The Sonoma County Peace Press put this in their latest issue, I wrote it but it's been edited, lucky for you. Some clarifying information and vocabularian choices had to be lost in order to make the 900 word limit. It makes it a little muddy not being in there, I think, but what the fuck.
April 10TH we go out in the street again in SF. 11AM Dolores Park. http://UNACPeace.org. Hope you can make it. Go Go Cairo. Don't give up.
Here it is IB
Borrowing into Foreclosure
In 2009, Sandy Weill, retired CEO and chairman of Citigroup bought an estate in the hills east of Cotati for $31 million. Mr Weill,you may remember took the company jet to Cabo San Lucas for a vacation two weeks after his company recieved $45 Billion in TARP (Troubled Asset Recovery Program) funds. He didn't go down there to recover troubled assets. He just thought he could use the jet for a couple of days. This caused some concern among us bailer-outers. I don't know whether the sharp sting of public opinion caused him to cut his vacation short and bring our plane back. Maybe it did.
Mr. Weill is known for playing a large part in Wall Streets financial collapse. He is also known as a great philanthropist and patron of the arts. But his philanthropy doesn't seem to have extended to helping homeowners save their houses from foreclosure.
When my wifes brother was losing his home, people like Mr. Weill did not step up to help him. Same thing with my stepson.. No bank or loan officials offered him anything except to come help him move out of his house. Actually, they sent the sheriff, a guy who is paid by us. Thanks a lot.
Nationwide, 2.5 million homes have been repossesed since 2005. Another six million are in the foreclosure pipeline. Four thousand homes have been repossesed in Sonoma County since 2008. Last year, one in every 47 homeowners in America had to deal with the foreclosure buzzards coming for them. Forecast for the "peak" this year are 1.2 million foreclosures nationwide.
Imagine you're this person; you don't qualify for a home loan and you can't afford the payments. Then one day you see an ad for a lender that says they can get you in a house. "Come on down and see us!" You walk out of the office the owner of a brand new house! You bought an ARM loan, but they say "you can refinance before the end of the life of the loan and buy into a fixed rate." You're stacking up equity, your house increases in value 20% and it's the best investment you ever made. Way to go!
Then a friend asks if you've had the house appraised by a party not involved with the sale. Turns out the lender and the developer are the same company, working under different names. In reality the house is worth 70% of what you paid for it. Then your employer for the last ten years moves the company to another country. You get a new job paying half of what you used to make. You need to figure out how you can keep your family in the house. You turn to the lenders, who refuse your request for a home equity line of credit because the property is not worth the money you still owe on the home loan.
The bank says they're sorry, but they are in a "position." You probably don't know about it, but they have insured the mortgage loan. When they "have" to foreclose, they file a claim and receive the full amount of the original loan, plus they own the house. You are responsible for this and the insurance company sues you to recover the entire amount plus court costs and damages. Then you find out that the insurance company and your lender are one and the same.
The house was built, sold and insured by the same corporation. The financial institutions, having evicted you by now using a sheriff that you have to pay for, are making so much money from all the manipulations that they can put your loan into credit default swaps. But you were given seven days to get out of your house and are long gone.
Bitterness, fear and victimization are the new American dream. The banks are given billions so they won't fail after they've already failed, while the sheriff is out taking peoples homes away. Traditionally, the rich always come for the lands of the poor. Always. After we did so much for them, this is how the banks show us their love. They'll do it again, too. They think the money is theirs, all of it, forever.
Tim Sullivan has been an anti war activist since 1969. He is progressive politically, 30 years in the trades, married and the father of one. He is extremely disappointed in the U.S. governments hegemonic policies towards war and social justice. He does not believe in the one percent doctrine.
That's it.
Thanks for sharing. Nice article, Tim. In spite of the edits.
ReplyDeleteMy belief in democracy only runs so far as mild relief that so many of us in the world still retain a vote. Assuming it doesn't stray straight from the ballot box to a dead letter tray the size of a football stadium.
Citigroup, for their part, laments this incovenience.
Personally, I would like to see Sandy Weill - and his UK and European counterparts - dragged from their beds in the dead of night. Ferried to that same stadium. And a soft-nosed slug discharged in the back of his neck, before it is wholly too late.
While those financial sector CEOs continue to party on a year round cruise funded out the public purse, I fear we may have missed the boat.
Anybody who doubts that Citigroup has a grand Machiavellian design - and I assume there are yet many who believe themselves inoculated to foreclosure - is mistaken. The worst of it is just around the corner. Left and right of those rows of boarded up homes; the atrophied commercial heart where the tax payer's dollar got siphoned off to feed a champagne geyser.
