When Occupy Wall street was rousted from Zucotti Park, they had an idea. Instead of camping out in public spaces, they would occupy homes on behalf of the homeless, thereby highlighting not only the evils of capitalism, but demonstrating the positive good of hope and change. The initiative was called “Occupy Homes”. Their first attempt was at 702 Vermont Street.
It had been the home of one Mr. Wise Ahadzi, who “was forced to leave in 2009 when he couldn’t make the mortgage payments to Bank of America.” But for some reason, he didn’t present well, so Occupy cast Alfredo Carrasquillo “as the man to move in, because he was a homeless advocate some of the members knew.”
Any misgivings Ahadzi felt were allayed by Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) who would inaugurate the Occupy project. Ahadzi was assured that he would be taken care of. What could go wrong?
The atmosphere was giddy that overcast December day. A swell of people hung banners (“Foreclose on Banks, Not People”) and chanted on Vermont Street, waiting to welcome new neighbors to 702, the two-story rowhouse Occupy had taken over.The excitement reached a crescendo when Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) knocked on the door, decorated with a pine wreath for Christmas, and out came the homeless man who was moving in with his family, Alfredo Carrasquillo.
Barron raised Carrasquillo’s arm in victory.
What could ever possibly go wrong?
Last week,Wise Ahadzi opened the door to the house he still owns, 702 Vermont Street in East New York.
Inside is a war zone. The walls are torn down, the plumbing is ripped out and the carpeting has been plucked from the floor. It’s like walking through a ribcage.
Garbage, open food containers and Ahadzi’s possessions are tossed haphazardly around the house.
“This is where my kitchen was,” Ahadzi says. There is no sink, no refrigerator and no counter space. Instead there are dirty dishes piled high waiting for a dip in three large buckets of putrid water that serve as the dishwashing system …
The first definite sign of trouble came when journalists from the New York Post made a follow up visit to the house two months later.
In January, The Post found squatters in the house instead of the family.
“They only stay here sometimes,” a protester explained. “There’s not enough room for the kids.”
Ahadzi thought about calling the police, until the embarrassed Occupy movement promised him that they’d repair the house and leave.
And perhaps they did repair it, according to the continental aesthetic of the Occupy crowd. Not as per Bauhaus perhaps, but certainly in the fashion of Berlin, 1945, after the 8th Airforce and the Red Army got through redecorating it.
They tore down many interior walls but did not put them back up. A neighbor said that mold corroded one wall, but a complete gutting of the house was unnecessary.
Even in this condition, protesters are still squatting on the floors, cooking using a bunsen burner and walking around guided by candlelight when a generator is not up and running.
Their efforts have actually made the neighborhood worse — because what used to be an empty house is now a hovel of squatters and probably should be condemned.
Neighbors, who initially welcomed the ragtag bunch into the area, now stay away. Local Doyle Coleman tried to get other homeowners on the street to participate in a street cleanup with the Occupiers, but they all just said, “I don’t want to get involved.”
Another neighbor stood across the street from the house and shook his head, imagining how extensive the damages were inside considering the revolving cast of characters living inside. “It must be in shambles,” he said.
Everyone wanted to help Wise Ahadzi , everybody wanted to be socially enlightened, community spirited and unselfish. So why did things turn out so badly for everyone? The answer may lie in a question. Who owns the house? Put another way, who had the incentive to maintain the property and increase its value? Was it Alfredo Carrasquillo, homeless advocate? Was it Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn)? Was it Wise Ahadzi? Was it the Bank of America?
No one owns the house.
Except possibly the taxpayer. Everbody else got something for nothing from 702 Rue Vermont and didn’t have to pay for it. If Ahadzi’s home was part of the subprime bubble, maybe he got it for a price he could not ultimately afford. To Carrasquillo it was just another flophouse and he got his. To Councilor Barron, it was a free PR prop. To Occupy it was free PR symbol and a flophouse. To the Bank of America it was a transaction on which they probably made money. The only entity that lost its shirt in the whole deal was the taxpayer.
Ultimately 702 Vermont Street was in the “Commons”. Nobody in particular owned it, excepting the ‘public’ and everybody used it. And therefore it was trashed, suffering the Tragedy of the Commons so familiar to every student of economics. It an example of pure socialism at work and a lesson in why socialism has problems.
When everybody owns something nobody owns it. When everyone is in charge, no one in charge. When everyone is looking into the far distant worker’s paradise, then nobody’s looking.
