Understanding the Bloodsucking Mortgage Mess

Last summer ‘07, the Federal Reserve pumped in $38 billion to shore up the tumbling Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), which declined over 1300 points from a record high 14,000 in July. It plummeted to around 12,340 during the second week of August. A slide triggered by massive defaults in US subprime mortgages, international investors at that time hoped the European Central Bank and the Fed would arrange a currency swap as a “market calming measure“.

We may safely assume that Wall Street bankers deliberately set up this house of cards to seize back financial control from London. Offered for substantiation, the ECB expected a more rapid fall in Europe’s stock markets, while American banks expressed fear of lending anywhere “east of 212” (NYC), thereby leaving Europe hanging.

In April, the Fed gave $30 billion dollars to Bear Stearns for its parasitic role in the subprime housing swindle. Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in America, sold its stock to JP Morgan Chase – after the Fed’s act of criminal charity – to the tune of $2 per share. The dollar remains weak against major foreign currencies; oil is over $110 per barrel; the colonial wars suck about $12 billion monthly from the economy; and there is a $9 trillion trade deficit. But the Fed can lend money to institutions which have precipitated economic crisis.

For those working people hoping to save money or to invest in the stock market, rather all you hard working folks better invest in guns and save lots of bullets to keep the economic crisis from stealing your jobs and homes. You better get your union kindred agitated, warn your neighbors a storm is coming and make revolution. Because working people will get nowhere fast with a KEOGH Plan, a 401k, CDs or any other investment strategy that the bosses have conned you into over the last fifteen years. You better get armed and ready, because the current policies presage the economic equivalent of ethnic cleansing; so Ghetto and Barrio denizens beware.

The stock market peaked at 14,000 points last July, since then ravaged by a jagged decline characterizing a recession that hasn’t yet made its voracious appetite known to your wallet. The lag between the mounting financial crisis and its effects on the working class relates directly to how the big money rollers have strategized to shift this weight onto the producing classes. They have already shifted massive weight from the subprime crisis onto black and Latino workers without any serious repercussions, as the Fed bails out banks but not people.

To understand how the stock market operates requires an analysis of how land became transformed into a commodity, now known as real estate, by capitalism. In a process which took centuries to achieve, and the crowning glory of capitalism today fundamentally derives off the back of colonially enslaved peoples. Capitalism is a system that is by no means level or balanced. It takes place gradually, with peaks and low points, but it is finite. Capitalism has a finite existence, just as did feudalism. Capitalism is finite because its processes are limited, being based on private (bourgeois) ownership and labor degradation.

For instance, German and Italian capital formation accelerated only after they merged disparate city-states into their respective national governments during the late 1800s. That move allowed the capitalists to have maximized concentration and control over capital resources: land, labor, finance and equipment. Yet they had been edged out of the colonial jumpstart, so they turned to fascism, a Malthusian model. The fascist countries turned colonial-like brutality upon their own population, having no colonies or ineffective colonial control, like Spain and Portugal. Capitalist wars remain inevitable because of the crises inherent within a system of maximum competition for resources and power. Spain, Portugal, Germany and Italy were all edged out of the colonial game. The Serbs displayed openly fascist tendencies during their military campaigns against the Bosnians, after breaking away from the Soviet sphere in the 1990s.

Europeans who invaded North America and other zones gained vast tracts of land stolen from newly colonized peoples, which the settlers documented as their own private property. This “free” land accounts for the dominant role of the US in the World economy. Settler occupation accommodates many important categories of social formation including access to timber, minerals, agriculture, population growth, industrial expansion, military use, and so forth. English-speaking settlers drove the Native Americans off vast tracts of land, then financial institutions transformed all this territory into real estate. Since the original sin of land piracy, no mass of people may ever control land in North America without the system of international finance capital intervening.

Nevertheless, home ownership as a primary aspect of social mobility has always been part of the American mythos, and white folks in America often become enraged when they sense they have been denied access to their piece of the pie. That is how we have arrived, in part, to today’s present credit crunch, based on the bourgeois theory that the American dream can be used to con millions of people out of trillions of dollars.

