Yes, I, also, was impacted. But there was a particular plan that targeted
minority people. What Wells Fargo did to black people has been well
documented. And although white people were impacted, the number of people
of color is much greater. The damage is greater. I read article after
article describing how minority communities were targeted. My daughter
works for a law firm that represents banks and mortgage companies. She
started working for them in 2005. Do you know what the majority of their
business was until 2008? Refinances. Minority people were talked into
refinancing their homes in order to get extra cash because their expenses
were higher than their incomes. The business was huge. They were going into
all the minority areas in the NY metro area. She told me that the people
didn't understand what they were signing and that a good part of the time,
the paperwork was changed after they signed. This was a cynical barbaric
industry with poor black and Hispanic people as its victims. Remember
Carlos, my computer guru who isn't available most of the time. He's a real
operator at heart. He grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the South
Bronx. He had an extra job during those years, selling mortgages. I didn't
realize what it was that he really did until the crash. He was selling these
bad mortgages for a New Jersey company, most likely to poor Hispanic people.
It makes me ill. I worked in adoptions and adoptions can be a dirty
business. I had rules for myself. There were certain adoption facilitators
and agencies that I would not work with because I thought they did unethical
things. I passed up lots of money because I had values that I live by. But
most people just went along with the system.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2016 9:39 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Virginia Jarvis
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Line That May Have Won Hillary Clinton
the Nomination
There's lots to think about here. But the banks did not forget to screw
only Blacks and Latinos. Many Working Class families found themselves out
on the curb while the foreclosure signs were being posted on their once cozy
home.
All three of my children were caught up, in one degree or another. My
nephew and his family. Cathy and I were impacted, even if we didn't lose
our home, we lost thousands of dollars of our equity.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/29/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Main Street.
Taibbi writes: "Maybe it's too early for post-mortems. But the results
the other night seemingly all but settled the Democratic primary race,
which may have turned on a single moment."
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Reuters)
The Line That May Have Won Hillary Clinton the Nomination By Matt
Taibbi, Rolling Stone
29 April 16
Clinton left a rhetorical door open for Sanders to connect Wall Street
and race, but he didnt do it Maybe its too early for post-mortems.
But the results the other night seemingly all but settled the
Democratic primary race, which may have turned on a single moment.
Earlier this year, at a union rally in Henderson, Nevada, Hillary
Clinton introduced a new theme in her stump speeches.
"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow," Clinton asked, "would that
end racism?"
Logically, it was an odd thing to say. After all, lots of things worth
doing, even political things, won't "end racism."
But from a practical point of view, Clinton's gambit was brilliant
politics.
It effectively caricaturized Sanders as a one-note candidate too
steeped in attacking billionaires to see the problems of people down on
And the line fit in a tweet, making it perfect for rocketing aroundconcern black people.
the Internet.
Clinton probably also understood that most people don't draw a
connection between Wall Street corruption and race. Although the first
victims of the financial crisis tended to be poor, nonwhite and
elderly, tales of iniquity in the billionaire class tend instead to
resonate with a different audience specifically, the white liberals
and college students who flocked to the Sanders campaign.
There was a political cliché behind this disconnect. When most people
hear the words "Wall Street," they think of the stock market. And
since African-American voters have traditionally distrusted and
avoided the stock market, at least in comparison to white investors,
there is a perception that "Wall Street" is an issue that doesn't really
In the subprime era, though, banks actually used this cliché to theirwent, it was remarkably un-subtle.
advantage. They profited immensely from a real-estate operation that
specifically targeted people who stayed away from the financial
markets, and carefully guarded their money by putting it in their
homes.
According to one study, about two-thirds of all subprime loans between
2000 and 2007 were made to people who already owned their homes. The
targets were often elderly, in particular men and women of color.
Visiting loan officers convinced these borrowers to use the homes
they'd poured their savings into their whole lives as ATM machines.
The pitch was: refinance your home, and get a little extra spending
money each month! Lots of people went for it. But there was mischief
hidden in the fine print of many of these "refi" deals, which often
quickly exploded.
Before long, the now-departed agent's promises would evaporate into a
toxic quicksand of debt, unforeseen penalties and foreclosure.
Like a lot of reporters who covered the crash era, I initially
misunderstood the profound racial element in the subprime drama. This
wasn't the S&L crisis or the Enron-era accounting scandals or even the
Internet bubble, a speculative craze that devoured the savings of
white Middle America.
Subprime was different. It was fueled by a particular kind of
predatory lending that targeted a very specific group of people.
