentives stance, and it takes protests at all levels of the machine to halt it.
These singing auction actions are part of a much larger housing justice movement that includes eviction blockades and home takeovers–direct actions at every human joint at this machine.
For more information, check out some of the articles I’ve been writing for WNV on this topic!
Foreclosure housing can be a good bargain or a financial nightmare. I admire them for this peaceful counter-intuitive.