The Great Middle Class Housing Scam, or The Whale
Call me Ishmael.
So, there I was. I had just gotten out of work early, being that we got only a few samples in that Friday. I had gone from the lab, up River street to the CVS/Trader Joe's parking lot. I needed dish soap and hair soap. Heading over to Ocean Street, where I'd make my turn and head off to home, is when I saw it. Something to write about. That something was a climate protest being held at the Chase bank at the corner.
The protest was being held by Extinction Rebellion Santa Cruz. They were protesting Chase being the leader in financing fossil fuels. At least that's what a little info card one of the protesters gave me said. I couldn't find anyone affiliated with ERSC that would actually say anything to me. There were journalists there, and they seemed to know just as much as me. I literally got the cold shoulder and ignored. I guess I don't look like a journalist enough to get spoken to. Or maybe, they expected to me to passively take in the performance like the other journalists. Oh, yes, you heard me right and correctly. The performance.
If you've read any articles at Gods & Radicals, you may have come across stories told by individuals that have worked and organized with groups like Extinction Rebellion; stories of frustration, disappointment, and disillusionment. I had tried for less than five minutes to get someone, anyone, to talk to me about what was going on. Less than five minutes, and I was already fed up with these assholes. What was going on here was not just a protest, it was music and dancing! The performers were middle class people, mostly baby boomer age people and underage people from the look of it. They were protesting with highly choreographed dancing to high paced dance music from the 70's, at one point it was literally the Bee Gee's “Stayin' Alive”, which is totally on brand!
You'd probably be wondering right now, what my problem is with all this. I often write about using art to protest, for magik, etc. etc. Shouldn't this be right up my alley? Well, it is to the same extent that painting by numbers is right up my alley. It is to the same degree that a “chemistry set” that consists of nothing but one off disposable experiments that don't actually help you learn chemistry is right up my alley. In other words, no.
You could tell just by looking that none of what was going on was actually disrupting any extinction. Because if you looked around, you'd of seen the cops on the other side of the block, just in case, with their totally relaxed posture. And you'd of known, deep down in your heart, that Chase doesn't care and that the status Q is just fine. I guess I could go on about how performative catharsis steals the energy from people who are genuinely fed the fuck up with status Q, and want to do something, and funnels that energy into “safe” outlets like the one I had witnessed; while keeping said people out of trouble and continuing to push the economy forward. In other words, it keeps the peasants in line. I could, but I won't. Because I want to tell you a different story.
It is a story that is not unique, and its lack of uniqueness makes it all the more monstrous. This story is about Chase, but not about the climate, necessarily. It is about Capitalism, but not about how Capitalism funds extinction. Sorry ERSC, you had your fucking chance to get more attention. To be sure, it would have been negative attention, and maybe they were right to steer clear of me. But now they only get a few paragraphs, because the real story I found was about a gent who was there that I will call Home Owner, or HO for short. He had shown up with a small stack of papers, no doubt his “evidence” that he wasn't lying, and was hoping to talk to someone, anyone. He also at first did that thing that most people do when they think people don't want to hear about their personal woes, by trying and easily failing to make it about the housing crisis in California when we first started talking. He later dropped the bullshit when he realized that I'd listen to his personal story and didn't need it to be about the bigger picture in order to care. Monstrous Capitalism indeed.
So I stepped aside with HO, out of the range of the loud speakers blaring disco music, and heard his story of woe. About how Chase bank scammed him out of his house. Later, after talking to him some, it was also readily apparent that the story was also of how he proceeded to throw everything else he had away in a mad Captain Ahab quest to get his house back. Of course, I'm paraphrasing. Because he hasn't given up, and definitely doesn't consider his goal of getting his house back to be mad at all.
His trouble began in 2008. Remember 2008? Anyway, the econopocalypse happened in the United States, which means it happened everywhere. Then President George Bush signed a bailout into law to the tune of 700 billion. Building infrastructure to combat and end the threats from anthropogenic climate change? Way too expensive, no way. Bank bailout? Fuck yes a bank bailout, we're Americans! We like bald eagles and bull markets, waaaaaaaaa-hoooooooo! Ave Iupeter! But anyway, 700 billion.
Leading up to this, HO was doing all right for himself. He had a nice house worth around 1.4 million. He even was buying and selling at a profit small bits of land himself. “Everyone was doing it”, HO told me. Yeah, everyone in his economic strata that he considered worth talking to was doing it. The same greed that drove the housing bubble also drove what came after. When the bubble burst, and the economy tanked, Washington Mutual took a dive, hard. HO had his home loan with WaMu, whose CEO said in 2003, “We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs(...)”. The talented executives of that company then beached it like it was a whale named Wamu, and not a bank that people had foolishly put their trust in. But fear not, they did “do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs” before they died.