In the 2000s, armies of smooth-talking real-estate hustlers from
companies like Countrywide and New Century poured into residential
areas across the country, but particularly into black neighborhoods.
They made wild promises, in many cases offering huge loans in exchange
for little or no money down.
Once the agents got signatures on these loans, they quickly sold them
up the financial river to Wall Street, where the great banks
repackaged them for resale at huge profit to pension funds and other
investors. The scheme depended on getting huge numbers of names on new
loans.
Thanks to a number of settlements, we now know that some companies got
many of those new signatures via intentional strategies targeting
black and Hispanic customers. The most infamous example was Wells
Fargo, which paid a
$175 million settlement for systematically overcharging black and
Hispanic borrowers.
It came out that a Maryland office of the bank referred to subprime
loans as "ghetto loans," and pushed its loan officers to unload as
many as possible on the "mud people" of Baltimore and the surrounding
suburbs. A crucial element involved pushing expensive and dangerous
subprime loans on people who qualified for the safer, lower-interest
prime loans.
The New York Times did a study of New York-area home lending and found
that African-Americans who made more than $68,000 were five times as
likely as white people in the same income category to be marketed
risky subprime loans. The ratio was even worse at Wells Fargo, where
it was more like eight to one.
Some of the pitches made by real-estate hustlers during this time bore
a striking resemblance to crude predatory schemes that had targeted
black homeowners in generations past.
The wide-scale falsification of employment data in mortgage
applications that subprime companies used to get as many borrowers
into loans as possible? That same scam happened decades ago in cities
all over America, most memorably in Brooklyn in the Sixties and Seventies.
In one particular case involving a firm called Eastern Services (a
kind of crude precursor to Countrywide), FHA officials were bribed en
masse in a scheme that led to tens of millions of dollars in losses
and thousands of vacated homes.
It was the same hot-potato game as subprime. Then as now, the idea was
to create lots of loans and quickly sell them off to unsuspecting
institutional suckers down the line, like savings banks and pension
funds.
In conjunction with better-known offenses like blockbusting (i.e.,
clearing neighborhoods of white residents through scare tactics), the
misdeeds of companies like Eastern Services helped destroy black
neighborhoods practically overnight. They did so in much the same way
the modern foreclosure crisis has now left deserts of blighted homes
in cities all over the country, from Trenton to Fort Wayne to
Fayetteville to Rochester to Port St. Lucie and beyond.
Likewise, the "interest-only" or "negative amortization" loan of the
subprime era, which allowed people to jump into new houses with little
or no money down, was little more than an homage to the "contract
mortgage." The latter was an infamous type of zero-equity real estate
loan-sharking that targeted black homeowners throughout the pre-Civil
Rights era.
Wall Street in the crisis era experienced an ideological shift. The
ideas of people like Ayn Rand, once considered extremist, became
mainstream. The heads of powerful companies became seduced by a vision
of an America made up of "producers and parasites."
Under this reasoning, it was only natural that the wealth-creating
"producers" should take all of the financial power, because the
parasites down below would otherwise just brainlessly consume it.
We saw this in comments like Mitt Romney's crack about "the 47
percent" or his incredible admonition to the NAACP chiding people who
want "free stuff,"
or in billionaire Charlie Munger's angry response to people who wanted
mortgage relief after the crash.
"There's danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, 'My
life is a little harder than it used to be,'" said Munger, who himself
had benefitted massively from federal bailouts. "At a certain place
you've got to say, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy.'"
These lunatic resentments drove the effort to blame minority
homeowners for the crisis. That effort peaked in a Tea Party movement
triggered by a rant by CNBC goof Rick Santelli against the "losers" of
the housing crisis. He described them as the "people who drink the
water" at the expense of those who "carry the water." As coded language
Race was always at the very center of the crash story. It was justvote"
never explained that way in the press.
When Hillary Clinton used that line about breaking up the banks not
ending racism, she opened a door for Bernie Sanders to talk about all
of this. He could have talked about Wall Street not just as a symbol
of international greed and corruption, but in terms of a more
peculiarly American kind of ugliness.
He could have begun with subprime and plausibly traced all the way
back to 40 acres and a mule, explaining the modern problem of wealth
inequality as (among other things) a still-extant failure of the Civil
Rights movement, an ancient wrong still not corrected.
But he didn't. Sanders I believe fundamentally sees the Wall Street
corruption issue as a matter of class, i.e., rich vs. poor. He never
found a way to talk about the special edge the financial sector
brought/brings to the exploitation of nonwhite America.
