On February 6, 2013, Shabnam Bashiri writes on AlterNet.org:
After creating a massive bubble in home prices that eventually burst and caused our economy to go into a tailspin, these guys have decided to come back for more, and figured out a way to profit off their destruction — by turning foreclosed homes into rentals and securitizing the rental income.
If banks were willing to offer principle reduction on these inflated mortgages down to the same price they are willing to sell at auction, many homeowners would likely be able to afford their payments, and stay in their homes for years to come, contributing to the stability of the neighborhood.
This attacks home ownership, a core American value and essential element of the American Dream.
Charles Hugh Smith oftwominds.com sums it up:
The core of American liberty is widespread private ownership of property. The Founding Fathers were quite clear on the necessity of protecting private ownership from encroachment by a covertly created monarchical Empire or a financial Aristocracy.
Private ownership protected liberty and the distribution of wealth by enabling widespread ownership of “the means of production” (land, tools, intellectual property, enterprises) and home ownership.
Thus the correlation between prosperity, widespread ownership of small businesses and homes and a relatively modest disparity of private wealth. When ownership of property becomes concentrated into a rentier class (i.e. a financial Aristocracy) that is protected by a Monocrat Central State, income disparity shoots up and prosperity is concentrated in the hands of the political and financial Elites.
Binary economics and democratic capitalism, or what could be termed economic personalism, is founded on the principal that economic power has to be universally distributed amongst individual citizens and never allowed to concentrate. It is a value system based on the importance and dignity of every human person. The “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence was interchangeable in those times with the word “property.” The original phrasing was “the right to life, liberty and property.” “The pursuit of happiness” phrase was a substitute for the “property” phrase. In the forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that securing “Life, Liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing Property” is the highest purpose for which any just government is formed. Democratizing economic power will return us to the pristine innocence and economic power diffusion we had in a pre-industrial society where labor was the principal factor in the creation of wealth.