Of course, everybody kno that the labor product is appropriated and exchanged for asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) subsequently held as futures, securities or some other stake floated on paper to peel a profit off of anything produced, traded or consumed by working class people. Based upon a primarily manipulative assessment of what happens in this economy, working people get lured into investment schemes which persuade them to believe they may actually own part of the “American Dream”.

This swindle has been used against workers repeatedly in the housing market, the S&L bust outs, and stock-based retirement plans. Bank notes, shares, bearer bonds, stocks, mutual funds – their conversion from paper into real assets defines the best part of a process that 98% of all people lack any inkling of whatsoever. These abstracts increase in value when assisted by the State thru such legal maneuvers as “imminent domain”, overnight billion dollar “liquidity grants”, and other efforts to advance corporate interests.

Then there’s the saying: AFTER EVERY BOOM FOLLOWS A BUST. The DotCom shake out bankrupted 401k plans, KEOGHs, and other retirement funds early in the Millennium. The Enron scandal era – which included MCI-WorldCom, Tyco and other notables – sucked up what was left. Teachers, clerks and other “educated” workers, whom most people expect to play it smart, got soaked. Think they would have learnt from the S&L swindles of the Eighties, like Whitewater and BCCI, when lenders robbed people outright and no perpetrators were ever prosecuted. Ken Starr preferred to scandalize the country with details of the president’s sexual exploits rather than expose the real crimes involved in the Clintons’ soaking of the savings and loans market in the Whitewater escapade.

Currently, the DJIA is down thirteen percent from its all time high last July. Subprime housing loans drove the stampede to mortgage lenders during the Greenspan era, now the crash bludgeons even buyers with perfect credit. Retail sales lag; gas prices have forced the price of flour – a leading economic indicator – to double. This suggests that all foodstuffs will increase in price very soon. Working people have begun to submit to their flagellation without so much as a whimper, and the big capitalists are cheesing.

One key propaganda point driving the subprime housing trend during the Greenspan era was to make home ownership available for “minorities” and low-income working families. However, anyone can reasonably anticipate that an economic backlash must snap on the tail end of every boom. That view comes easily acquired, since a crisis in social relations exists under Imperialism. This crisis occurs at the convergence of the class struggle, that is, at the point of production where the value created by working people gets stripped away by profiteers, capitalists, and the imperialist State.

What, exactly, has prompted homeowners to default en masse on the lowest available mortgage rates in history?

The housing market is a lender-operated investment scheme, a swindle sucking money out of the working class community to snowball finances into massive profits. A bank operates differently from an illegal pyramid scheme only inasmuch that banks offer big ticket items like buildings, automobiles and businesses, representative of the American dream. The bank controls security over all non-liquid assets not deposited in its accounts. When a mortgage gets signed, the bank pockets all fees and charges, then sells the mortgage to investors who convert it into asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP), floated worldwide. A minute number of deep pocket investors who control the voluminous horde of mortgage debtors, a.k.a. “homeowners”, determines that sooner or later the herd will be eaten.

In fact, the financial institution gets its money up front in the form of the down payment. Everytime that house gets sold, the bank gets paid first. The down payment gives the lender a fat cash cushion representing the real value of the house to the bank. This money allows to bank or other lender to be able to immediately sell off the mortgage to investors and speculators who will make their money over the long term.

Housing represents long-term asset-backed security for banks, which use mortgages to drive huge programs designed to profit from more complex investment schemes. Arbitrages, hedge funds and other schemes that go over everybody’s head on the finance page collect billions of dollars for investors to speculate/gamble with. When their gambling doesn’t pay off, the bank just collects bills for these investors, and seizes your home at foreclosure similar to the way the car dealer – not the bank – repossesses your car when you default on a bank loan.

