Let’s hear it for nonviolent bank terrorism!
by: Dave Belden on September 29th, 2009 | 2 Comments »
From the NACA website, a bank exec who made $50 M in 2007, but refused to restructure mortgages
Amazing article in my local newspaper about a national phenomenon I had totally missed: a nonprofit out of Massachusetts called NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America) has been organizing massive mortgage restructuring events across the country.
NACA’s Save the Dream tour has become a nationwide phenomenon, drawing more than 180,000 desperate people this summer to gigs in Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis and Atlanta – where a 2-mile-long line of people waiting to get in wrapped twice around the Georgia Dome. The pitch: a mobile loan-servicing operation where struggling homeowners can arrive with their paperwork and leave with a more affordable mortgage.
… The NACA events are the largest and most visible sign of how foreclosure activities have become part of the zeitgeist. Just as Hoovervilles and bread lines were emblematic of the Great Depression, foreclosure gatherings may go down in history as the public face of the Great Recession.
They did Los Angeles last weekend and next it’s Phoenix, Vegas and Oakland. Schedule here. If you are having mortgage trouble, don’t miss it. You bring all your paperwork, they scan it in, review it, work out what you can afford and then put you at a table with your mortgage lender rep, who restructures your loan on the spot.
… attendees typically end up with affordable mortgages fixed for 30 years at low interest rates — sometimes as low as 2 percent — and often with a principal balance reduction.
But here’s the most interesting part. When asked how this nonprofit manages to get the banks to do it, Bruce Marks, NACA’s CEO, says:
Obama pleads, begs and bribes the servicers, and that doesn’t work … We don’t trust them, so we force them to do it with nonviolent bank terrorism. We go to CEOs’ homes and hold them personally responsible for the devastation they’re causing. We dump furniture on their lawns; we knock on their front doors.
At the top of NACA’s website there is a string of perp photos: bank executives who have refused to cooperate. Click on a photo and a pop-up shows their portrait with the word PREDATOR across it, alongside the amount they earned the last three years (you know, $50 million a year, that kind of money), their net worth, and their home phone number. They call it their ACCOUNTABILITY CAMPAIGN. This is one combative website and group. They are also hiring over 1,000 new people right now. They are taking 500 employees on their Save The Dream Tour right now. They are organized.
This is the way Michael Lerner might like to organize a community effort on the mortgage crisis (if he had Bruce Marks’ skills) — combatively, on a big scale, referencing what Obama is failing to do by being too nice — though he would be trumpeting a Caring Society angle not the American Dream as his frame. Would he be running photos with PREDATOR I across them? We scrupulously avoid ad hominem attacks in Tikkun, but we strongly criticize people for their public stands on the issues. Isn’t this the latter? Writing PREDATOR across a photo would not be considered nonviolent in many peace circles, but is public shaming wrong? Conflict is necessary to counter injustice and greed. Furniture and angry crowds on financial predators’ lawns is the right way to go if it isn’t physically violent and is in a frame of promoting a caring world.
I can’t help but recall the weak response by Rabbi David Saperstein at the press conference for the religious campaign for health care reform, when he refused to suggest that any Congressperson who voted against universal healthcare was in any way immoral. I wrote him in my post:
But don’t you want to make someone who votes against universal healthcare even a little tiny bit uncomfortable? Did you have to go out of your way to assure them we would not think the worse of them?
NACA has no problem making corporate execs uncomfortable. This is interesting, because NACA itself seems so much more in the corporate style than most nonprofits.
For Bay Area readers, don’t miss another local angle in the story, about
… Mwanza Furaha of Lagunitas, who got involved with a foreclosure support group run by Marin Family Action called Don’t Get Mad, Get Even. Furaha, a longtime R&B singer who is fighting foreclosure of the home she and her husband own in western Marin County, decided to bring her music background to bear in the foreclosure battle. She’s acting as both an impresario and onstage performer for Marinstock, a daylong benefit concert for families struggling to hold onto their homes, being held Saturday in Novato at the amphitheater at the old Hamilton Air Force Base.
A few months ago, public television had a documentary on home mortgages and the financing of these mortgages. It was in the wording that had people buy a home with no money down and low interest rates for the short term but when the variable interest rates kicked in, the people could not make their monthly payments and they lost their homes.
Our fascist-Nazi nation is a nation of endless Ponzi schemes. Ponzi schemes are a form of terrorism.
These Ponzi schemes are permitted because ten percent of the nation is only concerned about itself and the ninety percent that is left are considered cannon fodder.
Our fascist-Nazi nation does not adhere to or follow the Golden Rule. How long can such a practice keep our nation viable? Like a house constructed from a deck of cards, our nation will crumble down.
Our country talks endlessly of foreign terrorism but our domestic terrorism that is common practice against the less fortunate is praised.
It is called social darwinism. this has been going on since the early 1980s. It did not catch the upper middle class’ attention until just recently when it rached up uinto the middle middle class.For twenty five years double income families and bank greed has supra-inflated the value of real estate for the highest possible profiteering and has forced the poor into black market economic dependency to keep eating and afford substandard overpriced shelter of some sort; the retired elderly and others on fixed or single low income in formerly prosperous cities like Buffalo, New York lcould onger pay their inflated and still rising property taxes and lost their modest homes by the hundreds of thousands, the working class began to deal drugs (600$ a bottle here for Rx painkiller pills) to try to make up the slack between their salary stasis and increasing economic insufficiency while raising a family still, optimally requires the stability of a home…etc etc.
Now we begin to pay attention, because the middle middle class has been hit. we are very very late. The individual’s net worth and credit account ahs become the barmoter of success in our very sick plutocracy. It doesn’t nmatter how you get the money or who you hurt or trample to do it. It’s a desperate struggle to afford 45,000 kindergartens and pay for kids to become guaranteed Ivy league stare even if they cheat their way thorugh college the way far tooo many are cheating their way through k-12…what a sorrow, if we do not begin to elevate developed character and the beauty of the sublimated human soul over money worship and trinkets and wall street gambling and the lust for sex ]drugs power and pleasure.
we cann reclaim our particpatory democracy. we can enculturate our nation into a prosperous and idealistic land that rewards fair play and provides actual justice irrespective of social staus and wealth. but it is going to take concerted hard work, effort scarifice and giving up demonizing by political party, recognizing that the demonization itself and all teh resultand sturm und drang results in the uber calss and global oligarchs laughing all the way to the bank while we make an unfiorgiving society so desperate that we are CREATING untold violence , violence that will only be increased if we strip people of their right to self protetion and violence that will not ened until we arm people with the probability that education and hard work is actually going to allow them to have simple modest basic but necessary success in life.