Odd Financial Situation I'm In

Folks-
It's hard for me to believe that it's been over a month since I've updated this blog. In that time I've been entering a diary over at The Daily Kos, mostly because most of those entries fit better there, but also because more people check out my entries there. I will, for now, continue to update my blog here, but I will also continue to evaluate my using this blog from time to time.

Now, here's my most recent entry. It's also probably my most personal one.
I’m going to do something I haven’t done before. I’m going to open up about my current financial situation. The main reason I’m going to open up here is because in all of my years, I find myself in a bizarre situation that I haven’t ever been told to expect.

Whenever I’ve committed thoughts to keyboard, I’ve always held back a little bit from my private life, which I understand includes ones financial life as well. I’ve not understood why this should be the case, since politicians and celebrities seem to have so little financial privacy, but I’ve held back in order to protect those around me from some… unknown, unseen, possibly legal liabilities.

So, with no further beating around the bush, here’s the background of my situation. Like many Real Estate Agents in the last few years, I got duped into taking one of those toxic loans out in order to buy a nice new home that I should have known I wouldn’t be able to afford once the loan recast. I can’t really remember the reasons why I would do something that seems so dumb in hindsight, but I’m betting the banks are thinking the exact same thing right now, only from the other side (“Why did it seem like such a good idea to loan money to people while making such a point to make sure we knew nothing about their finances?”)

So, about a year ago, under mounting financial debt and looking at a home value about 2/3 what we paid, we looked at our choices. We could file for bankruptcy, go through credit counseling, have the counselors tell the judge that we couldn’t pay the debt, have the court auction off everything, etc., or try something else. The something else that seemed most honorable to us was to pay off our credit cards, which in hindsight seems like the best thing we could do (Citibank recently increased their lowest credit card interest rate to over 20%!) while negotiating with our mortgage company in order to see if we could change the terms of our mortgage.

I’m going to do something I really didn’t want to do at this point: Name the bank. I think you’ll understand why later. To the credit of Indymac Federal Bank, even while they were going through all of their problems, they kept working with us. At least they did until last September. They asked us to get our financial information together for them and call them back with the information. I got the information, just as they asked, and called them back at the number they gave me, and ended up leaving them a voice-mail message. Next day, I left them another one. I waited a few days, called them back, and left another voice mail message. Then I did the same the next week. The week after that, I did the same thing. No replies came. No calls, no letters, no emails, no faxes, nothing. I called again the next week. I kept this up until around the middle of October, figuring they were backlogged, and would get back to me when they had the time.

Then came mid December. I got a letter from Indymac telling me I owed them roughly half of our joint household income by January 19th, or they would start foreclosure proceedings. I called them back at the number provided…and left them a voice mail message. And another one. Same thing the next week.

I figured it was time to up-the-ante, so I contacted my Congresswoman’s office and left a voice mail for her assistant who handles these things…and got no response.

So last week, we contacted a company that supposedly will negotiate with our mortgage company for an up-front fee, and I was going to go with them until I went to the California Attorney General’s webpage and found out that it was illegal for them to take a fee from us until after they had provided the services. Yesterday I called Indymac and after leaving my voice mail message in disgust, I called the Consumer Credit Counseling Service in my area, as suggested by the AG’s office, and was surprised to hear only confusion on their end. They suggested that I try to find a branch of Indymac and go in and talk to them, even though there are no branches in my area (in fact, the nearest branch is an 8 hour drive away). That was their best suggestion after a roughly 20 second phone call. No service from them was suggested or provided to this consumer regarding credit or counseling, so I’d say they failed completely.

To me, this is a bizarre situation. In my experience, and in all of the classes I’ve taken from high-school on, I’ve been told that the person who is owed money is the one that constantly tries to contact the person who owes them money. This is completely the opposite of my current situation. I’ve been calling them for MONTHS, and I haven’t even gotten any kind of confirmation that I’ve contacted them. I feel like I’m hounding them. I imagine them cowering in some room someplace, saying “Don’t answer the door, that guy owes me money!” It’s nuts. We hear all the time that if you’re in financial trouble that the worst thing to do is to stop talking to your lenders. That’s not my problem. They have stopped talking to me, even before we could talk about a possible solution! Is this the Indymac Federal Bank who was supposed to be a model of working things out with their customers, as was reported just a few months ago?