Adbusters Media Foundation, a Canadian group known for an anti-consumerism magazine, is credited with coining the term “occupy” last summer, but no group wholly dictates what happens.
Instead, Occupy gathers for General Assembly meetings held twice a week in a corner of Zuccotti Park. Members sign up to speak or pitch proposals. The crowd “twinkles their fingers” to support things or wriggles them pointing down to stand against them. Consensus is reached by a sea of dancing fingers.
Those dancing fingers were given hundreds of thousands of dollars, but nobody knows where the money went. Why should anyone care? It all belongs to the Man anyway, right? Responsibility was in the Commons too.
The group would debate endlessly how to use the $700,000 it raised, and even when it would spend some of that money — on bail or food — it would be accused by some members of misappropriation.
A group of 20 actually controls the money but were constantly saying they weren’t the “leaders”.
And yet the public is told that more of the same will improve the state of the nation. That more Occupy means more for the 99%. Why? Because they mean well. Because their moral compass will allow the poor and downtrodden to navigate the arc of history. That is probably true, but to what end? Where does their arc, their Rainbow Bridge lead? Does it connect Asgaard and Earth, like the White House to 702 Rue Vermont? Or is it a bridge to nowhere that is nobody’s home and nobody home.
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Obama, a Uniter not a Divider.
As the Good Prof says “Heh.”
I know Black Swans are supposed to be things that in hindsight are entirely predictable, but we just missed them somehow. This seems more like a Taupe Camel, a critter we could see right there in front of us getting ready to take a giant cr*p.
To the Bank of America it was a transaction on which they probably made money.
Let’s say the purchase price was $500k.
The bank (except it was probably Countrywide at the time) might have made $2,000 in origination fees, packaged and sold the loan for another $2,000 net profit, and perhaps stood to make another $2,000 per year in servicing. Just guestimates on the numbers but should be within a factor of 2.
Well, when they had to foreclose, it probably cost them $5,000 in overhead, they may be getting dinged $50,000 or more from whoever bought the package, and will probably lose $100,000 in clearing out the foreclosure.
Of the roughly $150k in losses, the taxapayer will pick up some directly, and more as a booked loss on BofA’s balance sheet.
Not to mention selling the wrecked property drags down the property values for everyone on the block, probably causing six more to go underwater and two more to default.
Have a nice day.
The things that fascinate me about this story are:
1) Rather than help out the guy with the mortgage on the place, they installed one of their own — who didn’t live there because it was “too small”.
2) They trashed the place, just like they’ve trashed all the other places they’ve taken residence.
3) They have control over enough money to rebuild the home, but seem more interested in holding onto it… for what?
4) IANAL, so I could be wrong, but it strikes me that the Occu-thugs lucked out in there’s no clear party who can sue them for the damages.
It is amazing how warped and distorted the truth becomes when the banks form a cartel to repudiate gold and take over control of the fiat money replacement and then spend a century starting wars, blowing bubbles and popping them to the benefit of themselves and their cronies.
Just look at Greece, it is like some theatre of the absurd. And here’s the thing, it keeps getting absurder. It is not going to stop, it is going to keep on accelerating. Just when you think things can’t get worse, they will. We know this from the Wiemar inflation of the 20′s. And just as the financial and political systems simply have to be allowed to destroy themselves so to will the moral fabric. They system needs to collapse, and the sooner the better. Then the real struggle will begin. And the elites know this, and they not only are ready, but they are orchestrating the collapse.
Haven’t stopped in to comment in quite awhile, but have been keeping up with BC as best I can. Just wanted to compliment all the high quality stuff from both W. and the comments. It would be impossible to single out all those deserving of praise, but I do want to give a special shout out to Buck O’Fama for the absolutely best pseudonym on the entire web.
Also, W. – whenever you use the formulation, “What could go wrong?”, it has me laughing and screaming in anger at the same time.
Same thing with “Hold my beer…”
BTW – here’s my favorite version of that theme:
When about to hit an unavoidable patch of ice, 98% of drivers exclaim, “oh s**t!” The other 2% are from Wisconsin and they say, “Hold my beer and watch this!”
