ORANGE COUNTY, NEW JERSEY, March 31 — “Bail out the people, not the banks!”
”You can’t rob the bank, but the bank can rob you!”
“Don’t evict Susie Johnson: Shame, shame, shame!”
These were just some of the vigorous chants heard on a quiet street in Orange, NJ when 35 committed protesters managed to block the eviction of an 80-year-old woman who has been a victim of predatory lending. The sheriff’s deputies were powerless to carry out their appointed task of removing this elderly woman, suffering from diabetes and incipient Alzheimer’s disease, from her little house.
The financial records of Mrs. Johnson’s mortgage were “lost” in 2004. She asked again and again to have the paperwork restored to her. Without her being informed, her mortgage was then bundled and moved from bank to bank. Although she obtained a reverse mortgage, this was snatched from her (that’s right — she was not allowed to make payments on it!) and sold by Wells Fargo to Chase. Mrs. Johnson was informed a year ago that she was being evicted for nonpayment.
Sexist, Racist Eviction
These kinds of scams are depriving millions of people in the U.S. of their homes. The pattern of predatory lending is especially sexist and racist: black women are five times as likely to have been offered predatory loan contracts than equivalent white men with identical financial profiles. This is not to say that most white men — other than those at the top — are benefiting from the system either.
The protesters outside Mrs. Johnson’s house came from a range of organizations participating in the New Jersey “Coalition for jobs, peace, justice, and equality.” Various labor unions, tenants’ rights organizations, anti-foreclosure groups, women’s organizations, and civil rights groups are working together around a series of demands seeking to protect the working class — especially in urban centers — from the ravages of the current financial situation. There is definitely no end to the “recession” in Newark and its nearby suburbs.
The coalition displays a number of the weaknesses and contradictions that accompany liberal formations. While people generally distrust the government, there are plenty of illusions that a “good sheriff” will not carry out his/her duties, if enough popular pressure is applied.
The “banks” tend to be separated out from the rest of the capitalist system. But the people in the coalition are a multiracial group of committed activists. When one speaker spoke about the long-term as well as immediate goals of our movement — including establishing a social system whose purpose is to produce fully realized human beings rather than profits — she received warm applause.
PL’ers need to root themselves in movements like this one in New Jersey, to participate in the struggle for immediate gains, to make friends, to build a movement that can target capitalism as the “real enemy” of the great majority of the world’s people.