I don't know and wouldn't presume to know if any of this explains why
Clinton performed so extremely well with black voters compared with
Sanders.
Surely there are hundreds of factors. The idea of a monolithic "black
is always one of the more insidious clichés of campaign journalismMain Street.
anyway, as Collier Meyerson explained so well in The New Yorker last week.
But this is less about whether or not Sanders failed to reach "the
black vote" than it is about a greater overall failure of many of us
who followed these issues, myself included, to eloquently connect Wall
Street corruption to the pain at the Main Street level. Nobody was
ever able to truly popularize that reality, make it felt.
Sanders came the closest. But if he recedes now in favor of a
candidate with ties to the very banks that caused the crisis, it will
mean another opportunity lost. For a little while longer at least,
"Wall Street corruption" will be thought of as a niche issue. But it
should be one that consumes the attention of all, rich and poor, white
and black, and sometimes especially the latter.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Reuters)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-line-that-may-have-won-h
illary
-clinton-the-nomination-20160428 -
ixzz478UwP2pfhttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-line-that-m
ay-hav
e-won-hillary-clinton-the-nomination-20160428 - ixzz478UwP2pf The Line
That May Have Won Hillary Clinton the Nomination By Matt Taibbi,
Rolling Stone
29 April 16
Clinton left a rhetorical door open for Sanders to connect Wall Street
and race, but he didnt do it aybe its too early for post-mortems.
But the results the other night seemingly all but settled the
Democratic primary race, which may have turned on a single moment.
Earlier this year, at a union rally in Henderson, Nevada, Hillary
Clinton introduced a new theme in her stump speeches.
"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow," Clinton asked, "would that
end racism?"
Logically, it was an odd thing to say. After all, lots of things worth
doing, even political things, won't "end racism."
But from a practical point of view, Clinton's gambit was brilliant
politics.
It effectively caricaturized Sanders as a one-note candidate too
steeped in attacking billionaires to see the problems of people down on
And the line fit in a tweet, making it perfect for rocketing aroundconcern black people.
the Internet.
Clinton probably also understood that most people don't draw a
connection between Wall Street corruption and race. Although the first
victims of the financial crisis tended to be poor, nonwhite and
elderly, tales of iniquity in the billionaire class tend instead to
resonate with a different audience specifically, the white liberals
and college students who flocked to the Sanders campaign.
There was a political cliché behind this disconnect. When most people
hear the words "Wall Street," they think of the stock market. And
since African-American voters have traditionally distrusted and
avoided the stock market, at least in comparison to white investors,
there is a perception that "Wall Street" is an issue that doesn't really
In the subprime era, though, banks actually used this cliché to theirwent, it was remarkably un-subtle.
advantage. They profited immensely from a real-estate operation that
specifically targeted people who stayed away from the financial
markets, and carefully guarded their money by putting it in their
homes.
According to one study, about two-thirds of all subprime loans between
2000 and 2007 were made to people who already owned their homes. The
targets were often elderly, in particular men and women of color.
Visiting loan officers convinced these borrowers to use the homes
they'd poured their savings into their whole lives as ATM machines.
The pitch was: refinance your home, and get a little extra spending
money each month! Lots of people went for it. But there was mischief
hidden in the fine print of many of these "refi" deals, which often
quickly exploded.
Before long, the now-departed agent's promises would evaporate into a
toxic quicksand of debt, unforeseen penalties and foreclosure.
Like a lot of reporters who covered the crash era, I initially
misunderstood the profound racial element in the subprime drama. This
wasn't the S&L crisis or the Enron-era accounting scandals or even the
Internet bubble, a speculative craze that devoured the savings of
white Middle America.
Subprime was different. It was fueled by a particular kind of
predatory lending that targeted a very specific group of people.
In the 2000s, armies of smooth-talking real-estate hustlers from
companies like Countrywide and New Century poured into residential
areas across the country, but particularly into black neighborhoods.
They made wild promises, in many cases offering huge loans in exchange
for little or no money down.
Once the agents got signatures on these loans, they quickly sold them
up the financial river to Wall Street, where the great banks
repackaged them for resale at huge profit to pension funds and other
investors. The scheme depended on getting huge numbers of names on new
loans.
Thanks to a number of settlements, we now know that some companies got
many of those new signatures via intentional strategies targeting
black and Hispanic customers. The most infamous example was Wells
Fargo, which paid a
$175 million settlement for systematically overcharging black and
Hispanic borrowers.
It came out that a Maryland office of the bank referred to subprime
loans as "ghetto loans," and pushed its loan officers to unload as
many as possible on the "mud people" of Baltimore and the surrounding
suburbs. A crucial element involved pushing expensive and dangerous
subprime loans on people who qualified for the safer, lower-interest
prime loans.