Your house is a real asset that can be sold out from under you due to no fault of your own. Homes, stores, factories, office buildings, churches, hospitals, municipal quarters and malls all sit on mortgaged property so the investment belongs to those making the loan. Tho it is the loan which investors interest themselves in, they acquire supremacy over the market (economy) because of the massive value accumulated in so very few hands. When investors enforce collections, that results in market corrections.

During a “market correction”, business fail or curtail production, resulting in higher unemployment. This spiraling effect has nothing to do with production but is based on seedy speculators whose very existence obstructs the flow of goods and services. Resources bottled up by a parasitic redundancy in trade relations can lead to the point where conflicts and wars erupt. (We already established that violence is essential to capitalist relations.)

Indeed, the farmer can’t sell futures in his fruit crop because the bank owns the crop and controls the market where fruit must be sold. Third-party negotiators then acquire rights to the futures and so on in transactions which do not benefit the real producer. In a complex process of events, what society views as a necessity for its maintenance has been transformed into a commodity similar to the way land was transformed into real estate. The fruit crop has changed hands multiple times before it is even ready for market. When the negotiations get confused thru mismanagement or too much speculation, that drives prices. Hence, inflation results from wild speculation across the board. A paradox, society can thrive without the banks and stock market, but not without the farmer. This system of wild market speculation drives prices not costs, accounting for the rise of fuel, interest rates, food, college degrees, health insurance, everything.

American dreamers keep dreaming. Anyone without a convenient $150k to sink into a mutual fund cannot rationally think about becoming a genuine capitalist. That designates the level where investments begin, as any commercial may well tell you when they advertise portfolio prerequisites during PGA tournaments, MLB, NBA and NFL games. Pay attention so that you have a reply when employer hustles our coworkers into that conference room and tries to sell you all a KEOGH.

International finance capital, Imperialism, operates thru a political system which protects the swindlers and cares little for the masses. Hence, the massive “liquidity injections” given to the bloodsucking investment banks, compared with the piddling $600 “economic stimulus” checks sent to chumps by the IRS. IMF/World Bank policies account for the horrendous wars in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Credit-Suisse, Deutsche Bank, CITICORP, Ameriquest Mortgage, Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual and HSBC Finance Corp. lead the shake out in the current housing bust. Some are defendants in discriminatory lending suits being pressed by the NAACP. Nobody can quite quantify the social impact, but look forward to a renewed phase of the racist wars against America’s colonized workers and increased Imperialist warfare abroad.

Meanwhile, investors holding complex mortgage securities and Wall Street bankers always manage to come out on top. Homeowners, on the other hand, will never be winners under this system. The only advantage for the people is to decolonize their minds, return to the source, and break down Imperialism like kung fu masters…

What is the dollar value of one point on the NYSE? Anyone who doesn’t kno has no business letting their employers talk them into an IRA, CDs or a 401k. Refuse to let your union leaders follow the advice of business agents who want to invest dues money in the stock market. Have they explained how that loot is converted, transferred, traded, exported and reinvested, ultimately prompting you to rant about foreign products and their threat to American workers?! At the same time lenders poise to snatch the roof from over your family’s heads, you want to bomb China, India, Pakistan, Mexico and the Ghetto.

Dirty, sexy money is the root of great evils. Its finance scams originated when the folks who violently swindled North America from the Indians redistributed it amongst the haves. This swindlers regime imposed itself upon the new “Indians and slaves”, working class people. These same suckers pay record prices for gas swindled from Irak, then send their kids to fight terrorism.

Yes, they blame Mexicans for trying to flee a more repressed economy. Suckers blame the Arabs for resisting a Beast who occupies their land. They blame neo colonies like China and India for jumping at dollars held out to them by American financiers. Homesteaders who slaughtered American Indians for the robber barons turn to racist political theory out of expedience. They blame Blacks, just because. In the heartland of the Homelanders, an ideological campaign must be carried out to turn society right side up. Make it hard, if not impossible, to find a sucker for America’s racist, bloodsucking anti-labor con game.