• Tens of thousands of average Americans reduced to living illegally in vacant buildings, paying to live in tents.
By Victor Thorn —
From the beginning, Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency has been based more on illusion than real hope and change—the illusion of peace, the illusion of reform, the illusion of government transparency, and the illusion of an economic recovery.
Take Obama’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example. These government economists have regularly cooked the books so terribly that it’s as if America’s entire financial foundation rests upon rigged statistics, stock market bubbles, artificial money, and trillions in unfunded mandates that can never be repaid.
Today, more Americans collect food stamps than ever before in our country’s history, and the labor participation rate is lower than it was during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
In 2008, Obama’s handlers, aided by a sycophantic press, misdirected the electorate with slick razzle-dazzle rhetoric without discussing how this candidate would enter the Oval Office with less business experience than an eight-year-old kid running a lemonade stand.
Reflecting his ineptitude, Obama surrounded himself with Keynesian pie-in-the-sky theorists, Marxist professors who advocated big government at any cost, and Wall Street crony capitalists intent on manipulating industries such as “green energy,” healthcare, and higher education.
Amid this seven-year stretch of economic stagnation, the renewed trend of squatting plagues many communities.
In Mira Mesa, California, for instance, squatters caused an apartment fire, resulting in $50,000 in damages to the building.
And only weeks after a police sweep cleared hundreds of squatters out of the former Seattle Times office building, the structure was once again overrun by homeless people.
That’s only the beginning.
Californians are renting out tents in posh suburban areas at a rate of $1,000 per month. In Colorado, a Denver SWAT team was forced to evacuate drifters residing in makeshift trailers.
At other locales, the working poor are reduced to shacking up in tent cities, the backseats of cars, shanty towns, or abandoned buildings.
A particularly troublesome example can be found near Atlanta, Georgia. There, a black woman named Daquisha Barber and her five children squatted in a home for months after forging the signature of a bogus real estate agent. The home they opportunistically took over had been placed on the market by its owner. It ended up costing the man over $10,000 in legal fees to finally evict her from the premises.
The same tactics were utilized in Charlotte, North Carolina when another black woman, Ninti El-Bey, returned to squatting in a home even after having been arrested and jailed for doing the same thing in another house.
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Circumstances have reached such dire levels in Detroit that homeowners in a northwest neighborhood are actively seeking squatters to occupy a rash of abandoned or foreclosed residences in hopes of preventing vandalism or arson.
On November 16, AMERICAN FREE PRESS interviewed Ryan Hertz, president and CEO of Detroit’s South Oakland Shelter.
When asked about his city’s desperate housing situation, Hertz replied: “It’s an interesting concept, but not a solution. I would never encourage anyone to squat. It’s not our public position, and we can certainly do better. When homeless people live in vacant properties, who’ll keep them up to par in terms of maintenance?”
As for the so-called Obama recovery, Hertz posited: “We’ve seen a change in the demographics of those who are displaced. It’s been a transition from the chronically homeless, disabled, and mentally ill to first-timers whose unemployment has run out. You’d never expect to see these people in shelters, and I’d estimate that 50%-80% of these folks are generally from working-class families. They don’t fit the mold of what you’d anticipate.”
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and author of over 50 books.
