the kitchens in chicago and strap my beebee on my back if i have to and scrub all the floors and watch all the sheets in america if i have to but we have to move. we have to get out of here. home. if we stretch all the way back to the dawn of civilization, we will remember that it was stationary home rather than mobile tents used by nomadic communities that were the marker, the heralding of what we consider to be human civilization. fast forward to the united states and home is nearly synonymous with the idea of the quality of upward mobility and freedom. yet is there a word more contested in the english language than the word home? as law professor anita hill rights referring to the 2008 financial crisis, at the heart of this crisis is the ideological disconnect between the home as a basic element of the american dream and a pathway to equal the. and home as a market product. since 2007 an estimated 10 million people have been forced from their home through bank pursued for closure and the eviction. 10 million people, in all reality that is a conservative estimate. some people say 20 million other people say we won't get out of the crisis under 30 million but let's fix for a moment the conservative estimate. 10 million. how much is 10 million? it's the population of to tunisia come it's the amount of wall street banks have already paid so far this year in campaign contributions to the lawmakers that sit on the house financial services committee which is the house committee charged with regulating those banks. did i mention that was $10 million just this year? it's also the population of the state of michigan. the tenth most populous state and in union. in other words, if bankers had ejected every single man, woman, child in the great lakes state. are these numbers that we've heard of the main street media? are the numbers we've heard from the government agencies that haven't been set up to track this number for the people effected or what happens to them after. how is it possible that the entire equivalent to the population of michigan has been forced from their home and we didn't even hear about. perhaps it is a reflection of how we value to this crisis that we have measured it in the prices rather than miss the school days that we've quantified in property values rather than family dinners or that we've spoken about it has shareholder profits rather than shuddered schools. we haven't in this country since 2007 only suffered an economic crisis. we've suffered a crisis of value and meaning and as a definition of our own lives. later this month is the 50th anniversary of the historic march on washington and martin luther king's iconic i have a dream speech. we remember many aspects of the speech and of this march. many of us are going to go down to d.c. to commemorate this event. but there are also words from the speech that have been he raced from the history books. and i want to read to you briefly from the speech so that we remember them that they are back in historical records. we remembered of course all of the images of little children holding hands and alabama but we don't remember that martin luther king jr. was also talking about restructuring society so that we could achieve the economic equality so desperately needed. and he said in a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. when the architects of the republic or the magnificent words of the constitution in the declaration of independence they were signing a promissory note to which every american was to fall error. this was a promise that all men yes black men as well as white men would be guaranteed the na pluggable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. it is obvious today, he said, that america has defaulted on this note insofar as its citizens of color are concerned. instead of honoring the sacred obligation, america has given the people in bad checks to be a check which has come back marked in sufficient funds. in reading this now today i can't help but think of the scandal on hundreds of thousands of foreclosure settlement checks sent out by the banks after the scanning scandal and they were required to send a very little money, $500 sometimes a thousand to all of the hundreds of thousands of people who'd been thrown out of their homes illegally since 2007 and yet when the homeowners receive the check the opened it, went to the bank and to everyone's surprise, the checks bounced. but speaking more broadly today there is no greater evidence of the united states continued be felt on its constitutional promises to african-americans than the ongoing and the racially slanted foreclosure crisis. i'm not just talking about the superficial statistics like african-americans were twice as likely to be foreclosed on than white americans or the fact that african-americans with high credit scores, with good credit ratings or three times more likely to be sold a predatory subprimal loans than white americans with the same credit score. i'm not just talking about the fact a wells fargo loan officer testified in court that wells fargo and to be clear all of the other companies at the same time put, quote, bounties on the head of minority borrowers and how did they do this? they paid cash incentives, he testified come to aggressively peddle the subprime mortgages in communities of color. i'm not just talking about the fact morgan stanley is being sued for violating the fair housing act in detroit which is undergoing the current municipal bankruptcy in u.s. history. no, i'm also talking about the unique impact that the foreclosure crisis has had on african-american communities because as dozens of african-american scholars, intellectuals and activists explained to me coming and these are their words and not mine. african-americans have had a unique relationship to home, private property and access to the full rights of the department. as law professor armstrong writes african-americans have a historical relationship to property that differs from that of other americans. our introduction to the country was as a form of property and contemporary relations between african-americans and property are still in pared, she rode. but it's not simply houses, structures that are at stake in the conversation because holding private property and achieving the full rights, full citizenship rights have indirectly tied since the nation's founding. what is at stake is freedom and full recognition that as a striking sanitation worker proclaimed in 1968, i am a man and as a low-wage workers proclaiming right now across the country in