We're just starting to get the little nudge now and then in the media that the big thing holding the "economy" back are all these foreclosed homes still empty. So, the people that got kicked out and are now living where and how no one knows are responsible for the decimation of America, not the looters with lobbyists and their little dancing monkey puppets. Watch for legislation to limit peoples rights to challenge the banks or slow down re-sale of contested properties. That'll be next. The only thing that worries the government and the bankers in this country is an informed and united populace that knows the difference between news and propaganda, which they don't. To prevent that, they will, and they do, do anything. Anything. The motherfuckers have almost everyone in the country either worried sick or convinced that all this bullshit is their own fault.
ReplyDeleteI remember watching Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" with something approaching sick dread as he exposed one internal Citigroup memorandum after another, and joined the dots as the big boys jumped horses and began lobbying the Democrats in earnest.
ReplyDeleteAnd all the while. The middle classes swooning over the conspiracies courted by "The Da Vinci Code". Hosting murder mystery weekends while the subprime lending crisis smouldered up into their pockets.
Nobody seemed too concerned when it seemed to be confined to those at the bottom of the housing ladder. Here in the UK, especially. It was only when the markets wobbled, and the banks with it, that the howling commenced.
I have rented all my life. The gulf between that and ownership has never seemed so vast. I count myself lucky.
Meanwhile. The bonuses are back in business. They never flew far south. And the banks don't seem very keen to pay back any of that swag they 'borrowed'; the polititicians not too eager, either, to hold them to account.
Oh, they paid it back. By lending it back to us at interest and doubling their money with derivatives trading before giving us ours back at principle plus 3%. Fuckers encouraged people all over the country to use their houses like credit cards and then drug it all down with credit default swaps and related derivatives that no one can figure out without a degree in economics and then only maybe, and took back all the bread they "lent" out and all the property they can get their fucking hands on. The whole country forgot the wars and hunkered down to try and keep their shit and obi wan bahama promised us four more years in afghanistan at 2 billion a day. No one here seems to be able to put 2 and 2 together anymore, or they don't want to. I like 4x352x2 billion equals what fucking economic crisis?
ReplyDeleteIt is a Frankenstein's Monster, the algebraic formula of the subprime fuckyouover continuum.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing certain is we've been fucked.
Your piece for the Peace Press cuts straight with the obsucarantism peddled in the mainstream. By the way, how is your stepson coping with the fallout from this shit ?
He's all right. He lives with us right now. He got fucked though, no doubt about it. I tried to get shit right with the bank, they ran me around as far as I'd go, I found an outfit in Tucson that was helping people getting beat by the banks, by the time we had anything together and it was a matter of 8 days, maybe 9, they had foreclosed on him and auctioned his house off on the courthouse steps in Tucson. He was 6 months behind in his payments, they'd sent back every check he sent them, he sent in what he could, and they told him they would only accept payments in full for the monthly amounts. I was just getting ready to go down there and he said he'd had enough and came back here. They wore him out.Kid was only 24 but he'd really worked to get and keep that place. They really don't give a fuck, they'll take all they can get, like a vacuum cleaner hose from hell.
ReplyDelete"He was 6 months behind in his payments, they'd sent back every check he sent them, he sent in what he could, and they told him they would only accept payments in full for the monthly amounts."
ReplyDeleteWell, one rule for those injured parties the banks set out to shaft with clear intent, another for the fuckers who did the shafting.
How long were the financiers given to pay back a fraction of the monies taken out the public purse to bail out their collapsing house of cards ? Five years ? Ten ?
They have no intention of paying back a brass farthing. And still they chip away.
I have nothing but contempt for the rules in a game so rigged. I have nothing but contempt. Period. Everything worth a dollar was stolen down the barrel of a gun. Every politician is a sack full of shit.
If I had the balls - and nothing to lose - I'd be whacking every post office in sight.
By the way, my "cuts straight with" ought to have read ""cuts straight through". I am sloppier than a pig in mustard.
I knew what you meant. There is a great book/ movie out that lays the whole fucking crooked shitball right out. It's called "Inside Job". Jess and I went to see it at a local theater and people were groaning and bitching through the movie. I was laughing, delirious actually, because of all the warnings and forecasting that went on before our two senators suspended their campaigns in order to "save the economy". Not one Wall Street banker or one politician has been charged for any of it in criminal court and the congress is all over tort reform right now. I wonder why.
ReplyDeleteThe warnings started in 1998.
ReplyDelete