Category: Class War
HR3
I wish everyone would watch this and read this. It is unthinkable that women will be denied the ability to get an abortion, and even more unthinkable that a Democratic president will sign the bill if it passes, but it sure looks like it’s about to happen. Bipartisanship!
Wheee
WASHINGTON — Economists at the New York Federal Reserve have concluded that a controversial 2005 law backed by banks and credit card companies pushed more than 200,000 people into foreclosure and exacerbated the subprime mortgage crisis.
Consumer advocates fought hard against the law, which made it much more difficult for individuals to alleviate credit card debt in bankruptcy. This inability of homeowners to eliminate other debts, the New York Fed economists conclude, in turn made borrowers unable to pay off their mortgages, spurring foreclosures.
Despite opposition from public interest groups, the 2005 law easily cleared both chambers of Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush. In a paper released Tuesday, New York Fed researchers Donald P. Morgan, Benjamin Iverson and Matthew Botsch determined that the law sparked about 116,000 additional subprime mortgage foreclosures a year after going into effect.
What’s more, they note, these foreclosures pushed home prices down, which may have lead to additional foreclosures. When the value of a home drops below what a borrower owes on the mortgage, it becomes nearly impossible to get out of the loan by selling the house or refinancing, making foreclosure more likely if they become unable to afford the monthly payment.
“By making it harder for borrowers to avoid paying credit card debt, [the 2005 bankruptcy law] made it more difficult for them to pay their mortgages, so foreclosure rates rose,” the economists wrote.
Although borrowers have been unable to alleviate mortgage debt in bankruptcy since 1993, they remain able to discharge credit card debts by filing for bankruptcy. But the 2005 law made it much more difficult for consumers to file for bankruptcy at all — and then limited their ability to reduce credit card debt burdens once they did.
My new hero
Someone isn’t taking the class war lying down. Good for Mr. Katz!
At last count, Steven Katz owed $80,000 on his six credit cards, and he has no intention of paying any of it off. In fact, he’d like to show you how to be like him—a “credit terrorist” in open revolt against the banking system.
Katz is the founder of Debtorboards.com (“Sue Your Creditor and Win!”), a five-year-old online forum where he’s collected countless tricks and tactics for evading and repelling persistent creditors. He’s written how-tos on shielding your assets from seizure, luring collection agenciesinto expensive lawsuits, and frustrating private investigators looking for debtors on the run. He’s even infiltrated the bill collectors’ forums, where he’s been tagged a “credit jihadist” and his site’s been called a “credit terrorist training camp,” a label he embraces. “Debtorboards is one of the biggest and most successful temper tantrums ever,” the 59-year-old Katz boasts. The site has more than 10,000 members—double what it had in 2009.
Katz wants the millions of Americans buried in debt to stop feeling guilty about not honoring their obligations. “People are brainwashed to think that paying a credit card is more important than paying for the necessities of life,” he says. “Business and morality have nothing to do with each other, according to the bankers.” One of Katz’s mottos is “No one ever went to hell for not paying a debt.”
He wasn’t always an unrepentant debtor. When he first spoke to me from his tax and accounting business in a strip mall in Tucson, Arizona, he recalled how his first job in the ’70s was tromping through Brooklyn making collections for a small loan company. He once threatened to take a woman’s kids to an orphanage if she didn’t pay her bills. He wasn’t serious, but it worked.
The tables were turned in 2003, when a collection agency came after Katz for a debt that had been written off when he declared bankruptcy a few years earlier. The collector wouldn’t relent, and Katz’s credit score tanked. Outraged, he turned to the internet, where he learned how to go after debt collectors for violating consumer protection laws. Eventually, the collector paid him $1,000 in damages. Katz framed the check with the caption “The Steven Katz school of bill collector education is now open for business.”
His tactics may be extreme, but Katz is not alone in his quest to evade the banking system. More Americans than ever are unable—or unwilling—to make good on their debts. Since 2008, banks have “charged off” a record $90 billion in credit card debt—taking it off their books as unlikely to ever be repaid. In the past two years, major banks charged off more than 10 percent of all consumer credit card accounts, on average—two times the pre-recession rate, and the highest in US history. The number of consumer lawsuits filed against collectors, like those Debtorboards encourages, has grown 122 percent since 2008. A backlash against the big banks is ballooning—from the California woman who made a popular YouTube video urging people to stop paying their credit card bills as part of a “debtors’ revolution” to the “Move Your Money” campaign, which encourages consumers to move their money to local banks or credit unions.
By the way
I got turned down again for the Media Matters’ Progressive Training Initiative, in which they give people media training to be progressive spokespeople. This is the fourth time; I’m beginning to feel like Susan Lucci.
Actually, I did get invited to the one they had in Vegas last year — but I couldn’t afford to fly there. Oh well!
Catch 22
Oh, I just love how out of touch our bureaucrats are with the pain and havoc they wreak in people’s lives:
Marc Sanders, who lost his job as a radiology consultant in October, was thrilled to find out he qualified for a federally funded program that will make up to $3,000 a month in mortgage payments on behalf of unemployed homeowners in California.
Sanders was eligible for the maximum assistance – $3,000 a month for six months – from the Keep Your Home California program, but he was shut out for an astonishing reason.
His mortgage payment is $3,180 a month and his loan servicer, Bank of America, will not accept a $3,000 payment from the program and a separate payment from Sanders for $180.
BofA – like most banks participating in the state-run program – will accept only a single, full payment.
Sanders can’t combine the $3,000 with his own funds and make a full payment to BofA because the program will only send money to loan servicers, not homeowners.
