Petition signed. This is just disgusting.

Can you tell it’s pissing me off a bit? Compromise for the better is one thing, watering down to screw people over is another thing entirely.

Is gmail down for everyone else, too — or is it just me?

Must just be you Christy. Is NSA mad at you for trying to set off some fires under Congress Critters?

my gmail is working ..[just read one from the lake btw ] and sent both letters ..etc ..

thanks for the heads up christy ..

Seems to be just a problem with the gmail interface with safari. Weird.

Christy,

Do you think all Obama has to do is restore what was true in 1990 or 1980?

Ya know, i spend hours every day reading all this economics crap and analysis, and for the life of me, i can’t figure out a way to view as credible the rationale being offered up by the folks in power for bailing out AIG and their ilk yet again over just sending a lump of cash, a big lump, big enough to pay off a modest mortgage, to every homeowner in the country making less than 60,000 a year.

anybody? watch out though…. don’t gimmie that ’save the banks or we’re done for’ crap. I’,m really sick up being asked to jump down this friggin rabbit hole every morning.

p.s. got your email and sent petitions. thanks

The banksters want everyone homeless and obedient.

You didn’t get the memo?

When I get a petition request form the Hamsher hersel, I know something BIG is up. I hope nobody’s antipathy to Pelosi makes loathe to sign this petition of Jane’s.
Thanks for posting this, Christy. There’s too much cynicism on this blog sometimes. To me that’s a mere excuse for inaction.

One of the beauties of the cram down provision, if it’s restored, is that it “regulates” lender behavior outside of bankruptcy. That covers thousands more people than those who file for bankruptcy law protection. (The idea that such laws are meant to protect the debtor from predatory lenders and give him or her an orderly, fresh start seems to have been expunged from the record like Bush’s crimes.)

If lenders know what’s in store for them if a debtor files for bankruptcy, many choose to renegotiate loans outside of bankruptcy in order to avoid the delays, costs and publicity of a formal filing (which also documents predatory practices). That may be less true now, of course, since no one seems to know who it is that owns debt any more. No owner, no one to renegotiate with, only mysterious minions who seem to work for an unnamed, Keyser Soze collective of creditors.

Still, the mortgage cram down provision for the primary home is a vitally important tool in ameliorating harm owing to predatory lending and collection practices. Why is it that today’s GOP and many Democrats, in thrall to lenders’ lobbyists, seem happier contemplating the return of debtors’ prisons (private ones, of course)?

Digg is open Pups! Please take the time to Digg this post and sign the petition and send it to all your email contacts. How can we afford to let me families get put on the street?? So please Digg and sign the petition.

This

Elderly women are prime targets of refinance and home improvement subprime lenders….Rising property taxes and medical expenses make older women on fixed incomes particularly susceptible to lenders who promise money for necessary repairs, but instead exact huge fees and charge inflated interest rates….

Reminds me of Addie Polk

A 90-year-old Akron woman, about to be evicted from her La Croix Avenue home for failing to pay her mortgage, apparently shot herself Wednesday while Summit County sheriff’s deputies were knocking on her door.

A neighbor and the deputies found Addie Polk in an upstairs bedroom suffering from multiple gunshot wounds to her upper body. A handgun was found near her.

She was taken to Akron General Medical Center, police said, and is expected to recover.

Akron police are investigating the incident.

A 90-year-old Akron woman, about to be evicted from her La Croix Avenue home for failing to pay her mortgage, apparently shot herself Wednesday while Summit County sheriff’s deputies were knocking on her door.

http://www.informationclearing…..e20940.htm

Anyone care to comment on this scenario?
to wit

Woman receives windfall. Woman buys house, puts down 20% cash, has enough cash reserves to actually pay cash for the rest of the house, but bank and others encourage her to take out mortgage (2005) insisting she’ll need the tax deduction (interest), even though she is unemployed and the house is to be a project she rehabs and sells in three years. Bank gives her a 5 yr arm mortgage at 6.5%.

Was the woman ill advised by the bank (she could have paid cash for the house and had $ to spare) or just stupid (ignorant, naively buying into common myths.)??

That is so horrible! She probably had to use her home to pay for her medical expenses. These Congresspeople should live like that for a few weeks; see how they like it.

Thanks for this post and the call-to-action email! This is shameful.

I have to say, today is the first day in a long time I was truly angry about what’s happening. I can’t believe that the banks are writing this legislation, and yet they are. The sense of outrage, that this legislation is so badly needed RIGHT NOW to address the crisis, and people are playing footsie with the banks and trying to pretend like it’s something they’re doing to protect mortgage holders — it’s unbelievable.