the air strikes again now predominantly people of color are saying i am a man and i am a woman. in other words, home, land, ownership and economic rights give access to the original american dream. the dream of democracy pitted it's fitting that we are speaking about democracy because this project began on a place that just lost theirs. detroit michigan which as i mentioned is currently undergoing the municipal bankruptcy. i was living at the time to years ago to see firsthand what i had heard only whispers about, masses of people stopping evictions. others squatting on the bank owned buildings and a whole blocks being taken over by collectives. people setting up communities outside the control of capitalism. in other words, i was hearing about liberated neighborhoods. at that time i had been inactive for the second in wall street in new york city. so i knew something about liberated zones. in the fall i lived in the park and worked in the free kitchen, the people's kitchen we called it. i knew in these liberated zones we organized for the collective rather than the individual. i knew that we organized so that we could meet everyone's basic needs and that any work they did, however hard they were working there was value enough to ensure their basic needs. i knew it was a place where time grew long, long enough to listen to everyone's story and talk to everyone and learn their names and you were never late. i learned a was a place not of utopia. i'm not foolish enough to think that but a contested zone organized and established to challenge the near absolute control of money and corporations over our daily lives. but the idea of this movement that i was experiencing in new york, the idea that it had spread from the downtown public spaces and into neighborhoods particularly the neighborhoods that were most victimized by the banks well, that is something that i found almost unbelievable so i got on a plane and i landed in detroit and the doctor unfortunately realizing they had no public transportation i met finally a woman named martha. the first day that i met bertha we were in her living room on a late sunday afternoon. she'd just gotten back from church and was wearing one of the most magnificent dignified outfits i ever seen. i grew up in suburban mostly white america so i wasn't used to the sheer beauty and dignity of a 65-year-old african-american woman raised in alabama and still very religious in post industrial detroit so she was wearing a suit and embroidered small and large brimmed white southern half. she looked to me like the absolute opposite person that i could ever imagine to take corrective action or protest anything. remember i was living with a collective of anarchists who rarely share were and we all had long hair and i missed on the house this woman sat down and told me her story over the course of six or seven hours. after 22 years, her husband fell into foreclosure as a result of a second predatory mortgage. she tried for years to scrape by. her children pitch in. her grandchildren pitched in until finally she couldn't any longer pay. she tried to fight the foreclosure in court and contacted a lawyer but ultimately the lawyer said i'm sorry that there is nothing legally i can do for you. the bank owns your home. its repossessed. this home is no longer yours. it was at that time people started talking about bertha behind her back because she was saying things that sounded pretty unbelievable. she said something to me for example she said it wasn't that i didn't understand that the banks owned a piece of paper. was that the banks didn't understand that i owned my home. she said those types of things and one of her friends whispered to her eldest daughter i think your mother might have to go ca doctor. but she didn't need to see a doctor. she called the newspaper and church groups and neighbors and everyone in her community and the day of her scheduled eviction, the day the city dispatched someone, she parked dumpster in front of her house and then the city contractors were going to haul out of her belongings, all of the things that she had a master for the 22 years of living in her home raising six grandchildren there, six children and several grandchildren. hundreds of people amassed on her front lawn and stood in the street and in front of a neighbor's houses and in front of her own home and said you can't park that dumpster here so the dumpster and left. later that day she went downtown to meet with a representative of the bank of new york melon that claimed to own her mortgage after it had been shuffled around after the securitization process. she spoke to a bank representative and they said i'm sorry but you don't have an appointment today so she said well if i can't come in today then nobody can come out of the 65-year-old grandmother dressed in a very similar white pressed suit laid down in front of the office of the bank and refused to move. the papers got wind of this naturally and the next day the bank called up and said call off the dogs we will sell you that this house. it is yours. we don't want it but you have to call off the dogs. so if you years later just a few days in fact after i had gone to visit her in her living room she sat down with a representative and finally signed the papers to out right to own the home that had already been hers for 22 years. i heard that story and i was hooked. i had to hear more and find out what made these liberated spaces and what inspired some neighborhoods and some communities to not suffer silently in shame as the banks stole millions of homes? i wanted to learn what communities organized for their rights while others didn't. .. a woman named monique white in minneapolis. about a week before her scheduled eviction, she called up a construction company, but this time she wanted to get hundreds of dollars worth of dirt and mulch to she organized a huge dump truck to pick up the mulch and drop it after house. when her neighbor said, what's all the dirt for? she said, it's to plant a garden. because i'm not moving. she planted the garden and the bank decades and she's still there. when i went there she was teaching of the people how to grow kale and cabbage and carrots and all the other good stuff you can grow in minneapolis. i heard people recount stories that they almost didn't believe except they were telling them. and so this is how one retired firefighter explained this enough for eviction blockade that saved her home. she said, my daughter called and said the sheriff was here. so i called jr and before you know it all