The New York Times did a study of New York-area home lending and found
that African-Americans who made more than $68,000 were five times as
likely as white people in the same income category to be marketed
risky subprime loans. The ratio was even worse at Wells Fargo, where
it was more like eight to one.
Some of the pitches made by real-estate hustlers during this time bore
a striking resemblance to crude predatory schemes that had targeted
black homeowners in generations past.
The wide-scale falsification of employment data in mortgage
applications that subprime companies used to get as many borrowers
into loans as possible? That same scam happened decades ago in cities
all over America, most memorably in Brooklyn in the Sixties and Seventies.
In one particular case involving a firm called Eastern Services (a
kind of crude precursor to Countrywide), FHA officials were bribed en
masse in a scheme that led to tens of millions of dollars in losses
and thousands of vacated homes.
It was the same hot-potato game as subprime. Then as now, the idea was
to create lots of loans and quickly sell them off to unsuspecting
institutional suckers down the line, like savings banks and pension
funds.
In conjunction with better-known offenses like blockbusting (i.e.,
clearing neighborhoods of white residents through scare tactics), the
misdeeds of companies like Eastern Services helped destroy black
neighborhoods practically overnight. They did so in much the same way
the modern foreclosure crisis has now left deserts of blighted homes
in cities all over the country, from Trenton to Fort Wayne to
Fayetteville to Rochester to Port St. Lucie and beyond.
Likewise, the "interest-only" or "negative amortization" loan of the
subprime era, which allowed people to jump into new houses with little
or no money down, was little more than an homage to the "contract
mortgage." The latter was an infamous type of zero-equity real estate
loan-sharking that targeted black homeowners throughout the pre-Civil
Rights era.
Wall Street in the crisis era experienced an ideological shift. The
ideas of people like Ayn Rand, once considered extremist, became
mainstream. The heads of powerful companies became seduced by a vision
of an America made up of "producers and parasites."
Under this reasoning, it was only natural that the wealth-creating
"producers" should take all of the financial power, because the
parasites down below would otherwise just brainlessly consume it.
We saw this in comments like Mitt Romney's crack about "the 47
percent" or his incredible admonition to the NAACP chiding people who
want "free stuff,"
or in billionaire Charlie Munger's angry response to people who wanted
mortgage relief after the crash.
"There's danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, 'My
life is a little harder than it used to be,'" said Munger, who himself
had benefitted massively from federal bailouts. "At a certain place
you've got to say, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy.'"
These lunatic resentments drove the effort to blame minority
homeowners for the crisis. That effort peaked in a Tea Party movement
triggered by a rant by CNBC goof Rick Santelli against the "losers" of
the housing crisis. He described them as the "people who drink the
water" at the expense of those who "carry the water." As coded language
Race was always at the very center of the crash story. It was justvote"
never explained that way in the press.
When Hillary Clinton used that line about breaking up the banks not
ending racism, she opened a door for Bernie Sanders to talk about all
of this. He could have talked about Wall Street not just as a symbol
of international greed and corruption, but in terms of a more
peculiarly American kind of ugliness.
He could have begun with subprime and plausibly traced all the way
back to 40 acres and a mule, explaining the modern problem of wealth
inequality as (among other things) a still-extant failure of the Civil
Rights movement, an ancient wrong still not corrected.
But he didn't. Sanders I believe fundamentally sees the Wall Street
corruption issue as a matter of class, i.e., rich vs. poor. He never
found a way to talk about the special edge the financial sector
brought/brings to the exploitation of nonwhite America.
I don't know and wouldn't presume to know if any of this explains why
Clinton performed so extremely well with black voters compared with
Sanders.
Surely there are hundreds of factors. The idea of a monolithic "black
is always one of the more insidious clichés of campaign journalism
anyway, as Collier Meyerson explained so well in The New Yorker last week.
But this is less about whether or not Sanders failed to reach "the
black vote" than it is about a greater overall failure of many of us
who followed these issues, myself included, to eloquently connect Wall
Street corruption to the pain at the Main Street level. Nobody was
ever able to truly popularize that reality, make it felt.
Sanders came the closest. But if he recedes now in favor of a
candidate with ties to the very banks that caused the crisis, it will
mean another opportunity lost. For a little while longer at least,
"Wall Street corruption" will be thought of as a niche issue. But it
should be one that consumes the attention of all, rich and poor, white
and black, and sometimes especially the latter.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