So, HO's loan got picked up by Chase bank. Chase bank, thirsty for max cash, decided to scam a whole bunch of people out of their houses. They did this like all scam artists have been doing since the Ur cities of the Bronze age rose out of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. First, you find your mark. He's gullible, greedy, and falls for sunk cost fallacy harder than most. You then “get him in” on the scam, in other words, you make him think he's your partner. For HO, it was telling him to skip his mortgage payments, so they could renegotiate his loan and get him some of that sweet 700 billion bail out money.
How it actually happened is that that money was always to bail the banks out, not the people. So it was a lie. 'The people on the phone were trained to encourage people not to make their payment'. They only told him that so they could get the bail-out on his loan, and take his house, all at the same time, all on taxpayer money. He believed it because he was a good mark. And they didn't even have to look for him. They just went down the list of home loans they dug out of Wamu's beached corpse and took all the houses from people too greedy and gullible to turn down free government money that, had they spent a moment educating themselves on what the bail-out actually was, would have been obviously not for them in any way. The scam would have been and should have been obvious. It always should be obvious. But that's why the mark has to be gullible and greedy. You hook him by the gullibility, and reel him in with the greed before he snaps out of being that gullible.
So at that point, even HO concedes that he had a choice. Either admit that he's a gullible, greedy, Middle-class asshole that just got knocked out of his hard won, completely worthless middle-class status, i.e. his house, and go on with his life. His wife was still on board at that point! Can you believe that shit? Like that was love and shit! She stayed after watching her husband get scammed out of a fucking house! She really loved him! And he still had kids to raise. His other choice was to fight to get his house back. If you know anything about whales or dicks, you might be able to see where this is going.
At the beginning of 2011 his house was foreclosed on. Which means they had already seized it, and sold it. By 2018, after much savings draining legal fuckery, Chase finally agreed to and delivered an out of court settlement, including paying off his lawyer. It must have seemed like a watershed moment. HO took the offer, and found that the new loan for his house, the “modification” he had been through so much for, was for a loan with interest worth more than the original lean on the house. Basically, they had managed to scam him a second time! They charged him all the interest for all that time, plus money he had already paid, because records are so easy to shred, aren't they?
So of course in November of that year, they foreclosed on the house again. This time it seems for good. HO was evicted in 2019. So after getting scammed twice, his wife left. Twelve years before the mast will have anyone looking for land. His kids are grown up. They have their own lives now, and have no need for such a house. At this point, if you're like me, you're probably wondering, 'who is this house for now?'. I don't think he bothers to think that far ahead anymore. This is a guy that was buying and selling land, acting rich. This is a guy that was so into the shady rich person land deal shit that he got fucked by an even shadier rich person, and a non-human rich person at that. This is a guy who shows up to other people's protests, irrationally hoping anyone will listen to him and maybe even help him. But no one can, he defaulted on a loan and then settled out of court. He's never getting that house back. It isn't the house he wants anyway. He wants to not be the fool that got scammed. He wants to be 'rich' again, even though rich is relative and he was never even close to being actually in that bank account weight class. Maybe he even thinks that he'll get the family back, if he just can get that house back. It is probably a little of all that. But you can never go back, you can only try to learn and move forward.
And that's it. No “From Hell's heart I strike at thee!” None of that. It's Moby Dick, but without the finality of such a violent confrontation. HO is still out there, just trying to get a house back for a family that has moved on, in a world that has moved on from 2008 housing scams. I often see in the tech news, people talking about “being disruptive” as the new path forward for businesses, especially new businesses. What they often don't cover in the “be disruptive” narrative is the lives that get up-ended from that disruption. What they talk about even less is when “being disruptive” wanders into scam and theft category. No one talks about that part because no one wants to believe it. The status Q needs that middle-class to believe that the system works for them. But HO found out too late, that just because one has six figures to blow on a house once, that this does not mean that he has common cause with the Archons. He thought he was wealthy, but his little pile of equity was a paltry figure in a ledger to the non-human thing that took his house. Only worth the time because of the mass theft it was situated in.
As of March 9, 2020, the markets have taken a beating, experiencing the same harsh correction that triggered the 2008 housing route. Also, it is the first time since 1997 that it was so bad they just cut trading automatically across the board, a circuit breaker stop. But its fine, I'm sure all the problems, scams, and shady shit that led to the last housing market was addressed and it will never happen again. Yeah right. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to buy some staple foods and toilet paper.
Patacelsus
A Discordian for 20 years, Patacelsus finally got comfortable when the 21st century “started getting weird.” When not casting sigils, taking part in Tibetan Buddhist rituals, or studying the unfortunate but sometimes amusing stories of the dead, he’s been known to wander the hidden ways of the city, communing with all of the hidden spirits one can find in a city. As Patacelsus sees it, we’re all already free; after completing the arduous task of waking up to that we can then proceed, like a doctor treating a patient, to try to rouse others from the bitter and frightening nightmares of Archism. He laughs at Samsara’s shadow-play in lovely California, in the company of his wife, two cats, and two birds.