these people are my porch and shouting light, fight, fight. more people are coming up and it would is saying we are the people. what? my neighbors are on the porch is yelling, we've got a story. what? to construction worker down the street is coming over and the whole port was filled with people chanting, tell the whole wide world this is people's territory. the eviction blockade she said was out in full force. it was such a beautiful thing she said. i felt like i was floating outside myself. and i was just watching all these people on my front lawn defend my home. i made organizers and activists from the chicago anti-eviction campaign and occupy whose chapters across the country and take back the land nationally come in cities like boston and the moratorium now in detroit. in chattanooga, so many more but it won't bore you with the list. the more i travel, the more i realize it african-americans unique relationship to home, this story of struggle and dreams have stretched to the present day, had made many of these communities actually better equipped to respond to the crisis. sure, they were being disproportionally attacked by wall street yet they were also better organize. most importantly, to me at least, more visionary in the proposal that they were imagining for how we could restructure the system. as max come one of the cofounders of take back the land said, we are in a transformative moment. because this crisis is firmly rooted in the housing crisis, i think we're going to significant changes in the way people think about not only housing but land itself. in other words, and i want to make this really clear, i didn't focus on these neighborhoods because they were hit disproportionately hard. i focused on these communities because they were the most organized and resistance. and all of us of all races have something to learn from them. yet it wasn't until my second shift to chicago that i learned that organizing isn't always an act undertaken by ferry or political beliefs. i learned that oftentimes activists don't shoot the activist. they do so out of basic survival. i sort of did the story of jemima and justice and martha and gaming and jajuanna. and wanted to tell the story now more of justice. she's on the cover. some people have asked us that the stock image of little girl? it's a photograph of justice, one of martha biggs daughters, and he was taken and want to say this, by an extraordinary and photographer in chicago named brent lewis. and so the story of justice is that she was born during the trials of martha's decade. the story began, one of the most infant housing projects in the country. at its peak it had 25,000 people. it was never intended for that many the people in such dire need that the crowd into apartments. and yet the mayor of chicago decided in the late 1990s that he was going to transform the city of chicago. his plan was essentially to tear all the public housing projects don't come including the one in which martha lives. he also i do plan to build 40,000 new units but, unfortunately, that didn't happen. so martha along with 25,000 other neighbors and her children were if it did and that began a cycle of homelessness that stretched throughout much of the 2000. and when justice was born, she named her just because she said, it will be justice if i am never homeless again. i learned that martha became an activist at the chicago anti-eviction campaign not out of political belief, but out of sheer necessity. sheer survival. because she is one of the million economic refugees in this country. and so finally after leaving in a car and breaking up her family for years, she called up to chicago anti-defamation league and said what you got? you are talking a big game, talking about liberating land while i am homeless with my children and i need a place for us to live. so they said we've got a foreclosed home on the southside. we need somebody to live in a. it's not going to be safe and it's not going to be easy. she said, okay. and in 2010, the chicago anti-fishing campaign an and maa after should we have developed and made a really beautiful, the goal of all the local press and ththe call that scene and the nw times and became out and in front of all of the cameras in front of the national media martha got up and told her story and then said, i declared this bank owned homes liberated. because it makes no sense if the bank's own more homes than the number of people who are homeless in the country, the system is next up. it's illogical. and i frankly just need a place to put my kids to sleep at night. so i stayed with her in that home where she still lives and she still lives, she knows it's precarious but she also knows that it's the safest place they been in a very long time. so when i do radio interviews, people sometimes call in an essay i'm outraged by this author's position because doesn't she understand if people stop paying their mortgage and people start so-called liberating bank owned homes, don't they know my interest rate is going to rise? and it's a real question. everybody doesn't want to necessarily live in a liberated house on the southside of chicago. but what i want to emphasize, what i think is very important is the long-term strategy, the long-term vision of some of these groups like take back the land and the chicago anti-eviction campaign, and many more. this vision is that we need to move towards structuring and restructuring land in this country in a way that will start to remedy this century of economic disparity and exportation, and that we need to do with this battled for people being victimized also for all of us. their proposal and one that outputs to you tonight is storm community land trust. legal structures that allow for community control of land. i won't bore you with detailed because my book is not a legal analysis of how these work and is book does exist and i recommend you checking them out. .gov want to talk about the potential of these types of structures. because all a lot of decisions are made right now and they're made that necessary by our communities. they are made by people most often far away, the ones that have the capital. i want to propose, imagine if we created this society in which communities have control over not only housing but also environmental issues like mining and fracking. also, educational policies and decisions like standardized testing. also hospitals, should to be open or closed? prisons, should they be formed intercommunity and should with arrest and incarcerate so many of our young people of color? the food