> Bank Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks
>
> By Michael Powell
> The New York Times
> June 6, 2009
>
> As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells
> Fargo Bank "rode the stagecoach from hell" for a decade, systematically
> singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest
> subprime mortgages. These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a
> federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into
> foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city
> services.
<http://www.metamute.org/en/content/in_praise_of_usura>
We are not, therefore, suggesting that Obama's moral reinscriptions of the household be supplemented with real economic supports of a neo-Keynesian kind in the manner, for example, of the family wage. This, indeed, is one of the demands of Obama's progressive Christian supporters, E. J. Dionne, and is one obvious direction in which demands for a living wage or basic income might unfold. Rather, we are interested in pushing the exercise in excess even further, in praise of a usurious economy from below that would begin with the most intimate of acts while breaking beyond their normative sexual and racial boundaries. Briefly put, how is it possible to live on borrowed time, to extend credit to oneself and others, while defaulting on the contractual arrangements one might have with the creditor? This is not an instance of declaring what is to be done, but of noting what is already occurring. Treasury Secretary Paulson was not so wrong in accusing the subprime class of being ‘speculators'. It is possible to separate the temporality of speculation from the obligation of debt, as long as living beyond one's means (which means living beyond the conditions of scarcity imposed by the wage) is no longer limited by a deference to repayment. As the foreclosures began, some defaulted on their debts while extending their own credit lines - the latter, often in the most practical of ways, by staying on after foreclosure and reconnecting energy. The merely private reocccupation of property could undoubtedly descend into the most reactionary of populisms - a survivalist protest against the federative, taxing state. But when the reoccupation extends beyond the limits of the private (whether in its strictly economic or infra-economic, familial and genealogical form) it enables connections of a more interesting kind. Some post-foreclosure squatting groups make a deliberate effort to separate re-housing from prior claims to ownership, therefore breaking with the moral pact between lineage, property and an authentic (i.e. non-usurious, repayable) debt. Generally, squatting networks have long been preoccupied with the question of how to reconnect and house without recourse to the identifications of race, class and sex that have a tendency to reform, even in the most marginal of spaces. In this regard, we could point to the queering of (some) European squatter spaces, the presence of undocumented women from Algeria in queer squats in France, or the regular traffic between queer, sex worker and undocumented squats of London, Oakland and Sydney. Moreover, the question of permanent occupation posed during the New School occupation - that of how to go beyond the ‘four sweating walls of privacy' - assumes a wider conflict over genealogy, territory and property beyond simply that which is manifest in the universities or contained under the heading of cognitive labour.
As it is, we would argue that the financial crisis is an effect of usury from below, a consequence of speculative household consumption that extended beyond the limits which were tolerable to capital. And so, while it is a commonplace to speak of predatory lending, it is too easy, we think, to assume that those who took out the loans had no sense of risk or, rather, did not strategise within the cramped conditions of what was a monetised, racialised and gendered housing regime well before the advent of subprime loans. Usury lives in the pores of production because that is where many live, or attempt to. Condemnations of usury, even where seemingly pronounced in the interests of the poor, have - as Marx noted - a tendency to ‘turn pious wishes into their very opposite during the process of realisation'. Disorganised from the perspective of social movement theory, and yet nevertheless effective, the subprime class rolled over their debts and lived beyond their means, generating surplus in the most unproductive of ways. The financial crisis signalled the existence of mass debt default and occupation, and was precipitated by the growing presence of usurious households. This unfolds as an experiment in the defamiliarisation of the nexus that binds intimacy, genealogy and productivity.