Forum Post: Testify - Send Your Story to the Senate & House!
Posted 12 years ago on Feb. 9, 2012, 10:34 p.m. EST by desolationpress
(11)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
About a month ago, I received a form/questionnaire used to participate in an Independent Foreclosure Review by virtue of losing my home to a short sale.
The only bright spot in the form was an open ended question asking me to describe any other way I may have been "financially injured" by the foreclosure process.
Oh, yes. Hard not to bite on that one.
After composing my response, I sent hard copies to the Independent Reviewer, the House and Senate Finance committees, and the chief executives of PNC.
And I posted it on my website:
http://www.desolationpress.com/essays/indreview.html
After a day or so of reflection, I thought it might make for a good template for others to use to share their stories. I worked it up and posted it:
http://www.desolationpress.com/essays/testimony.html
I would like to encourage anyone who has been burned by the moneylenders to use the template as a basis for capturing their story, and then send copies to members of congress - both the House and Senate Finance committees and your state representatives. The key addresses are in the template.
There are at least three million of these stories, and all of them should be heard (or at least carried into their offices) as testimony to the scale and nature of the catastrophe. Let's make the scale of this thing a little more concrete - "three million" is too abstract to really wrap your mind around. A few truckloads of letters might give them a better sense of the magnitude of the issue.
I would suggest email, or web forms, but they're just too easy to ignore. And delete. Sure, some trees may have to die, but at least it's for a better cause than more real estate circulars.
just start a free worpress site ... I believe all the tools are already provided by the software to do that
I think It's a FANTASTIC Idea.... brings awareness to the people who have not been effected... as well as to the A$$holes in power who let this whole collapse happen...
post it in public on the the web
as has already been done in this case
Although I feel for ya, I fail to see the fault of the moneylender here. You can't expect a bank to lend such vast sums without security in the property; the 92K you paid represents principal and interest on that loan, and any perceived equity, as an eventual profit on investment, cannot be expected until a final sale.
If there is fault here it is not with the bank which, it appears, honored its agreement.
You know there are many who did NOT lose their homes yet still suffered tremendous loses as a result of the 2008 collapse - there were loses in market value, loses to investment portfolios, future inheritance, business income, etc.
My own loses are probably in the hundreds of thousands which for most of our Fed politicians is mere pennies.
It's a bit like saying that the loan shark merely honored the terms of their agreement, and the broken legs simply represent a fair return on their investment. I'm amazed that we have all just come to accept the premise that a bank should keep the first 90% or more of every payment as interest for the first 25 or thirty years of a loan. There are, certainly, many who have lost larger sums due to shady business practices (hard to feel too bad about the inheritance, however); as Matt Taibbi noted in his blog today, banking should be a staid, boring job that should pay a good salary for protecting people's money, and not using it for a never-ending party weekend in Atlantic City.
I keep thinking about the Pick-Six bets, and how they are nearly indistinguishable from many of the "investment opportunities" hawked on Wall Street. But hey, if Friedman is right, the market will just "correct" for all those bad bets. Nice theory, but the Chicago school of economics only works if people are betting with their own money. Perhaps we should pass a simple regulation that forces those who want to play investment poker to relocate to Vegas -- at least people would know they're playing against the house, and the odds are most definitely not in their favor.
Well, as someone who has paid off multiple mortgages and countless personal loans, only through the luck of steady employment, I am definitely not a fan of the moneylenders, either. For the American working class the bank is our perpetual enemy.