By Caroline Arbour, Voice of America
Protest groups in Spain have helped families that were kicked out of their homes by banks find shelter in repossessed, empty apartment buildings. Police moved in quickly in most cases, but in Seville about 30 families are going on six months of illegal occupation.
Fifty-four-year old Mercedes Lladanosa showed us around the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her daughter and granddaughter. It has hardwood floors and a fancy faucet in the bathroom. But bare light bulbs hang uselessly from the ceiling.
The electricity was shut off months ago.
And the washing machine is only for show, as the city cut off the building’s access to running water last week.
They cook with a gas camping stove. What little furniture Lladanosa has was donated or found in the trash. It is not much – a couch, a bed and a crib.
Squatting for survival
She and more than 100 others have been living like this since May, in this five-story building that was completed three years ago and left empty when the developer went bankrupt.
Nearly 40 families moved in with help of members from the 15M activist group, like Antonio Moreno Rosana.
“Right now in Spain we have something like 517 evictions a day. The thing is, just in Andalucía I think, there are 116,000 empty houses. It is outrageous that you have got empty houses when people are getting thrown out into the street,” said Rosana.
Rampant evictions
Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards have been evicted from their homes since the housing bubble burst in 2008.
Once a house is repossessed by the banks, the owner is still liable for the mortgage, meaning several generations are being saddled with debt.
Rosana said it makes no sense.
“We think that, you know, if a bank has an empty house for a year or two years, that should be expropriated immediately. It is like you have it empty? No, you can not have it empty. We are going to put some people in there, if you are going to have it empty,” said Rosana.
15M group protests
The 15M movement has tried a few times in Madrid, Barcelona and the Catalonian city of Sabadell to house evicted families in buildings now belonging to banks, but efforts were swiftly defeated by police. Lladanosa and her fellow squatters risk being thrown out any day.
Not everyone lives in the building out of absolute necessity, and for some, making a statement is worth the risk.
Social worker Montserrat Sanchez lost her job in an immigrant center two months ago and could not pay her rent anymore, so she went back to live with her mother and father, but then left.
“I think I have the right, like everyone living in this world, to have my own house and my own place where to stay. And I do not think it is right to go back with my parents. So that is why I came here,” said Sanchez.
Lladanosa and others show us the water fountain installed outside the building this week by the city, on the corner of an intersection, next to garbage bins. She hauls water from there up to her apartment to wash herself and to clean her clothes.
The unemployed cook turned housekeeper said she wants to regain her dignity. She wants a roof over her head. Not for free. She wants to catch a break, though, and pay rent that she can afford.
Published in Notitas de Noticias
Replies
What is the connection? Ii posted this as it illustrates the mentality being taught to so-called
" law enforcement" personnel. Note how the female officer beats the man's legs with a metal rod while he is being held down and choked and not resisting.
PS; When did Peace Officers star wearing BLACK and calling themselves LAW ENFORCEMENT, as in Forcing you? Are we their slaves or something ?????
French business erupts in fury against "disastrous" François Hollande
France is sliding into a grave economic crisis and risks a full-blown “hurricane” as investors flee rocketing tax rates, the country’s business federation has warned.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
9:52PM BST 15 Oct 2012
“The situation is very serious. Some business leaders are in a state of quasi-panic,” said Laurence Parisot, head of employers’ group MEDEF.
“The pace of bankruptcies has accelerated over the summer. We are seeing a general loss of confidence by investors. Large foreign investors are shunning France altogether. It’s becoming really dramatic.”
MEDEF, France’s equivalent of the CBI, said the threat has risen from “a storm warning to a hurricane warning”, adding that the Socialist government of François Hollande has yet to understand the “extreme gravity” of the crisis.
The immediate bone of contention is Article 6 of the new tax law, which raises the top rate of capital gains tax from 34.5pc to 62.2pc. This compares with 21pc in Spain, 26.4pc in Germany and 28pc in Britain.
“Let’s be clear, Article 6 is not acceptable, even if modified. We will not be complicit in a disastrous economic mistake,” Mrs Parisot told Le Figaro.
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Mrs Parisot said the policies border on economic illiteracy: “The idea of aligning taxes on capital with those on wages is a profound economic error. It is scandalous that the French have been left in such economic ignorance for years.”
French business has called for “competiveness shock” of business tax cuts to claw back lost ground against Germany. Instead, it faces an extra €10bn (£8.1bn) of business costs from the budget unveiled in September.
Mr Hollande is tightening fiscal policy by 2pc of GDP next year to meet EU deficit targets, with two-thirds coming from higher taxes. The budget does little to shrink the French state. Spending has risen to 55pc of GDP, similar to Sweden but without Nordic labour flexibility.
French economic growth has been near zero for the past five quarters. It may have tipped into recession over the summer as the malaise spread from Italy and Spain, according to Banque de France.
New car registrations were down 7.7pc in the third quarter from a year earlier. Unemployment has been creeeping up, reaching a post-euro high of 10.6pc.
The fear is that a fiscal shock in 2013 will tip the economy into a sharp downward slide. “France needs more fiscal austerity right now like a hole in the head,” said sovereign debt strategist Nicholas Spiro.
“They don’t have any chance of meeting their growth target of 0.8pc next year, but that does not in itself put French debt at risk.
“The real danger is contagion if things turn ugly in Spain.”
Finance minister Pierre Moscovici has hinted at a shift in policy, saying there may have to be a “reorientation” of the eurozone’s fiscal strategy. “The people are not going to like Europe if it can’t offer growth,” he said.
Mr Hollande has promised reforms to the labour market next year but MEDEF remains sceptical.
Mrs Parisot said business feels deeply unloved and is “in revolt across the country”.