I hate to say it, but the real feeling I have is that this problem is so large for these people that they actually have no idea how to tackle it. Indymac can’t figure out what they can do, Congress can’t figure out what they should do, and the CCCS doesn’t know who they are, what day it is, or remember how they got to work (“What’s that ringing thing? What happens if I pick this thing up?”) The problem of foreclosures has gotten so huge that they are unable to figure a way out, and have decided to simply shut-down all thought and hope the automatic systems take care of the problem, or that by some miracle, it simply vanishes; the nightmare over with the dawning of a beautiful new day. Unfortunately, the dawning morning is the dream, and the financial crisis is real.

My family and I would like to keep the house, but we have completely lost our investment in it. The question is: “Should I keep plunging money into an investment that is currently, and probably always will have a negative return on my investment?” The businessman in me says no. Any further investment is money lost, unless Indymac can reduce our payments to a reasonable level. No offense intended, but that’s the right business decision. However, this is about family. If I could work out something else, I would, but it’s going to require Indymac to at least return my phone calls. The question for them is: “Do you want to definitely lose 2/3 of your investment, or find some way to lose ¼ or less (or possibly nothing, but no more than 2/3)?” Their current actions say they would rather definitely lose big than risk losing small. They know where I live and have all of my contact phone numbers.

I would love to hear from other people. Do you have any suggestions on what to do next? Are you in or have you been in a similar situation? Do you work at Indymac and know what is happening? I’m completely at a loss, and for once in my life, I have no idea what to do next.

What we need to do NEXT Part 4

This is the fourth part of my massive essay, "What we need to do NEXT." For the previous three parts, read them below.

Education

In the 1960’s, the average college graduate had little debt when given their diploma. Most of their education was funded through grants or the GI Bill. Now, most students graduate with a minimum of $30,000 in debt, usually more. Most of the funds spent on tuition and books come from loans. This needs to end. With credit becoming scarcer, we need to start funding our higher education. This is where fortunes are started, through education. Businesses cannot produce good products without well educated people. Government doesn’t work well without well educated people. Money spent on education is not lost, it is invested, and we need to start treating it this way, instead of treating it like it’s money thrown down a well.

We need to support our troops by giving them a free education. Honestly, how can we say that we are supporting them when in fact all of the funds they are getting for education right now are a part of their pay? We need to do more for those who would sacrifice themselves for us.

Money paid into colleges also helps our country by supporting basic research. The more basic research that is done, the more our industry benefits and the more jobs that are created.

For primary education, we need to start the reforms by paying our teachers better. The starting pay for an elementary school teacher in California is about $24,000. That’s nothing. Two teachers together aren’t making $50,000 per year. That needs to be changed dramatically. You absolutely can’t get a first-rate education from someone who can’t survive on their pay, let alone pay off their college debt. It’s scandalous.

After doing this, we need to reform our textbooks, and how they are written and chosen. History text books are written as propaganda pieces, and chosen based on how much they project the way we wish our country had been, not on actual history. That’s nuts. Let our kids know what has happened in our country, or they might make some kind of dumb mistake, like allowing a depression to happen again.

None of this is optional. If we refuse to do these reforms we have in effect decided that our country will fade away into history.

The TV Networks Owe Us An Apology

Scott McClellan has done his first good deed to the people of the United States in the last 8 years. He has pointed out in his new book that the Bush White House manipulated the media to get a war that they knew was unnecessary, and that the television media in the U.S. was completely complicit in this deception.

We know that the White House lied to get us into the war. There is no reasonable point of debate on this issue any longer. We know that Congress allowed the White House to dominate this issue, and gave them the war they wanted without any significant debate. Even under the Democratic Leadership, Congress has been unwilling to reign in the White House’s excesses. We are painfully aware of how the Supreme Court has largely allowed the White House to do what it will, with only token disagreement by allowing Civil instead of Military trials of U.S. Citizens captured within the U.S. as terrorists.

