A-Infos (en) US, NortWest anarchist Common Action Newsletter INTERSECTIONS, Vol. 1, Issue 2 -

Common Action announces the second issue of our newsletter Intersections. 
Whether its government bailouts, busses, or baseball, our newsletter strives to 
bring anarchist ideas to community and neighborhood issues. We hope you enjoy 
it! This issue's contents include: * Economic Rescue From the Bottom Up by Greg 
A. * Economic Crisis: Anarchist Solutions from Mexico by Joshua Neuhouser * WASL 
Fight Heats Up by Sylvia Jones * Portland, OR: No to High Bus Fares by Brandon 
Feld * Big Money, Bad Baseball by Andrew Hedden ---- Intersections is available 
as a PDF http://www.classactionalliance.org/intersections2.pdf for reading and 
printing. Individual articles will appear on-line soon. To get a hard copy, or 
to let us know what you think, hit us up at nwcommonaction@gmail.com

Economic Rescue From the Bottom Up - The working class is too big to fail By Greg A.

Across the country, home foreclosures
and job layoffs are on the rise. While we
worry about our paychecks and homes,
the government is giving money to banks
that are "too big to fail" and asking them
kindly to prevent a collapse of the
economy by lending it out. We have little
direct control over Wall Street, but
anything we can do to prevent
foreclosures and evictions from Main
Street to Martin Luther King Way will
directly impact the local economy.
So how did we get here? In the 1990s,
the Republican-controlled Congress
deregulated the banking industry. For
years, banks made a fortune by making
risky loans, bundling them, and selling
them to other banks while lying about the
risk. Many borrowers were lied to about
the terms of their loan and their ability to
pay. As long as house prices rose, the
banks were happy to profit off the
mortgages, mortgage-backed securities,
and other unregulated speculative side
bets.
But when interest rates started rising and
home prices started falling, many
homeowners couldn't afford their higher
mortgages but also couldn't sell their
homes. To make matters worse, the
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and
Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA)
was rushed through Congress in 2005,
making it harder to
prevent foreclosure.
When banks started
foreclosing on homes,
they realized that the
mortgage-backed
securities they bought
were worth much less
than they thought. As the
banks saw the value of
their assets drop, they all
tried to sell at the same
time, which caused the
value of their assets to
plummet. Next thing you
know, banks started failing, and the
government began planning a bailout.
Many working people who depend on a
paycheck to survive are rightfully
skeptical about the bailout. Why should
we care if banks fail, and why should
renters care about the plight of
homeowners?
Th e answer is tha t our econo mic
problems are all connected. The
mismanagement of the financial industry
has led to a credit crunch in which many
businesses are unable to get short-term
loans, which they need in order to
consistently make payroll. Without the
loans, companies must scramble to get
cash, or lay off their employees. A
further worry is that working people,
unsure of their income and without
access to consumer credit, will spend
less, causing businesses to lay off
workers to cut back supply.
Meanwhile, home foreclosures turn
former owners into renters. While homes
sit empty, apartment building occupancy
goes up, driving rent up. If you own your
home, it loses its value. If you rent, your
rent goes up, and you can't even get a
loan to buy a foreclosed home.
It all adds up to a downward economic
spiral. The bailout proposals are an
attempt to stop the cycle by helping out
those at the top. The trouble is that bank
CEOs know that it's in their self-interest
to hold on to the bailout money and try to
ride out the economic crisis. The CEO of
Merrill Lynch recently said of the bailout
cash, "At least for the next quarter, it's
just going to be a cushion."
Democrats and Republicans alike would
have us believe that the crisis and any
solution to it is beyond our control. But
the true threat of the crisis is its impact
on the broadly defined working class ­
those of us who depend on a paycheck to
keep our homes and feed our families. It
is our participation in the economy that
keeps it all going. If we stick together,
we can build a grassroots bailout from
the bottom up--because the working
class is too big to fail.

Across the country, working people are
fighting back with eviction and
foreclosure resistance. As Howard Zinn
explains in A People's History of the
United States, this tactic helped save
homes during the Great Depression. This
resistance prompted government-
imposed foreclosure moratoriums and
led to the introduction of federal New
Deal programs in 1933.
Throughout the past year, the Bank
Tenants Association, organized in
Boston by City Life / Vida Urbana
(www.clvu.org), has resisted
foreclosures. By taking direct action and
blockading foreclosed homes, they have
succeeded in forcing banks to
renegotiate terms. In other cases,
homeowners were allowed to pay rent
after a foreclosure rather than be evicted
only to have the house sit empty.
In Detroit, Moratorium NOW!
(www.moratorium-mi.org/) has
succeeded in preventing a foreclosure
and prevented evictions of tenants in
foreclosed rental properties.
And here in the Pacific Northwest, the
Seattle Solidarity Network
(www.seattlesolidarity.net) has had
successes in related struggles. In June,
they successfully helped tenants win
their legally entitled relocation
assistance from their landlord when the
Green Lake Motel was shut down.
As news of these wins spread, more
communities are standing together to
fight back for a real economic rescue--
from the bottom up.

I N T E R S E C T I O N S
A publication of Common Action www.nwcommonaction.org December/January 2008-2009
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