
The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 19 that the Obama administration was pushing heavily to get the 50 state attorneys general to agree to a settlement with five major banks in the “robo-signing” scandal. The settlement would let Wall Street bankers off the hook for crimes that would land the rest of us in jail.

It’s become standard procedure for real estate companies and their eviction attorneys to “move quickly to take the homes from these homeowners, harassing and scaring them, using guerrilla tactics like threatening to get the sheriff to remove them in four hours. But if we all stay together,” Delia Aguilar, an organizer with the Bay Area Moratorium (BAM), said, “we can defeat them and keep our homes.”

The original owner of the home is sitting in the catbird seat and doesn’t know it. Millions of people who THINK they have lost their homes still own them. If we the people pick up the tab for more Wall Street bankruptcies, we should insist on owning the banks.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters conducts her drug war from the top down. Her view is to follow the money. Our government wages drug war on street vendors. The government’s view is to lock up as many young Blacks as is possible.

It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

There have been over 4,000 home foreclosures in Oakland since early 2007 and home foreclosures are currently the leading cause of evictions.

Banco de Venezuela is one of the most important banks in Venezuela, with a 12 percent share of the market in loans and obtained profits of US$170 million in the first half of 2008, a 29 percent increase on 2007, when its profits had already increased by 20 percent. It has 285 offices and 3 million customers. Banco de Venezuela was nationalized in 1994 after a massive banking crisis which bankrupted 60 percent of the banking sector, only to be privatized in 1996 and bought by the Spanish multinational banking group Grupo Santander for only US$300 million. In only nine months Grupo Santander recovered its original investment.