supply, should we be eating food with e.g. most or should we try to grow more food locally? imagine if we make these types of decisions for example, in appalachia where mountaintop removal is destroying and predicting so many worldwide commuters. do you think they would vote for mountaintop removal? this is not necessarily a socialist policy. it's simply a policy to begin to recalibrate the balance between capital and community in this culture. and it's one that i hope everybody will consider. so i want to speak briefly about the role of journalists. essentially i traveled the country and her the most exciting search of my life, i witnessed arrest campaigns, eviction blockades until liberation. liberation. then it would. then it would him and shouted myself in our apartment i wrote for about a year. so what is the role of the charter list, the storyteller and a social movement? i'll never forget something that my mom told me, who's here today, and i thank you for coming. she said to me, people who feel powerless gravitates to powerful stories. because their own stores are so this empowering. and right now she said, many of us feel powerless. our challenge is to make a story that is more powerful than the current narrative and just remember what the current narrative is, it's a believe in competition between individuals as the driving force in history. and i'm certain that saying that individualism is a bad thing. what instinct is that if there's no shared community tying these individuals together, we could be, no more than distrustful walking mannequins who are still wearing our price tags to intimidate the others. right now, there is a grassroots surge of transformative african committees, scorned and ignored i mainstream media. they are liberated neighborhoods across the country and nobody knows about it. and so if history is a compilation of the actions, then i propose that narrative is the conjunction, the meaning and stories together that tie together these actions as allow us to imagine what they really represent, which is a new culture that is more humane. one benefit of being a journalist is that i get to hear uncountable stories. and i received one last night i would like to share with the audience. it came from the men in washington state who is facing foreclosure. he said he just finished my book and he said, griggs wimbley story, it parallels my own because i also have dreams -- reams of paper and let it sit. eye-opening thing was his fight against sbf servicing as they the ones i'm currently doing with. sobering. he said the sense of alone is that i share is the societal norms clouds the underlying issue. i heard that some people say about me behind my back, why doesn't he just get a job and pay my mortgage? that i do work, that a teaching people how to live more sustainably and that i carry on a working farm. apparently somehow doesn't count as work because it doesn't make enough money to pay the bank back what they have already been reimbursed for. yet, what i appreciated is that what he said next, and he said he felt inspiration more than anything else in learning about the stories of the people who fought back. he said ultimately there was so many moments of pride in our human spirit, and moments of almighty god, how could that have happened? since wimbledon our way back to words and definitions as always seems to happen when you're in a bookstore, it's now at this moment that i would like to propose a third definition of homes. remember what we begin with? we begin with communities and begin with commodities, right? we begin with collections of people, the places in which people live. we begin with a market product. it's a sharp dichotomy but i want to get through it in some way and propose my own definition. i'd like to say that home is a form of shelter. it's a basic necessity for human survival. and as such, home is a basic human right. we know that as frederick douglass said, how -- power concedes nothing without a demand but it never has and it never will. some i demanded it is that housing be recognized as a human rights in this country. when i say this on the radio or television, i'm often told this is an unreasonable demand. what i personally think is unreasonable is that in the richest nation in the world, under a government that has figured out how to collect all of my e-mail and all of my phone logs, under any know that it's figured out how to wage war with remote control and construct the largest prison system in u.s. history, and in world history, we can't figure out how to structure society such that a but has a basic place to put their children to sleep at night? housing must be recognize as a human right, and the power that be won't or can't figure out how to ensure this right, then we should figure out how to have the right to liberate the homes in the land ourselves. it is this type of collective liberation that people across the country, people like bertha garrett, people like martha biggs are already doing. and now, i propose it is our time to join them. thank you. [applause] >> thank you for the amazing summary of your book. so we are, of course, going to have our offer signed some books after the event has concluded. so, books are available at the bookstore, and then we will have laura here on stage to give you, sign your copy. so with that i will open up the floor. i would like to open up the floor now for questions for laura. yes. >> laura, are you familiar with the eminent domain coming out in richmond and the rest of the investors to boycott basically all loans that come out of the area. and what do you think of this strategy and what you think is going to happen? >> yeah, i think that's a great question. thank you for bringing that up. boycott is an interesting word because i call it redline, when you refuse to lend in a neighborhood. and in my boat that was made illegal in 1968 and 1977 with the passage of the fair housing act and the fair lending act. so to summarize briefly in case anyone is not aware, richmond, california, and about a dozen other cities across the country that have been hard hit by foreclosure are investigating, and perhaps implementing, richmond may be the first to do it, a policy in which they use eminent domain to seize mortgages, write down the principal, so reduce the amount owed by families, and then sell it back to the homeowner who then makes the regular mortgage payments. first off, let's back up for a second. why would cities and the in the business of doing this? it's because in cities like richmond, california, and