The program can’t make a combined payment either because it is not set up to accept money from homeowners, says Diane Richardson, director of legislation with the California Housing Finance Agency, which administers the program.
As a result, Sanders – like most California homeowners who owe more than $3,000 a month – can’t get help from the unemployment assistance program even if they meet the qualifications.
“It is truly mind-boggling that BofA would rather receive nothing and face a possible foreclosure than accept two payments per month for the next six months,” says Sanders. He and his wife are using credit cards to make payments on their home in Lincoln (Placer County).
BofA spokesman Rick Simon says, “California made decisions to limit the monthly benefit cap to $3,000, and to not collect and consolidate partial payments from homeowners when the monthly mortgage payment exceeds that cap. This has the result of disqualifying some homeowners with payments above $3,000 from receiving the program benefits at this time.”
Yeah, Bank of America, but you’re still dicks.
Here we go again
God, I hate these people. What soulless, amoral tools.
Torturous
So it seems that Israel and the U.S. decided in 2008 that Egypt’s torture chief is the man they’ve selected to replace Mubarak. Yes, I know there’s such a thing as balancing competing interests, but why is our political establishment so very comfortable with dictators and torturers? Am I supposed to be less morally outraged because it’s a Democratic administration moving the chess pieces?
Mr Suleiman, who is widely tipped to take over from Hosni Mubarak as president, was named as Israel’s preferred candidate for the job after discussions with American officials in 2008.
As a key figure working for Middle East peace, he once suggested that Israeli troops would be “welcome” to invade Egypt to stop weapons being smuggled to Hamas terrorists in neighbouring Gaza.
The details, which emerged in secret files obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to The Daily Telegraph, come after Mr Suleiman began talks with opposition groups on the future for Egypt’s government.
On Saturday, Mr Suleiman won the backing of Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to lead the “transition” to democracy after two weeks of demonstrations calling for President Mubarak to resign.David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spoke to Mr Suleiman yesterday and urged him to take “bold and credible steps” to show the world that Egypt is embarking on an “irreversible, urgent and real” transition.
Leaked cables from American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv disclose the close co-operation between Mr Suleiman and the US and Israeli governments as well as diplomats’ intense interest in likely successors to the ageing President Mubarak, 83.
The documents highlight the delicate position which the Egyptian government seeks to maintain in Middle East politics, as a leading Arab nation with a strong relationship with the US and Israel. By 2008, Mr Suleiman, who was head of the foreign intelligence service, had become Israel’s main point of contact in the Egyptian government.
Let’s put this into perspective: There are some very serious allegations against Suleiman and they deserve more attention than they’re getting. I posted this yesterday from Dave Bry at The Awl:
“The extraordinary rendition program landed some people in CIA black sites—and others were turned over for torture-by-proxy to other regimes. Egypt figured large as a torture destination of choice, as did Suleiman as Egypt’s torturer-in-chief. At least one person extraordinarily rendered by the CIA to Egypt — Egyptian-born Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib — was reportedly tortured by Suleiman himself.
… In October 2001, Habib was seized from a bus by Pakistani security forces. While detained in Pakistan, at the behest of American agents, he was suspended from a hook and electrocuted repeatedly. He was then turned over to the CIA, and in the process of transporting him to Egypt he endured the usual treatment: his clothes were cut off, a suppository was stuffed in his anus, he was put into a diaper—and ‘wrapped up like a spring roll’. In Egypt, as Habib recounts in his memoir, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, he was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water up to his nostrils and beaten. His fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that his blindfold was dislodged, revealing the identity of his tormentor: Suleiman.”
—Oh, no. At Al-Jazeera, UC Santa Barbara professor Lisa Hajjar writes an extremely damning of portrait of the
spyman overseeing Egypt’s “transition” to democracy. I’d like to be more optimistic about this. But it’s awfully difficult.
Numbers
Bob Herbert must get awfully tired of being one of the few pundits who actually tells the truth:
What data zealots need to do is leave their hermetically sealed rooms and step outside, take a walk among the millions of Americans who are hurting to the bone. They should talk with families that are suffering, losing their homes, doubling up, checking into homeless shelters.
We behave as though the numbers are an end in themselves — just get the G.D.P. up or the jobless rate down — and we’ll be on our way to fat city. But the numbers are just tools, abstractions to help guide us, orient us. They aren’t the be-all and end-all. They don’t tell us squat about the flesh-and-blood reality of the mom or dad lying awake in the dark of night, worrying about the repo man coming for the family van or the foreclosure notice that’s sure to materialize any day now.
The policy makers who rely on the data zealots are just as detached from the real world of real people. They’re always promising in the most earnest tones imaginable to do something about employment, to ease the awful squeeze on the middle class (policy makers never talk about the poor), to reform education, and so on.
They say those things because they have to. But they are far more obsessed with the numbers than they are with the struggles and suffering of real people. You won’t hear policy makers acknowledging that the unemployment numbers would be much worse if not for the millions of people who have left the work force over the past few years. What happened to those folks? How are they and their families faring?
The policy makers don’t tell us that most of the new jobs being created in such meager numbers are, in fact, poor ones, with lousy pay and few or no benefits. What we hear is what the data zealots pump out week after week, that the market is up, retail sales are strong, Wall Street salaries and bonuses are streaking, as always, to the moon, and that businesses are sitting on mountains of cash. So all must be right with the world.
Continue reading “Numbers”
A mortgage isn’t a life sentence
Good Dylan Ratigan piece about resources to help you walk away.