OccupyWallStreet sharpens the message by de-foreclosing

Hat tip to Naked Capitalism for including the following Village Voice article in its round-up of links. This past Tuesday, Occupy Wall Street marched into Brooklyn and "de-foreclosed" a house that has been vacant and unkempt for the past three years, after the residing family was evicted by Countrywide Financial. The house was carefully chosen by researchers going through city records. Occupy is calling on homeless families to come take up residence in the houses Occupy de-forecloses. I'm going to start the quote in the middle of the article, instead of the beginning.

This new strategy presents a much tighter fit between tactics and message than was seen in OWS 1.0. When Occupy Wall Street was in Zuccotti Park, the media seized on the drum circles and sleeping-bag lifestyle to paint a picture of aimlessness and chaos—Woodstock tipping over into Altamont. But the occupied homes present a much clearer narrative: previously homeless families and young children, put into homes that the bankers' broken system had left vacant and rotting for years.

"The foreclosure crisis is where the rubber hits the road with the financial sector and the real economy, the 1 percent and the 99 percent," says Mike Konczal, a finance-reform expert at the Roosevelt Institute who attended the East New York occupation. "If you really want to challenge the banks' power and the way they're stripping wealth out of communities, leaving wreckage behind, foreclosures are a key point to go to."

Read the entire article (it's short).