many other cities across the country, particularly committees of color about communities of all races and socioeconomic status is, many, many people in richmond, more than 50%, our underwater on their mortgage. what it means when you're underwater is it means you owe more on the principle of your mortgage -- yet been more than your home is worth. i spoke to someone in detroit, michigan, for example, that was 21 times underwater, which meant their house was about communicable worth something very low because the housing price plummeted and they owed 20 times more on their house and the house is currently worth. it's been well documented by a number of economic agencies, including the imf, the international monetary fund, one of the most conservative neoliberal capitalist organizations in the world, that when you're underwater on your mortgage you are more likely to go into default, and that widespread principal reduction reducing the amount owed would help us get out of this housing crisis. so the banks have been incredibly opposed to doing this of course because we be cutting into their cake. so cities like richmond, california, are saying if you won't do it, and the federal government is not making any moves to doing it, we're going to do it. we are going to seize these mortgages through eminent domain, which is the cities right, we were right and a pencil and so back to the homeowner who will go up and make regular payments but we got to do something about the foreclosures. what's interesting is the banks are very opposed to the. i'm pretty excited about the proposal if you can't tell from her attitude. the banks are very opposed to it but what's particularly interesting to me is the federal government is also very opposed to this policy. is also taking a hard line in saying we will take to court any city that implements this plan, and the most vehement opponent of this post has been at a market, the director of the fhfa. he is on his way out but he has been overseeing appointed to oversee the now government entity of fannie mae and freddie mac. they were bailed out you remember to the tune of trillions of dollars. they are now government entities. they guarantee more than 80% of mortgages. yet even though they are owned by the government, owned by the government, they have been the most aggressive opponent of principal reduction, of any foreclosure prevention programs, and particularly this policy being proposed in richmond, california. so to me i think it's unsurprising that the banks would oppose this because they would certainly be digging into the paycheck. what is particularly disappointing to me is that the federal government has once again taken the side of the banks and once again using its legal power and its bullying power as the federal government to effectively say they will boycott or redline or suit any local government that is trying to take care of its own citizens. so once again we talk about control from a faraway versus localized control, collective control, community control, you can see that there is a tension. and that right now the mayor of richmond and other mayors are interested in trying to move forward a policy that will help their communities. >> hi. [inaudible] thirty year mortgages are no longer effective. what are the benches -- what are the advantages of a 30 year mortgage? >> sure. 30 year mortgages come to my knowledge and that could be wrong but to my knowledge it's not that they're not effective right now. it's a that many people are saying they are under threat. and they may be under threat because recently in phoenix, president obama just about two weeks ago now gave his speech about his been failing his brand-new plan for the housing market in the united states here and if you noticed in his speech, the centerpiece was that he wanted to draw down fannie mae and freddie mac, which were just talking about, what he wants to do is, to quote his own words, allow the private market to form the backbone of the u.s. housing market. when he says that, he says it to advocate that private lenders assume more risk, so if they make these spectacular profits, they should assume more risk. it's something of a false promise for two reasons. one, if they ever got into any system that should trouble, we learned from the bailout rounds of 2008 and 2008, that we've got their backs. but also that in his plan would likely have a government guarantee of any of their mortgage-backed securities. and mortgage-backed securities are the bundles that these mortgages are placed into so they could go through the securitization chain where they were sold off for one bank to the next bank the next bank, and ultimately to investors. and the process is used that banks don't accept any risk at any state frankly and whether or not we pay back their mortgages because they have already been paid out. so some are speculating i think completely unconfirmed that if we were to draw down fannie mae and freddie mac, it is possible for 30 year fixed mortgage could be under attack. we don't know yet but we don't even know if obama really does want to draw down fannie and freddie. we don't know if that's possible. there's still a mess in housing market. i think the important part of this debate is that the 30 year fixed mortgage used to be the actual backbone offer housing market. and now we've increasingly moved to the subprime variable rate, ballooning mortgage contract. we saw the results of them when the housing market exploded in 2007, 2008. we saw that many people could not pay, that these were in many places unpayable debt. and more than anything else, you drawback to the different ways that we have experienced about this history of the united states housing in the united states used to be the every white american always received a 30 year fixed mortgage. you would have to have ruined, ruined credit to get anything else. but in redline communities to actually see it, african-americans actually received loans from lenders that were then called loan sharks because they were so predatory. loans that mirror pretty closely the loans that we experienced as the rise of the subprime mortgage market started to kind of balloon in the late 90s and throughout the 2000s. so we saw, and many scholars have referred to it, is the marginalization and the predatory actions that at one point is really could only happen in the secondary market. go completely mainstream. and affect people of all races and all religions, and we didn't even need this discriminatory lending practice to make it a mainstream market