A middle class farmer who happens to be a socialist goes to welcome his new, wealthy neighbor, whom he discovers is also a socialist. The farmer said, “You know, I bet if you had a thousand acres out here, you’d give me a hundred acres, wouldn’t you?” “Why absolutely!” replied the new neighbor. The farmer then said, “You know, if you had a hundred horses, you give me a dozen, wouldn’t you?” “Why, of course I’d give you at least a dozen,” replied the new neighbor. The farmer then said, “You know, I bet that if you had ten cows, you’d give me a couple, wouldn’t you?” The neighbor replied, “Whoa, wait just a minute buster, I’ve GOT 10 cows.!”
In Atlanta, the Occupiers pulled such stunts in a neighborhood called Vine City, which has see so much money in block grants, urban revitalization, tax set-aside, etc. etc. etc. for forty years that the roads where crackheads still stumble and pee might as well be paved with gold.
When I worked nearby in 1990, we had to take not only the radios but the batteries and other strippable units out of our cars and leave the windows rolled down so nobody would break the windows if we worked an overnight shift. I’ll never forget lugging my car battery to work with me. That will cure you of liberalism too.
I once had rocks thrown at my car in Vine City when I drove a co-worker home. He was exhausted so we broke the rules about a white person driving on that street.
22 years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, it’s still the same craphole. When I saw the Occupiers acting out there, and watched Bank of America cave to their demands, I felt real anger at the journalists who pretended any of this was news. It’s just the latest damn shakedown — of us.
7. dlsada, my acquaintance with that story is from Bert and I in their discourse on Down East Socialism. Though I first heard it without the bass in the background.
I, for one, see this as a positive sea change in the US culture war milieu. We have reached the long awaited point where those smarter than us’ens no longer need to say “Bush did it”. Instead, their new mantra is “The banks did it”. I’m encouraged by that progress. Thought it would take much longer to reach this point. High-fives, everyone.
Will the real Vine City, Atlanta stand up? According to Wikipedia:
However, Creative Loafing Atlanta paints another picture.
Maybe both portraits are true and it only depends on who’s doing the counting.
To paraphrase an Easter European, “The problem is not the clown who was elected into office, it is all the clowns who put him into office.” The only positive thing that I’ve seen is the growing buyer’s remorse and the rubes growing realization that the institutions they trusted for news, education, and entertainment are basically lying a…. The bad thing is that even when the occupants of the clown car that is Washington are tossed out, lives will be lost due to war its policies have caused and that have led to an economic dislocation caused by currency collapse.
“While I’m shuffling down the street with my walker to check out the dumpster behind the supermarket, be careful to not get to close to me. My vision is bad, so is my hearing and my reaction time isn’t what it used to be, so if I perceive a possible threat I’ll shoot first. Worried about the cops? No, the ones left are too busy guarding their dibs on the dumpster behind the local Walmart.”
We are just tea bagging chumps and they are bohemians hipsters “living the dream…”
We often get a warped romanticized view of protest from the arts (think Le Miserables, La Boheme, Rent, act). Which is why I liked Trainspotting. What that book and film showed is it is harder to be a bum (and even worse when you are an addict). There is nothing romantic about it. And for every naive true believer in the OWS, there are ten scammers looking for an opportunity to rape, steal and generally act way more rapaciously than any Wall Street predator.
Good point Langley. Sort of like Greece today, but without the mitigation of having some rural community ties to fall back on and a lot more violence.
THE OCTUPUS
The octopus that is socialism, anti-capitalism and radical environmentalism has many arms, and Occupy is only one of them.
The singular of octopi is octopus
The singular of occupy is occupus
If pus is what you get when sores get bad and weep
A putrid occupus you get when notions seep
Into the public consciousness and grow like mold
Until the filth assumes a glitter soft as gold
Proponents of this noxious vapor seem so kind
They claim that fairness is the goal they seek to find
If killing all the one percent will bring about
That happy day then how could anyone then doubt
That socialism is the way men ought to live
And those who have it now will surely have to give
Whatever they’ve acquired in a lawful way
To those whom fortune smiled not on their natal day
The Goddess Gaia speaks and speaks to only us
The we of many arms. We are the octopus
Wretchard: “Where does their arc, their Rainbow Bridge lead?”
Answer: the arc, the Rainbow Bridge, leads to the Gulag.
Turns out Wise wasn’t.
Sorry he made a bad decision worse, but at least he can say he had skin in the game.
It isn’t going to be funny when all these suckers figure out they have lost it all in a rigged game. There will be a feast of long pig smoked well done and it will be a grateful dead kinda place for a good while.
