Mortgage Ripoffs and the Panthers

Dropping off my 5-year old at summer camp this morning I was chatting with another parent. She was a bit peeved that her company sent her a text message marked “Urgent.” Relieved, she mentioned it was about canceling a meeting. For a moment she thought she was being called in to be laid-off. I don’t know what’s worse being unemployed or waiting for the cut to come. Well, I do know what’s worse.
She told me that her main concern, as it is for many of us, is her mortgage. “After we got the loan and were paying, they told us they’d made a mistake and they had to raise our payment. If it was $50 or a $100, Okay. But we ended up paying $1,000-a-month more!” They tried several lawyers, but are stuck with this massively higher mortgage payment. So many ripped off by so few. Capitalism.
Later this morning we made a Campaign for Renters Rights house call. A couple of us stopped by a high-fenced, corner-lot garage, piled up with old cars. Ronnell came out to meet us and we made our way between the disabled vehicles up on ramps to his office. Ronnell told us he became a mechanic, “’cause that’s all they’d let me do.” He contacted the Campaign For Renters Rights through a carpenter friend who’d found our number in the Local union’s newspaper. He’s lived in his house for 15 years and refinanced in 2004. Recently his original monthly payment bounced up from $938 to close to $1600. With the economy down, there’s no way he could make the new fat payment. He called us to let us know he was 90-days behind on his payments and that Wachovia was messing around with him as he tried to get his mortgage modified.
We flicked through the phone book, found a couple of local Wachovia banks and made a date for a lively picket line. We’ll bring a few people and we asked Ronnell to bring people. He mentioned he has a friend who takes pictures. Great! He used to be involved in civil rights stuff. Great!
As our meet drew to close, Ronnell pointed across the road at a small run-down apartment building with a store-front below it. “That’s where the Black Panthers had their Office, right there!” Wow. There’s some real history. But the building had no sign on the wall, no nothing to commemorate this historical site.
In the subsequent thirty years the Panthers came and went. People’s rights have improved a little, while poverty is probably worse. We now have a black President, but life on the street doesn’t change. As we told Ronnell, billion-dollar banks like Wachovia are getting cash hand-over-fist from the Federal Government, but they don’t want to let it go in loan modifications for the average person that got screwed by Big Finance and their agents.
Anything we gain, we gain by action. We’ll let you know how the Wachovia action goes!