product. what we are releasing is the increasing radicalization of the financial products that wall street has been selling to us, and if any things like the 30 year fixed mortgage or the rights of local city to reduce the principles through eminent domain, or the creation of legal structures like committee land chose. all these are ways to fight back against the increasingly radical and predatory products of wall street. >> you were talking about a woman who is homeless for 10 years, and i was wondering what strategies that she came up with the kind of raise a family while being homeless? >> thanks for that question. that was something that really impressed me. i remember speaking to her, to get my, and she at the time was, she just finished six great. she was supposed to go into seventh grade but they wanted her to skip and eighth grade because her grades were so good. it's well documented that if you're homeless as a child, her grades suffer, your test scores suffer because of her difficult for you to function in society and grew up to be a thriving adult. but martha became a very fierce and protective mother in a situation where it was very hard to protect her children. so jeremiah told me it was always homework time in the back of the car. the backseat of the car was a homework section when you living in the car and has riveted their homework. if we do anything else you are in trouble. she would members going to school early. martha used to take her to school early sometimes and they would do their homework there. because martha knew that getting out of the cycle of poverty was the goal not just for her children, but also for herself, and in this generation. but it also was incredibly difficult but she told stories of having to break up her children. all of them had to go to different relatives houses. the children said we used to the adult gossip about our mother. we history them say things like, why doesn't she just come and pick up her kids? they wanted to say, hey, you don't know what my mother is going through, but they did want to jeopardize their ability stay at their house anymore so the hillside and. martha knew they were saying those things but she had nowhere to take them. she could not -- she worked at numerous minimum-wage jobs throughout those 10 years. she held those jobs, yet they didn't do enough to rent an apartment. so she set a new that i had nowhere to take them so i would just let the phone ring and lay down in the back of the minivan. next question. >> so i want to go back to -- [inaudible] just maybe from your experience, even from interviewing everyone in the process of your book as part of the occupant movement, how effective is a really for people just to take over a house, live in a? is that something that -- have any -- have there been many success for some that? >> thanks for that question. it's challenging. it's easy to idolize these types of actions, turned them into utopias. these things are challenging and that's what i really wanted to talk about the fact that sometimes people are not taking these actions out of some devotion. but they're taking out a basic survival as an economic refugee in this country. but to refer to question about collective, i saw very interesting things. i saw the way that people organized communities in the collective. and i remember for example, being inside a 24 hour home occupation in minneapolis. it was a family home occupation and four about, ultimately about a month, there was a 24 hours people staying in the so because fannie mae was trying to evict the family from home and repossess it. they said no, we are protecting the family. people were taking shows. you went in the house and took shifts and they stay there for three or four nights. there were no incidents when i was there but later the result was a series of very intense police rates. but you walk in and everything is structured. there's rules on the walls and there's lives and there's rules about the dishes but it's sort of like being in a house of an overprotective mother and you've got to do everything right and you know the rules. but it wasn't authoritarian in any way. it was that the community was trying to come together and unlearn the type of selfish and greedy behavior that is inscribed inside us as a result of living in such individualistic and capitalist society. service almost structured to talk about how could we organized this committee better? so every night there were meetings and they were usually pretty sure. you rented a particle, what would happen if the police show up? who do you call? what role do you take? we watched a lot of revolutionary movies, movies about squatting liberation movements, et cetera. and i remember just feeling fat, okay, there's a lot of process, a lot of process in an artist collectives if anybody participate in that. but the point of those processes is to ensure that things are fair, and maybe it makes its go through a lot of process to ensure things are fair. >> are there any examples of other countries that have fairer ways of making housing available to people, whether it's privately owned or collectively owned, so that we have models like we have models in national health care? >> yeah. >> that don't work in our current system. >> that's a great question, a great question. i mentioned a few countries and few models, and, of course, all this if you're interested, you can investigate further. i was at a conference with latin american countries and social movements. i was talking to a representative, a lawyer, in the ecuadorian government. and i was saying, well, what happened? we had this massive housing crisis and that's what i'm researching. what did you get to as a war and the government? what did you do? they said, we looked north. we saw what was going on with you guys, and we immediately cratered a national bank and the national bank gives out most of the loans and most of the mortgages. they only be fixed rate mortgages. data that any of the toxic and predator loans we have here, essentially mainstream and acceptable products. and the also lots and lots of government programs intended for people who are made in default or in foreclosure to try to get out of the. their goal is to have a low foreclosure rate. it's one of their stated government policies but i think that's the difference but it's not it's a perfect model. it's about their priorities are in my opinion better. one of their priorities is we prefer not to throw people out of their homes, rather than throw people out of their homes. we will establish a