Be a good scout and always be prepared.
The Tragedy of the Commons awaits whenever people believe that something lacks a particular responsible owner. In the Navy every space and object, from the gun mount to the fan room is assigned to someone whose name is written down and on display. Once I had an Admiral conduct a Quadrennial Inspection of the ship visit one of my Division spaces. The assigned Petty Officer 2nd Class acutely uncomfortable in his best uniform, an unprecedented event, was there with me standing by. The Admiral after returning my salute ignored me. The PO2 saluted and announced “Petty Officer Umptysquat space 03-xx-xx ready for inspection Admiral.” The Admiral returned his salute and gave him a long slow look and asked “Is this your space son?” Startled the PO2 slowly lowered his salute and replied “Why yes Admiral. Yes it is.” “Do you know what is wrong in this space?” A slow nod and and a cautious “Yes Admiral I do” was his reply as I stood there contemplating enacting an Oriental retirement with something rusty. The Admiral asked “Will I find it?” A slow smile spread across the Petty Officer’s face and he said “No Admiral you won’t.” The Admiral then nodded and said “Good” and proceeded to do a good thorough inspection of the space. We passed.
Feudalism and its decayed descendants did give all property personal owners. In England the shore or road or prison or forest belong to the Queen. In reality that may mean that they belong to the Crown in some abstract sense but only under a welter of restrictions and limitations subject to the administration of a sea of functionaries but it is not the same as saying it is the governments so it belongs to everybody. If you defile something that belongs to her that somehow means more than littering in a subway that “belongs” to the Metropolitan Transit Authority in NY, or for that matter to something like a UK Council Estate that belongs to the local Housing Authority. In America we hope that greater social mobility will lead to people internalizing the respect for the property of others, even that held by the community, that in more traditional societies is evidenced by those with traditional landed property and those who respect the personal identity of persons and property of the old order. Unfortunately the Aristo-socialists have successfully infiltrated the institutions that helped enable social mobility and values transmittal. This results in the preservation of the “Social Deficit” that the rent seekers profit from managing.
Waugh understood how the rising tide of Socialism was corrupting the Working Class. Here is how he described in “Put Out More Flags” the meeting of the Lady of Malfrey and the women of Birmingham upon the arrival of the urban working class evacuees at the start of WW-II into a traditional community.
Everyone connected with the Occupy episode, the City Councilman and the front man and the participants and those who gave material aid in arranging the episode, should all be charged with theft, trespass, incitement, public health violations and Mopery. Unleash the RICO statute on the lot of them.
2/4
@19 Okay, I’m not as sharp as the average poster here, BFtP. Find what?
Everyone connected with the Occupy episode, the City Councilman and the front man and the participants and those who gave material aid in arranging the episode, should all be charged with theft, trespass, incitement, public health violations and Mopery. Unleash the RICO statute on the lot of them.
I agree.
Problem is, who has standing? Bank won’t care to do it. Previous owner doesn’t have the funds to proceed. And so the system crashes.
OT? but part of the big picture: does anyone here know about UN’s “Agenda 21″?
If you don’t, you should see this: http://preview.tinyurl.com/67z996a
and shudder. . . . 600 cities in the US are already signed on, most without the knowledge or permission of their citizens.
1913
23, no, is 1775. There is rebellion in the wind.
New York has des rues to rue? I guess rue Vermont was so named at one time precisely to accent its desirability as private property. Tabernouche!
Just a question for the rabble-rouser in the beginning of that video: How can you take BACK what was never yours?
Another question: when people who achieve great things say they want to give “back” to the community, they’re going along with the Marxist idea that they derive all their achievement From the community — that nothing is really “theirs,” only borrowed from the Collective.
Used to be, people talked about giving To the community, not giving “Back To” the community. It may seem a small point, but of thousands of such points is the Leftist Collective made into a fait accompli.
1983, but as seen from 1948.
Undoubtedly, one of the great evils of capitalism is embodied in the simple loaf of bread. All across this land, people labor day and night to deliver loaves of bread (we’ll get to fishes later) to markets in every town. No particular federal agency is required to manage this process, just liberty and justice for all. It need not be taxed, controlled or regulated. In fact, there is reason to believe that if it were regulated by, say, some federal or state agency, we would wait in long lines or find the market closed at inconvenient times, paying much more for our daily bread.
