ACORN Urges Civil Disobedience in Foreclosure Evictions

[babylonsister]

ACORN Urges Civil Disobedience in Foreclosure Evictions

The Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now has launched a campaign encouraging people facing eviction to summon volunteers to their homes to resist orders to leave.

by Jessica Garrison


A national community organizing group Thursday announced a campaign of civil disobedience designed to help families resist eviction and remain in their homes after foreclosure.

Activists with ACORN, the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, said they would encourage people facing eviction to use text messaging and cellphones to quickly summon volunteers to their homes. The entire group would resist orders to leave, forcing sheriff's deputies to arrest large numbers of people to complete the eviction -- and drawing attention to the evictees' plight in the process.

The HomeStaying campaign is being waged in Los Angeles and more than 20 other cities, including Oakland, Houston and New York, said Charles Jackson, an ACORN spokesman.

Jackson and others with the group met with reporters outside a Watts house with comedian Roseanne Barr to demonstrate how the campaign would work.

Debora Beard said she and her husband, Tommy, have received an eviction notice requiring them to leave their home of 20 years.

Beard, a teacher's assistant, said she would not leave unless she was "led out by the sheriff. . . . I am not leaving without a fight."

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/20-6

[niyad]

1. what I want to know is why more areas cannot do what that judge in IL (I think) is doing

the lenders and borrowers are in her courtroom and they negotiate settlements--they actually try to work things out. amazing, yes? a sad contrast to the courtroom in FL where the judge just tosses everyone out of their homes, no effort at settlements, nothing.

[MADem]

2. That's just dumb and it won't work. Why don't the ACORN people bully the

bank executives who are instituting these forclosures instead of working with the homeowners instead? Run around in front of the banks with giant poster-pictures of the kids that the bums threw out on the street. Name some names, identify the cruel bankers by name and face, put it up on YOUTUBE--start some shit up at the BANK, and shame the banks into working with the people to refinance the usurious loans--hell, even if they have to rewrite the loan for forty years, it beats throwing people out and leaving the place empty.

No, instead, make the poor deputies/sherriffs, doing a shitty rotten job they don't want to do, have to wade in and make it more difficult.

Isn't ACORN on the list to get federal stimulus money? And this is how they want to spend their time?

Talk about rightwing fodder....it's a crummy idea, IMO.

[anonymous171]

3. The bankers need to be scared. Otherwise they will resist any type of change from the WH.

[MADem]

8. And I think getting demonstrators out there is just the way to do it, too! nt

[Missy Vixen]

4. The evicted and their supporters would get arrested in front of a bank

The local gendarmes are probably as sick of this already as we are. There's already been stories in the news about police and sheriff departments in a couple parts of the country refusing to enforce eviction orders.

I seriously thought about picketing the local B of A re: their fees on those using unemployment debit cards, but realized I'd end up in jail in a New York City minute.

[MADem]

9. Not if they got a permit for a demonstration, they wouldn't.

And not if they didn't block access to the bank. First Amendment, and all that.

Hell, it's not an abortion clinic, and people get to demonstrate in front of those things all the live-long day.

[mmonk]

12. Those are the most effective kind of protests. There isn't a permit amendment

anywhere in the Constitution. People supposedly have the right to assemble and air grievances.

[billyoc]

5. Actually, this is a time honored practice that ALWAYS works.

Many sherriff's departments just won't do the evictions if they're going to be this much of an ass-ache.

[MADem]

7. But many will. Confrontation might work in the short term, but in the long term, it will become

ordinary and expected. The sherriffs will do their evictions at night, when public transportation isn't running. Or when the weather sucks. Or during major sports games, which just might reduce participation.

Better to target the bankers--give the public someone to hate.

[Qutzupalotl]

6. ACORN is not on the list to get federal stimulus money. nt

[MADem]

10. That's good.

The GOP will still take this shit, though, and spin it. http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=17857&tx_irfaq_pi1=161&tx_irfaq_pi1=P2lkPTE3ODU3&cHash=3b5f677fec

I simply think that targeting workers, like the sherriff, who are doing what they're told and nothing more, while ignoring the obvious targets of real live greedy bankers who are living large, wearing expensive suits and shoes, with pricy haircuts, who are fat and well fed, well...it's a missed opportunity.

No one will remember a sherriff's name. They will remember the name of a greedy pig banker if demonstrators repeat it often enough.

[Shealee]

11. Yes We Can

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=282873&widget=1

Idiots.

[MADem]

13. "The home has already been sold to someone else, and the bank no longer even owns it.'

Idiots, indeed.

So not only were they "trespassing," they were breaking and entering in the daytime, along with vandalizing the private property of another!

You'd think they'd CHECK to see if the bank still owned the home before they made their dramatic 'demonstration.' And that idiot breaking the lock for the TV camera is just too stupid for words.

If they want to make a difference, they should demonstrate in front of the bank....but baby, it's COLD outside. That would take no small degree of commitment.

[Generic Other]

14. Community Activism our forefathers would have approved of I suspect

Likely to get ya killed (I am recalling the bulldozed farmhouse in Grapes of Wrath) but certainly an option in bad times. If government is incapable of providing for the common good, it is failed government and our forefathers would have expected us to turn it aside and start anew.

That being said, I have to wonder how they can keep the homeless from homesteading the abandoned once the numbers reach the tipping point. Certainly I would risk arrest for trespassing if I were cold and homeless and saw shelter was available in a rundown empty house. This is a basic human right that IMO has more validity than absentee landlord property rights. Abandoned land for whatever reason is and always has been vulnerable to squatting.

I am a person who has many times explored old abandoned places. I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to find a way in and inhabit the empty space if the need arose.