The machine for spitting out poor people

The appearance on screens of some faces of victims of real estate speculation has caused, at the very least, discomfort and the desire to formulate some type of response, both on the part of society and the political class. Everyone has heard of the case of Maricarmen, an eighty-seven-year-old woman from Madrid, who suffers from poor health and economic precariousness, and who has been evicted from the apartment where she had lived for more than seventy years. There was also another brutal and disproportionate action by the Police, who charged against the protesters who were demonstrating for Maricarmen's eviction with a brutality that recalled the one they exhibited in Palma on July 27th, at the end of the massive demonstration called by the Platform Less Tourism Less Life. Mobilizing in favor of the right to housing or to demand the rationalization of the tourism sector is not prohibited for the moment, but it is greeted, from the outset, with baton blows by unworthy police officers who beat up citizens who are exercising another fundamental right, that of demonstration. Afterwards, if they find themselves in the position of having to give any type of explanation, this terrible Police force resorts to a cowardly and lying victimhood, according to which they had allegedly 'defended' themselves from supposed 'threats' from the protesters.In Catalonia, in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, the death of Olga, a 54-year-old woman with two daughters, one of them a minor, who could not bear to lose her home and committed suicide, has come to light. And here we have seen the face of Pilar López Cabrera, a 65-year-old woman who explained at the Palma City Council plenary session, through tears, that after losing the home where she lived – on Joan Crespí street in the city – and having contributed for forty years as a hospitality worker, she has been left on the street and has had to spend this last summer sleeping in her car, showering at the Ciutat Jardí showers and having to take care of personal hygiene in hidden places in large shopping centers. You can read about it in Héctor Rubio's chronicle in ARA Balears. These are not extreme cases, but rather much more common than they might seem in our environment. To some, they may seem like marginal characters, but they are people as central as anyone else could be. No one is marginal; the margins are simply the spaces of injustice and existential torture that our economic model reserves for those who cannot cope – with money – with the pressure of speculators.Pilar Gómez Cabrera insisted on emphasizing that she is “Spanish”, assuming that her nationality, the fact of having been born in Spain, should protect her from injustice. Maricarmen and Olga also are or were Spanish. Faced with vulture funds and unbridled capitalism, however, nationalities are worth nothing: without money to pay the prices of speculation, we all become ‘immigrants’, because we are all reduced to the condition of being poor. And this thing we call ‘economic system or model’, which is nothing more than the law of the strongest and the one with the fewest scruples, swallows, chews, and spits out the poor. The first thing to understand is that we are all exposed to it. And at the same time –we must insist on it as much as necessary– that the right to decent housing is a constitutional right, and as such it must prevail over the right to property and the free market. Naturally, it is necessary to legislate to prevent vulture funds from continuing to trade with people's lives and basic rights. And naturally, it is necessary to restrict the purchase of housing by companies and foreign investors. In fact, it is urgent.