Wheat must be grown, flour produced, and yeast obtained. It happens every day with but slight interference of government. It’s a great land, ours. Surely we do not need the federal government to control all the bakeries so that the people can be fed. In fact, others have noted before us, “If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread”.
Economists tell us that a purchase is a fundamental trade in a free market. Each side trades something they possess for something they value more. Each side gets the “better” of the transaction.
Occupiers traded nothing and acquired nothing. In their view, the property has no value, and not having regard for the property of others, they treated the property thusly.
Lowest common demoninator. That which society obtains, upon providing something that others have labored to produce, to those who find no value in it.
Next time one of the usual suspects declares the ‘tragedy of the commons’ to be a myth remember to provide them a link 702 Rue Vermont.
I know the real Vine City very well. A few new buildings on the Georgia Tech side; a big fancy medical complex, and some gentrification around the Tech campus and to the south, which houses the famous historically black colleges, Morehouse and Spellman. But crime is still dire — kids at all three campuses are routinely robbed, or worse. And the neighborhood blocks themselves, the ones not razed, have not changed one iota.
I find this curious. How do you waste so much money, so many times, to no positive effect? The answer is a purely human one: we did nothing with any of that money to solve the problem of broken families. You can move people out of public housing apartments into Section 8, or throw millions of dollars at the well-connected ministers (heck, just sew it into their pockets for them, so they don’t have to break a sweat doing even that). Where there is federal money, there is a higher concentration of crooks ensuring that nothing changes, except a deepening of demands and resentment. Al Sharpton and one of his more unpleasant acolytes are known to make the occasional appearance there, when they smell green or sense a camera lens.
One of the interesting aspects of this blog for me, because I don’t think all that scientifically, is the insights of game theory and other models to explain social problems I only used to view at the level of the quotidian.
Also curiously, similar neighborhoods where federal money didn’t rain down are the ones that have turned themselves around — of course with tremendous effort by people who actually bothered to buy their own houses and have jobs, but the rising tide lifted more people than it displaced. That’s just a personal observation, but it comes from a lot of observing.
So what the Occupiers are doing is literally the most toxic thing they could do — highly racialized, symbolic, resentment-driven demands for more free money to people who have proven themselves irresponsible with the last cash windfall. Meanwhile, there are people in all of those neighborhoods who really do try to maintain standards and parent children (often great-grandchildren now). They’re almost universally the ones who aren’t sticking out their hands for a handout.
Interesting that no one comments on the common denominator of all the public gatherings of the Left – the destruction they leave behind. We want to think of them as just misguided people with a different point of view. True Evil would be ugly and have horns and a tail, right? Not look like ordinary people who constantly assume the “moral high ground” and tell the rest of us how low we are.
But would a normal, productive person behave as they do just because they didn’t own the property they temporarily “occupied”? Ayn Rand describes many of these types so very well and also the inability of people like Hank Reardon to believe that their moral code is centered around destruction, even as they mostly hide that from themselves as well as others around them.
A truly free society offers these types of people little, but one such as ours is fertile soil for them. Just as in Atlas Shrugged, they have the power to destroy us all. Power given to them by the sanction of the productive victims. Power provided by the inability of the victims to acknowledge the true evil of their fellow citizens.
This videoclip from the Financial Times, giving a platform to a couple of neo-marxixts who argue that communism, as opposed to state socialism, is a viable option.
http://tinyurl.com/835w8s8
The journalists of the FT are not out there with bullhorns, as in Brooklyn, celebrating asset seizure on behalf of the mob. But give them a chance…….
re: @31: Be good to list a few streets that are examples of the best and the worst. Was poking around in satellite and street view (looks like Atlanta is blanketed) and though there are some empty lots and run-down areas, I didn’t see a lot of trash(?) – so perhaps civil society is improving.
re: why do we add funding to failing programs (and subtract funding from the successful)? I support a couple of efforts at the Mercatus Center (at George Mason University). Including the work of a Kiwi friend who talks directly to these issues (that he was at the center of when the NZ economy collapsed after socialism ran it into the ground). He’s a proponent of not only smaller government, but more effective government based on measuring results and rewarding what works. i.e. rather than measuring spend against budget, e.g. number of food stamps distributed – he’d prefer to measure reduction in hunger, or better, measure reduction in dependency. Call it goals-based-governance.
see:
http://mercatus.org/maurice-p-mctigue
and these informative and often amusing podcasts:
http://mercatus.org/person/podcasts/17042
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