lending and governmental agency that by and large is trying to do the same thing. we haven't seen that at fannie mae and freddie mac and we have not seen that with wall street banks. most of europe also most of western europe has better models and we do. sort of one historical tidbit. i didn't get into the history. there's lots of history. sort of the rise in public housing happened after the great depression, and because millions of people were thrown out of their own. actually we like to think that millions were thrown out and but not now. actually 2010 had pretty much the same eviction rate when she recalibrate for population changes. as you know, the 1933, 1934. but actually it was roughly the same rate but still they had massive tragedy, lots of elections. but really the theory public housing rose in the '20s in academic circles. and when people were looking at models just like you are today, they were saying, what has done it better? what countries have done it better? they looked to lots of countries in western europe and that after world war i decided that they would reconstruct their countries by building millions and millions of units of public housing. the idea we had to build this country back up a lot of war, bombings, and thus we need to construct public housing. and so they arose modern housing. is a state of all the social is housing in europe and that became the proposal that became public housing in the united states. thanks for that question. >> i've got one in the corner. >> i have a question in regards to -- the mayor was mayor daley. [inaudible] with a loss of 25,000 residents, it had a plan at the time as to what they're going to to? give? >> a good question, a logical question. >> are the any of the cities that have a different model? i have to apologize, i'm not an expert but i can survey speak to chicago and some other major u.s. cities. i appreciate that question because it's a very logical question. so they're going to evict 25,000 residents. robert kehler, approximately 20,000 more residents, many other public housing projects. 10,000 residents, et cetera. where are the 50, 60,000 people going to go? so there were two plants. one of them was they would get section eight which argues vouchers given out by the federal government and you can acquire subsidized housing by using this section eight voucher. the other plan was that chicago was going to rebuild 40,000 units of public housing. you do with the latter first. that never happened or quit an economic collapse. we never built any back. so that maybe as an example in the future when you hear about a plan to disrupt a lot of things a city might lead them to look back up again, if you don't know what the economic situation -- situational be, you might want to be skeptical. talk about section a for moment. section eight is a federal plan run by hud and it is essentially a way to subsidize people who need help living in the private housing market. so what you get is if you're lucky you get a voucher and then you go around and the landlord doesn't have to take you, but a landlord can take you and then hud pays, the federal government pays a lot of your housing costs. there's many -- there's also location-based section eight, which for simplicity focus on the individual section eight because that was the plan that was used for chicago. there's a number of problems with the section eight, although there's also some benefits that the city wants often, sites often. the benefits our public housing is not necessarily always a beautiful place to live. it's nice to talk about public housing as an economic theory but it might not be as live -- the idea with such neat is that you have the freedom and the buzzword is freedom to choose whatever you want to live. now to the problems. i think it's a program and i really should be scrutinized more fully than we did in the country. there's a difference between freedom and access. there's a difference between freedom and reality. the reality as many people do you section eight have told me is that nobody wants to you and nobody is compelled to accept your section eight voucher. so you end up going from house to house looking for a place that you can live with a family in a moment where frankly you need them most and you get rejected over and over again. another problem with section eight vouchers is it doesn't help you with social security deposit because it's just a monthly, you know, string but it does not do things with security deposits and other things you need to move into a rental apartment. if anybody has recent move into a rental apartment, it doesn't matter what your monthly rate is, that first month you pay a lot more. if you were infected from public housing in the united states you might not have a lot more in your pocket. you might not have thousands of dollars for the closing cost. that's their problem and one i think is the most important is that when you tear down a public housing complex that tested for generations, and then you stand with the people with these vouchers in their pocket did just fine housing wherever, you break up communities. you break out those types of ties that people rely on for survival, weekly when you do have a lot of money in a country that values money above everything else. it's the dispersed effect. it's the idea that the poor in chicago were simply sort of vanished to the far corners of the cities, and suddenly there was nobody when the federal government had at least to look out and there was nobody who is checking to see what was going on and whether these landlord were being predatory come and summit of them were because so many of the places where people ended up then fell into foreclosure and the landlords did not feel compelled necessary to inform their tenets. so section eight while it has its benefits and it's important that we consider programs to help subsidize housing, especially when will that in a country where minimum wage does not teach a fair market rental apartment in any major city in the united states, while it's important to consider programs like section eight, we had to recognize how it rose under the reagan administration, and it rose yet another way to subsidize the private market, to the federal government pay private landlords. and so in some ways, section eight is simply turning the federal government into one of the largest clients of slum landlords across the country. >> in closing i have one final question for you. in the book you did say in the beginning, you talk a lot about the legacy of private property