Now, with McClellan’s and other voices being heard, there is no longer any doubt that the television media in the United States at best allowed the White House to completely have its say, and at worst actively suppressed dissent of a war that would kill thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Before the war former weapons inspector Scott Ritter came to the college I was attending to give a talk about his experiences. He made it absolutely clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because he and his team found and destroyed them. He also told us, as a former Marine, that he believed that invading Iraq would be a huge mistake. He believed that invading Iraq and taking Saddam out would mean that we would be mired in the country for decades. He said that he believed that Iraq would break out in civil war. He said all of this before we set one foot over the Iraqi border. Perhaps the President had bad information about how the Iraq war would go, but that means I had better information available to me. The sad thing is the media had the same access to this information I did, and ignored it.

Before we went into Iraq, CNN news chief, Eason Jordan, went so far as to say of Mr. Ritter, “Well, Scott Ritter's chameleon-like behaviour has really bewildered a lot of people…U.S. officials no longer give Scott Ritter much credibility..." Perhaps U.S. Officials didn’t, but CNN should have. Not long after, Paula Zahn said on her show that Scott Ritter had “drunk Saddam Hussein’s Kool-Aid.”

In the final weeks of the run up to the war, MSNBC fired Phil Donahue from his highly rated show because he was willing to book guests that were speaking out against the war. A memo from MSNBC stating this explicitly surfaced at allyourtv.com soon after the firing that confirmed the reasons.

Perhaps it’s this mind set that explains why, as reported by The New York Times, these news bureaus didn’t carefully check the connections that their military experts had with the Pentagon. The vast majority of the military experts seated in all of the networks were working directly for the Pentagon or for military contractors. If the analysts said anything the Pentagon didn’t like, then they were denied access to the Pentagon and threatened with being fired. This means that all military analysis that was seen on U.S. television was approved by the Pentagon. Considering that the White House fired any dissenters in the Pentagon prior to the war, for all intents and purposes all military analysis of the war shown on TV was approved by the White House. We got no differing views. The reporting was anything but fair and balanced. And this was happening at all of the networks.

There is no other way to say this: The “Fourth Branch of Government”, the one given its existence in the First Amendment, failed us completely and spectacularly, at least as badly as the three traditional branches of government.

The framers of our Constitution knew that Democracy requires a well informed citizenry. That is the reason why they created an independent press in the First Amendment. For at least the last decade, television news has completely fallen down on their responsibility to keep us well informed by making sure we know and understand all points of view.

Newspapers, the main source of news when the Constitution and the First Amendment were written, are no longer the main source of news in this country. Television surpassed newspapers decades ago. Those who work for television news have done everything they could to become the most important news source for us, without realizing that there is an enormous responsibility that comes with it. The use of the limited public airwaves, whether directly to the home, via satellite link, or over the internet, obliges them to help with the nurturing of our democracy. Becoming the primary source of news to the average citizen clinches that responsibility. This is a responsibility that cannot be disregarded. Doing so will guarantee that democracy in this country will fall into despotism, and even the television news organizations will not be immune to that.

In order for us to regain our trust in television news, it is necessary for the news organizations to apologize to us, directly and publicly. This is not optional, and the failure to do so compromises the integrity of those news organizations. The longer it takes to get that apology, the more serious the breach of trust.

All of us need to demand this of our news organizations, including all of the ones mentioned in this essay, as well as all of the others in this country. There has been a major breach of trust, and it needs to be fixed. An apology is the least that they can do, and it should be done now.

Sources:

CNN’s attack on Scott Ritter:

CNN's Hatchet Job on Scott Ritter, by Antonia Zerbisias, originally in The Toronto Star, archived at: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0912-02.htm

MSNBC Fires Phil Donahue over liberal, anti-war bias:

Commentary: The Surrender Of MSNBC, by Rick Ellis, Wednesday, February 25th, 2003, http://www.allyourtv.com/0203season/news/02252003donahue.html

Some Critical Media Voices Face Censorship, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting), 4/3/03, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1825

Pentagon’s Control of TV Military Analysts:

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand, By DAVID BARSTOW, Published: April 20, 2008 in The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?ex=1366689600&en=eefc8e0bdd6ffc91&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Special Earth Day Post

By Ed Smallwood

I promised after MLK Day that I would attempt to be more topical; that I would attempt to remember special days more often. This Special Earth Day edition is my first attempt to do so. Look for my Special Free Comic Book Day Edition next month (the joke is: I’m not joking.) Rest assured that this Tuesday (the actual Earth Day) I will return to my usual purely political rantings.