On the positive side, groups across the spectrum are really united. On the negative side — it’s going to be slow to change how things get done. It’s great to finally have a President who is trying to do the right thing, but the system is still a mess.

if obama were doing the right thing he would not have personally intervened to block the provision to allow bankruptcy judges to change mortgage terms – last year – in order to get TARP passed. he’s been putting the bankers first with hundreds of billions of dollars and ordinary Americans are supposed to be happy with too small and late?

and yes, i’ve been pissed off since then.

Thank you CHS! You know I love your calls for action.

Dugg and petition sent.

Wain Bennett wrote a good blog on the story

And Peter Boyer wrote this on page three of an article on Addie in the New Yorker about the predatory lenders

Adair told me stories about the predatory lending that had occurred. “Mortgage brokers started cropping up like dandelions on your front lawn after a spring rain,” she said. Solicitations for easy loans, using one’s house as collateral, came in the mail, in telephone calls, and sometimes from door-to-door hucksters. “You put a slick and a con man together,” she said, “and you have predatory lenders.” People who accepted loans on terms that seemed too good to be true later found themselves confronted with hidden costs or huge balloon payments, or sudden, upward adjustments in the rates they thought they had agreed to. When they couldn’t make their payments, many of them, embarrassed or confused, ignored the legal notices that began to arrive, and soon found themselves ruined and dislodged.

FYI, LHP has a new post.

You describe Unconsionable Advantage.

The bank knew better and should not have taken advantage of the unsuspecting member of the public. If an elderly person, it could also be elder abuse.

Maybe Christy, LHP, bmaz, Jane or on of the other legal eagles here could explain this fully.

GMail is ok. The problem is pounding the keyborad with a fist for emphasis. There is no tag for that.

As I posted yesterday, there are probably no valid mortgages. Here’s more supporting stories.

http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/3947

We need a class action against the lenders:

http://agonist.org/synoia/2008…..ry_lawsuit

Did you notice the author of the article on the disparate impact of subprime lending on women? Anita Hill. That Anita Hill.

Reminds me of Addie Polk

A 90-year-old Akron woman, about to be evicted from her La Croix Avenue home for failing to pay her mortgage, apparently shot herself Wednesday while Summit County sheriff’s deputies were knocking on her door.

Damn damn damn. That is the worst of the worst. And Santelli calls people like her ‘losers’.

hello. i do not understand how so many people can so completely believe all the lies propagated by the globalists; as they install the new world currency. labelling people as libs,dems, repos, homeless, congresspeople,: write to them, call them, talk to them, keep yourselves busy! petrodollars are running everything, and we cannot got off the grasp around our cajones of gasoline- even if it is the major cause of cancer! obama is in bed with the very pacs he promised to abolish;

[Mod Note; racist comments and suggestions of violence are not permitted. Please refrain from doing so in the future. Thanks.]

So many friends are just going ballistic over the latest hand-out to AIG and all the promised trillions to the banksters, while ordinary people are drowning without help at all.

It wouldn’t be so bad to hand over so much money to the banks and the Wall Street gangs, maybe, if there were more than token help available for households, but that’s the one thing that simply cannot be allowed to happen, apparently.

And can we figure out a different term than “cramdown?” I know it’s the one that’s used all the time, and I know it’s supposed to be benign and all, but when people have been talking about “cramming” this, that, and the other thing down people’s throats for a generation already, asking them now to get behind a “cramdown” provision in bankruptcy is really asking too much.

How about just calling it what it is: “court ordered mortgage revision?”

Aw, gee, John. This is prima facie evidence of fraud, or at a minimum bad faith on the part of the lender.
Who (rationally) gives a 30-yr. mortgage to an 85-yr old woman? By itself this tells me the loan was predatory.

My elderly FIL was persuaded by a mortgage broker – who called him out of the blue – shortly after Texas legalized equity loans in the nineties – to take out a loan for repairs on his house. He wasn’t living in it, he was living with his grandson in grandson’s house.

He carefully didn’t tell his son and me about it until a day AFTER the three-day period in which you can change your mind and cancel the loan, so we couldn’t talk him out of it.

He kept saying the broker was trustworthy, even though he didn’t know him before, because he was “Mexican like me,” and therefore, he “wouldn’t cheat [me].”

FIL fortunately has good pension income,and loan is current, but not paid off. FIL currently in hospital for heart problems, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
We presume there will be money to complete paying the loan when he dies (he’s 86 now), but who knows? The house is in very bad shape –the repairs were done shoddily and it’s in a low-income, low-house-price neighborhood. A sale, if necessary soon, is unlikely.

And this isn’t even a story with a tragic ending. No ARM, no eviction, no falling behind on the payments.