Pretty Boy Floyd by Woodie Guthrie

Yes, there’s many a starving farmer

The same story told

How the outlaw paid their mortgage

And saved their home.

Some rob you with a six gun

Some with a fountain pen

Don Corleone, the Godfather, speaking to Sonny

“Don’t you want to become a lawyer? Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks.”

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, 2004

Mafia bosses often start out as street thugs. But over time, the ones who make it to the top transform their appearance. They take to wearing impeccably tailored suits, owning legitimate businesses, and wrapping themselves in the cloak of upstanding society. They support local charities and are respected by their communities. These men appear to be model citizens. However, beneath this patina is a trail of blood. When the debtors cannot pay, hit men move in to demand their pound of flesh. If this is not granted, the jackals close in with baseball bats, Finally, as a last resort, out come the guns.

Facing Foreclosure? Don't Leave. Squat

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/04-8

February 4, 2009

Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is the longest-serving Democratic congresswoman in U.S. history. Her district, stretching along the shore of Lake Erie from west of Cleveland to Toledo, faces an epidemic of home foreclosures and 11.5 percent unemployment. She criticizes the bailout's failure to protect homeowners facing foreclosure. Her advice to "squat" cleverly exploits a legal technicality within the subprime-mortgage crisis. These mortgages were made, then bundled into securities and sold and resold repeatedly, by the very Wall Street banks that are now benefiting from TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program). The banks foreclosing on families very often can't locate the actual loan note that binds the homeowner to the bad loan. "Produce the note," Kaptur recommends those facing foreclosure demands of the banks.

Meltdown Madness: The Human Costs of the Economic Crisis

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/29-12

Jan 29, 2009

The body count is still rising. For months on end, marked by bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, and layoffs, the economic meltdown has taken a heavy toll on Americans. In response, a range of extreme acts including suicide, self-inflicted injury, murder, and arson have hit the local news. It's mostly on Main Street, not Wall Street, that people are being driven to once unthinkable extremes. And while it's always impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to drastic acts, violent or otherwise, many of those recently reported are undoubtedly tied, at least in part, to the way the bottom seems to be falling out of the economy. As a result, reports of people driven to anything from armed robbery to financially-motivated suicide in response to new fiscal realities continue to bubble to the surface. And since only a certain percentage of such acts receive media coverage, the drumbeat of what is being reported definitely qualifies as startling.

With no job and 5 kids, 'better to end our lives,' man wrote

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/28/family.dead.california/index.html

Jan 28, 2009

It was described as one of the most grisly scenes Los Angeles police had ever encountered: the bodies of five small children and their parents, all shot to death, in two upstairs rooms of the family's home.

The Rising Body Count on Main Street

The Human Fallout from the Financial Crisis

Oct 20, 2008

Suicide is just one type of extreme act for which the financial meltdown has seemingly been the catalyst. Since the beginning of the year, stories of resistance to eviction, armed self-defense, canicide, arson, self-inflicted injury, murder, as well as suicide, especially in response to the foreclosure crisis, have bubbled up into the local news, although most reports have gone unnoticed nationally -- as has any pattern to these events. Troubling trends are to be expected in the years ahead, especially as hundreds of thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, their families often already under enormous stress, are coming home to scenarios of joblessness and, in some cases, hopelessness.

Bush: No Bailout for Pinched Homeowners

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/08/09/national/w112030D23.DTL&tsp=1

August 9 2007

President Bush said Thursday concern should be shown those who've lost their homes but it's not the federal government's job to bail them out. "Obviously anybody who loses their home is somebody with whom we must show an enormous empathy," Bush said. Asked whether he would champion a government bailout? Bush responded: "If you mean direct grants to homeowners, the answer would be `No, I don't support that.'"

Bernanke: Go Slow on Subprime Regulation

http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/17/real_estate/Bernanke_on_subprime/index.htm

May 17, 2007

Facing criticism from some members of Congress over lax regulation of the nation's mortgage market, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke came out swinging Thursday against too much government intrusion in the troubled subprime mortgage business. In a speech before the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Thursday, Bernanke outlined the background and run-up to the present crisis in subprime lending and gave his view of what adjustments government regulators needed to make to minimize the scope and severity of subprime mortgage problems.

Foreclosure Rates Still Soaring

http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/14/real_estate/April-foreclosures/index.htm?postversion=2007051505

May 15, 2007

Foreclosures continue to trouble real estate markets nationwide, with filings in April up 65 percent from a year earlier, according to a report released Tuesday. Six out of the 10 hardest hit cities were in California with Stockton registering the nation's highest rate, 1 foreclosure filing for every 131 households. Other California cities in the top 10 included No. 2 Vallejo-Fairfield and No. 4 Riverside-San Bernardino.

The Ugly Face of Foreclosure

http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/02/real_estate/face_of_foreclosure/index.htm?postversion=2007050718

May 07, 2007

Foreclosures are devastating communities across the United States, and the impact may only worsen as more subprime adjustable mortgages reset during the next few months. The vacancies look bad enough, but it's what happens next that really hurts. "The bad people in a community find out right away when a house has been foreclosed on," said Hayden. "They come in and steal the copper plumbing. I've even seen them strip the aluminum siding off to sell. The houses become havens for drug dealers."

Fighting those problems off, stabilizing the community and redeveloping blighted areas are a challenge for cash-starved municipalities. And they have less money to pay for it because foreclosures cause tax collections to suffer. Not only do foreclosures, abandonment and demolition take properties off the tax rolls; the remaining homeowners often want their assessments lowered and taxes cut to reflect their plummeting property values.