All humor aside, Earth Day used to be really important when I was younger. It was supposed to bring attention to environmental issues, hopefully so we could do something about it before it was too late. Somehow in the last decade or so, it has become almost irrelevant. We have allowed it to disappear and today I am wondering: “Why?”

It certainly isn’t because we don’t need it. I’m sure many holidays have disappeared because they outlived their usefulness. Earth Day can hardly be considered to be one of those.

It can’t be because nobody is concerned about the environment. I have a hard time turning on a newscast without something being mentioned about Global Warming or Carbon Emissions, even if something much more important is happening, like The Pope marrying Britney Spears and Robert Downey Jr. while paparazzi have a shootout over the rights to crash into their limo before they disappear permanently from a Dutch colony.

Is it because we have Republicans in the White House? I doubt that would be the cause. Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, under the Nixon administration.

So what could the cause be? Is it because we’re so concerned about the environment all the time that having a special day to raise awareness is unnecessary? I would like to think so, but I doubt it.

Actually, I believe that we have never had as urgent a need for Earth Day as we do now. If we use it to it’s fullest, we should be going to Earth Day celebrations and using that time to network, to start to apply more pressure on our legislators to take the environment much more seriously than we have in the past several years.

Under the current administration, environmental regulations have been loosened, at a time when they are becoming more important. California has petitioned the EPA for a variance that would allow the state to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from cars the way they do other smog producing emissions. First the EPA stated that they had no authority to do so, and after California sued them in the Supreme Court, and the Court told the EPA that they do indeed have that authority, the EPA has decided to ignore California’s request on the assumption that they actually don’t have to pay attention to the most populous state in the Union.

The President first stated that he didn’t believe that global warming was happening. He later changed his stance to the idea that it was a natural event that we didn’t have to worry about. He has recently changed his mind again to agree that it is human caused, but his solution to the problem hasn’t changed much: Let polluters trade Carbon Credits. This would allow some polluters to put out much more carbon dioxide than they do now, under the assumption that others would put out less. This is a non-solution.

My gut feeling at this point is that we have a much bigger problem with global warming than we realize; that it is much further along than we have been told by a media that doesn’t understand the problem. The main evidence, and problem, that I can point to is that the permafrost is melting. This may not sound important, but it is huge. The permafrost is the land area starting around the Arctic Circle and going north of there. This is land that has been frozen solid essentially since the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago. Think about that for a bit. Many of the things that live in that part of the world that have died over tens of thousands of years were left in a frozen state. It is a giant ice-box, storing tens of thousands of years of leftovers. Now, it’s on a defrost cycle. Think of what happens to the food in your freezer when you have a week-long power outage.

Now think of all of the grasses, rats, mammoths, and other now-dead things rotting and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere. Over 10,000 years worth. That could easily amount to much more greenhouse gas than our entire civilization has ever released.

Considering how long carbon dioxide stays in the air (about 30 years on average,) my feeling is that we would have needed to go carbon neutral 20 or more years ago to prevent our current situation.

Now that I’ve scared the bajeezus out of you, we can still fix this. We have time. The temperature is not going up too quickly yet, however we do need to get on top of this problem as quickly as possible. I keep hearing people saying that we need a World War II type mobilization to fix this problem, and I think they have something there. It is possible, and things like this have been done in the past.

So let’s use Earth Day this year to start this mobilization. Go over to the Earth Policy Institute and purchase at least one copy, preferably several more, of the book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown. This book has the best roadmap of what needs to be done in my opinion. After reading it, you will want to lend it out. Trust me on this—virtually everyone I know that bought a copy of the last edition of the book bought at least one other for someone else. Next, Contact your Representative in Congress to let them know you are paying attention, and remember their reaction this November. You can also buy them a copy of Plan B 3.0 (the more you buy, the better the price gets.) And don’t forget to vote this November.