Foreclosure-Gate: Why The Banks Must Not Get Away With This

10-26-2010 • Market-ticker.denninger.org/

Here's the problem: If the people get into their head that not only politicians can do this sort of thing and get away with it when it comes to things like traffic tickets, but banks can literally rob the people with predatory lending and then enlist the courts to screw them a second time in unjustly evicting them from their house, there is a point where they will snap. That point is where people vote from the rooftop. That's a bad place to see someone cast a ballot. Our society relies on the general premise that you can walk from the grocery store door to your car, and from your car into your apartment, in reasonable safety. That's part of the unwritten social contract that binds all of us together. Nobody passed a law to make it thus - those laws were all passed for other reasons (e.g. "no murdering, no raping, no pillaging") - but the general agreement among the population that these laws apply to everyone, and the people who disobey them will be punished, is why you can, in fact, walk from your car to your apartment with a reasonable expectation that you'll get there without any extra holes added to your body. If this element of reasonable expectation is lost, we have instant madness. Once the population gets into its head that the very legal code that says you can't steal someone's house by lying about debts in court only applies to them, and not to banks, we're not far from the general population deciding that the rest of the law doesn't apply either - and if the banks aren't going to play it legal and straight neither will they. Society cannot survive in its present form if that decision is taken by even a tiny percentage of the population. There simply are not enough cops - federal, state, local or otherwise - to enforce the law if the general social contract breaks down. You want to see the economy shut down? I mean really shut down? All we have to do is see a handful of people lose everything, conclude they have no recourse to the law despite lawlessness by the banks, and then take the critical (and ugly) next step and decide they have nothing left to lose. Will you go to the mall and shop if this sort of thing starts happening? Nope - and neither will I. We'll wind up like Mexico, and damn fast too. No thanks.