He describes the number of retired Americans who are not able to save enough money to live on, and live in their cars with no family to care for them. People are isolated and living hand to mouth. He asks, “How did America’s elderly end up cheated of dignity?” After all, even poor countries have “informal social support systems” — otherwise known as families and communities. In America, social bonds have collapsed as extreme capitalism and profits above people have become the only priority. Haque refers to social bonds and close relationships as “unaffordable luxuries” in America that even third-world countries possess.
Sadly, he says that Americans appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die and suffer. “They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity, or having to numb the pain of it all away.”
Haque is spot-on. America may be monetarily wealthy, but it is morally bankrupt. The average American lives in a state of perpetual fear, living from paycheck to paycheck, with no safety-net if things go wrong. And when things go wrong- where do people turn? They have no where to turn for relief or a remedy because the courts grant justice to only those who can afford justice, pricing most Americans out of the justice market.
Justice and due-process must be purchased. Ask anyone who has sued a large bank for fraudulently foreclosing on their home with strong evidence of fraudulent tactics. Most homeowners eventually give up because they have exhausted their limited financial resources while the bank executes its procedural playbook backed by a billion-dollar budget. Why bother with the battle when the judicial bias against the homeowner is palatable.
In a civilized society, there would be built in safeties for homeowners, where a home and all of its equity could not be taken for several missed payments once or twice over the history of a thirty-year mortgage. Instead, the missed payment would but rolled into the principal due at the end of the loan and interest would be charged- as it should be. The banks have designed a system where Servicers are financially rewarded by deliberately causing a default to occur.
I am not condoning missing a house payment, and the homeowner is obligated to payback the missed payment with interest (if there is a holder in due course somewhere)- but life happens- and people are imperfect. If the consumer had any power in the market, the banks would not be permitted to implement such a drastically punitive system where homeowners must be perfect or risk being homeless.
A homeowner must make 360 payments perfectly ON TIME with no hiccups. If you are in the hospital, temporarily out of the country, or lose your job- and your payment is more than 5 days late- an avalanche of penalties and charges will start to accrue. If you call your loan servicer for assistance to correct the problem you will find that they have no incentive to help you bring your loan current- when they can try to confuse and trick you into default. The servicing industry is designed to be predatory to maximize bank profit- not to ensure the homeowner remains current.
If these pathologies happened in any other rich country — even in most poor ones — people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly.
Haque states we live in a predatory society. A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially (which they do). “It means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbors, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves”- or standing by why banks steal homes with fabricated documents.
Hague astutely points out that, “The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.” The banks are this invisible and insatiable predatory force that will strip all wealth from middle class homeowners.
In any other country in the world, people would revolt over the theft of homes by the presentation and filing of fabricated and forged documents, empty trusts and false securitizations. The courthouses would be mobbed, and the populace would refuse to pay their taxes if their leaders failed to meet the social contract.
When the banks, and the courts collude to steal homes- there is no justice. The banks have received a clear message they will not be prosecuted or punished for illegal activity if they can create a complex, convoluted, multi-tiered process of moving and undetectable parties. In fact, the move to e-mortgages and notes will virtually strip away transparency and allow the banks to manufacture the papertrail on-demand and perfect their criminal enterprise with a keystroke, thus circumventing hundreds of years of recording and UCC law. All accountability blurred.
The predators will soon control everything about you through databases. Your health records, your biometrics, your bank accounts, your purchases, your computer records, the GPS coordinates for your phone and new car- and have almost complete knowledge of your movement, contacts, income and social contacts.
You are witnessing the American decline and a nation suffering from pathological illnesses. This illness is caused by the American model of “extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, and the perversion of everyday virtue” according to Haque. Our own demise is reinforced by the “junk media, junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.” The foreclosure machine is a microcosm of everything that is wrong in America- where corruption is the norm, the rules are bent to accomodate the wealthy, and where profit at all costs matters than the lives of our fellow man.