ownership, the cultural connection to that hasn't really developed over our natural history. him so i guess going to your proposal about communal ownership, homeownership, i'm wondering what kind of contradiction, ideological contradiction you see surfacing in this idea of fighting over levels, and particularly amongst people of color who have really been restricted from property rights, attached to it throughout history. >> i think that's a really good question. i think that we are pretty -- i don't want to speak for everybody. but recently in the united states we really like contradiction. you've got to capitalism or socialism and we're going of the cold war over it, right? for me when we talk about more communal structures, it's not necessary that we want to banish the private housing market but it's a that, in my opinion, we need to open up the possibility, both literal, legal, and also imaginative where we can imagine different ways of structuring society. and have the ability in one of the most diverse countries in the world to actually entertain some possibilities of diversity economically speaking, and structurally speaking. to move back to your question in terms of personhood and dignity, a lot of this does come down to a question of dignity and rights. and it comes down to the question, and i think it's important, particularly me speaking as a white american, to be willing to listen to people and validate and really hear what they say their experiences are. so when i spoke to hundreds of people, particularly african-americans who said, we don't have any rights in this country because this country only cares about private property. that's actually something i think we need to listen to. tim wise has a great segment on this, and he blatantly risks history from them but give them a little credit. in every generation, the status quo says, we have achieved equality now but back then, things are really bad, right? so in the '70s we achieved equality then but in the '50s, that sucked, you know? and in the '50s we achieved equality then but if you went back to the reconstruction period where we blatantly just said as the federal government said, all right, we're going to redistrict leg, take a lot of george and redistributed to the freed slaves and then, when i going to do that, when i got to do that. that moment sucked but the 1950s, that moment is okay. we have achieved racial equality. i think it's important, we're in a moment in 2013 and begin to achieve racial equality. we have a black president. i mean, come on. so it's important for all of us regardless of our race, religion, or anything, to be willing to listen to other people in society and say, did you don't feel like you're right as an american are insured, well then we've got to do something about it and we've got to be imagined get about it. and maybe collective ownership isn't a possibility. maybe something else is. we don't necessary no one it is. but in my mind is that listening and it's that ability to recognize the voices of other people, and validate their expenses as true, and then being willing to imagine together how we could restructure things such that it would be different. that to me is our task, ma and that is what i tried to achieve in this book. >> thank you, laura. [applause] >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar in the upper left side of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> and the senate is about to gamble in your wielded for columbus day booktv programs now and take you live to the senate for debate on the shutdown and debt ceiling continued today. judicial nominations scheduled for 5 p.m. eastern time, andr. votes on those nominations at 5:30 p.m. the chaplain: let us pray. eternal father, hear the prayers of all your people everywhere, great and small alike, rich and poor together. may all people called by your name, humble themselves and pray, seeking your face and turning from evil. lord, you have promised that you will hear the prayers of those who fervently seek you, forgiving our sins and healing our nation. inspire our lawmakers who believe in you to also pray. may their intercession bring them a tallness of stature that will enable them to see above the walls of partisan division in order to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. we pray in your holy name. amen. the presiding officer: please join me in reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. the presiding officer: the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington d.c., october 14, 2013. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable christopher s. murphy, a senator from the state of connecticut, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patrick j. leahy, president pro tempore. mr. reid: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. reid: i move to proceed to calendar number 211. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: motion to proceed to calendar number 211, s. 1569, a bill to ensure the complete and timely payment of the obligations of the united states government until december 31, 2014. mr. reid: mr. president, at 5:00 today, the senate will proceed to executive session to consider the nomination of and rea wood to be united states district judge in illinois and the nomination of madeline haikala to be a united states district judge in alabama. at 5:30, there will be a roll call vote on confirmation of the haikala nomination. the wood nomination is expected to be confirmed in another way. mr. president, instructive good-faith negotiations continue between the republican leader and me. i'm very optimistic that we will reach an agreement that's reasonable in nature this week to reopen the government, pay the nation's bills and begin long-term negotiations to put our country on sound fiscal footing. i deeply appreciate my friend, the minority leader, for his diligent efforts to come to an agreement. the republican leader and i will keep members informed as negotiations continue. mr. mcconnell: mr. president? the presiding officer: the republican leader. mr. mcconnell: let me just echo the remarks of my good friend, the majority leader. we have had an opportunity over the last couple of days to have some very constructive exchanges of views about how to move forward. those discussions continue, and i share his optimism that we're going to get a result that will be acceptable to both sides. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the leadership time is reserved. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call: