SQUATTING AMERICA

In his second inaugural address, President Bush offered a grand vision of for the future of America: the ownership society. We now know what such a property-obsessed society looks like: one where publicly bailed-out banks own thousands of boarded-up, foreclosed homes and the people are on the street. While the massive steroid-like injection of federal funds bailed-out the banks' broken balance sheets (instead of regulating them), it is doing far less to help families get back into foreclosed homes. Working-class households are experiencing a new kind of informality of residence not seen since the Great Depression. The stories are telling: NPR recently interviewed members of a growing tent camp of 400 along the American River in Sacramento and the he New York Times reports on an somewhat invisible mass of homeless families now cramming themselves into hotels after being evicted from their homes.

Take Back The Land is a group dedicated to re-taking control of the land in their communities from banks, real-estate powers, and the government which are not sitting on thousands of empty houses across the country as families are put out on the streets. Take Back the Land is headed They are the intersection of the radical and the ethical. Focused on putting an end to brutal cycle of land dispossession and denial of land rights to in African American communities that has taken multiple forms over the course of our national history - from slavery to sharecropping to ghettoization, renewal, and gentrification. Although their greater struggle is about the control of land, to meet their objective of feeding and housing the people in a time of foreclosure crises the group's current tactic is moving families into illegally foreclosed homes. Their well-spoken front man, Max Remau has been very public in discussing the tactics of his group and articulately explains how squatting in foreclosed homes is saving homeless families, revitalizing neighborhoods in decline, and doing more to maintain vacant foreclosed homes. So far the police say they will not force out the families unless the banks ask them to.

Check out the website and TV interviews on the TAKE BACK THE LAND WEBSITE