Foreclosing Florida

This is a heartfelt easily spoken soft paced piece which balances and explains the issues so anyone can understand the basic issue, but more importantly what they can do if face with the same. I hope treasury secretary Paulson, formerly of head of Goldman Sachs, is pulled across the coals for this his role in architecting the subprime mortgage market.

i agree w/ spacetraveler on all fronts... its a damn shame this crisis is going on. reminds me of the people at enron who architected what turned out to be a huge fall out, leaving many to suffer.

"smartest men in the room" is a great doc on it, i highly recommend it.

Very good work Justin. This whole issue makes me sick to my stomach, how an entire closet industry has formed around the buying and selling of foreclosed properties. Every time I turn on the TV or radio, I hear "GET A BEAUTIFUL HOME AT A FRACTION OF THE COST, FORECLOSURES ARE GROWING IN YOUR AREA MAKING FOR A GOLDEN INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY RIGHT NOW." I'm sorry, but there is nothing golden about a family that has fallen on hard times and cannot come up with their rent. Foreclosures are NEVER a good thing for anybody in my opinion and the fact that profits are being made from evicting hard working families just turns my stomach.

This pod shows the sad state of our American society today:the issue of the disappearing middle class. The gap between the rich and the poor is ever growing and instead of the have-nots dreaming and acheiving something bigger and better like home ownership, the real American Dream is being realized-taking advantage of the disadvantaged in order to make a profit for oneself.
I would venture to guess that this foreclosure crisis will go down in history as a similar situation to Enron and the energy crisis(The smartest bankers in the room?) where some smart guys said-lets make a new product in this unchanged mortgage industry that will totally dupe and ruin the lower-middle and lower classes to further widen the gap...and then when they fail, we and others like us will buy up all their property at below maket value.
The only thing that foreclosure is good for is making the rich richer and the poor...destitute.
Its a shame not everyone got the chance to play Monopoly as a child to see how "this" game is really played.

Thank you Justin for making this video. My sister is currently in the process of possibly losing her home and with the information provided here I am able to at least advise her to seek an attorney. Contributing to the community is this way is such a blessing! A+ Mister Mitchell, A+!

Leroy Mobley

http://www.plusaf.com/soapbox/mortgage-crisis.htm = end of crisis....

o boy

re: "This pod shows the sad state of our American society today:the issue of the disappearing middle class. The gap between the rich and the poor is ever growing and instead of the have-nots dreaming and acheiving something bigger and better like home ownership, the real American Dream is being realized-taking advantage of the disadvantaged in order to make a profit for oneself. I would venture to guess that this foreclosure crisis will go down in history as a similar situation to Enron and the energy crisis(The smartest bankers in the room?) where some smart guys said-lets make a new product in this unchanged mortgage industry that will totally dupe and ruin the lower-middle and lower classes to further widen the gap...and then when they fail, we and others like us will buy up all their property at below maket value. The only thing that foreclosure is good for is making the rich richer and the poor...destitute. Its a shame not everyone got the chance to play Monopoly as a child to see how "this" game is really played."

and other stuff like it..... it's a nice emotional appeal, but it has very little bearing in reality.

the LAST thing a bank wants to do OR should do is... own property..... "buying it back at below-market rates" sounds good, but if they were to buy a lot of these homes at those rates, they'd glut the market if they tried to unload them, cutting their "windfall" profits to nil.

i don't know where you didn't learn economics or criticall thinking, but the facts don't bear you out on this, nor on the myth of the "disappearing middle class." lots of data show that the "disappearing middle class" is mostly moving into the "upper classes" as they gain education and better jobs. if all of the middle class moved into the upper class, you'd consider that a BAD THING, right???? utter stupidity!

what you need to start thinking about is how to get the lower classes UP and INTO the MIDDLE CLASS.

and it's going to be through education, valuing schools and teachers and education and NOT by giving them government handouts which must, of necessity come out of the pockets of the middle and upper classes...... ah, but picking the pockets of the upper classes is a GOOD THING, according to your "thinking," right? if they're rich, they don't need the money, so take it, as Hillary and Pelosi have promised, and give it to the TRULY NEEDY, rather than get the truly needy to respect teachers and get educated so they CAN have jobs.....

utter stupidity, but i'm beginning to think it's a nature/nurture thing.... some of you learned these lies in the PUBLIC schools which you would like to expand, and others learned them from your parents and teachers, without applying any critical thinking in the process.

the money you take from me to give to someone else does NOT RAISE THE AVERAGE OF THE TWO OF US, but, alas, you won't ever see that.

vote for Pelosi, vote for Ms. Clinton. get what you deserve.

Excellent pod here. Really well composed and super timely.

I really identified with the main character who managed to get her house out of foreclosure. You got us into her house and we were very close to her so her face and eyes really rang her story through. One thing that confused me is you introduced her and then went straight to the foreclosure expert before the other woman had her first soundbyte -- it lost me for a second but not a major hangup obviously.

You really managed to capture the feeling on the street in Florida right now -- foreclosure central. I would have liked to have heard some numbers about how many people are in foreclosure etc. But this was still a really great piece here.

You took us to the courthouse which also gave the piece a really good feeling of movement -- we were not just stationary, we saw the people who are profiting from the foreclosures. Really well done inclusion on that.

Lastly, by getting so close to the woman who was your main subject, you really managed to capture the conflict of what it must feel like to be faced with losing a home. And the other man who talked about the fixed rates vs. adjustable rate (can't find the $800 when you could hardly find the $500) was really good.

Overall, really nice job.

Great pod Justin!

If somebody ever put a sign on my front lawn....

re:plusaf's rant
WOW!
First off-look up The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt by Teresa A. Sullivan, or The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, or Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do About It by Thom Hartmann and many others like it that will prove to you the current decline of the middle class-also i havent heard any new news about this all of a sudden burgening upper class, have you?Unfortunately, they(lower middle class families) are going nowhere but down, especially due to the lack of education, in public and private schools-publics dont have the funding to care and the privates have too much to provide an alternative to those that do.
The reference to Monopoly and other games like it is meant to show the falsity with which this sub-prime mortgage industry had advertised itself. If poor folks had previous experience with these kinds of things, educations in social economics, they would have known that it was too good to be true. Theres only so much legal jargon a non-college educated person can understand. {And if they had gone to college, 1, they'd theoretically be making more money. and 2, would have understood the cycle of the economy and how it would not work in their favor in the end,-so therefore wouldnt be in the predicament in the first place.The population obviously targeted in this scam were poor young to middle-aged, lower to middle class minorities.}
sure it sounds good-but we all know bout things that sound good right?Wrong! we dont-so it should have been the job of "Big Brother" to not scandalize us, but to help bring everybody up.
Are we so selfish to not want your society as a whole to be succesful, a strong America. Sure, there can be more rich or more poor people but the current gap between the two is astounding.And the majority of those at the very top, didnt get there through hard work and perseverance, its passed down family wealth-and we all know what happened to the majority(African-Americans) of the lower class' family wealth, it was stolen, along with our brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers on the block, the auction block.(Shout out to Black HIstory Month)
Also, you cant frame sub-prime mortgages as hand-outs-these people paid then, and everyones paying now, for the greed of a few.
If you look at the current map of high forclosure rates, you can see these cities were not on the top 100 best places to live..they are poor neighborhoods already, next to ones even worse. HOW can you blame these families for seeing a way out of the ghetto, trying to find away to live away from the crime, trying to seek out better schools in better areas with more money-just to have it all stripped way again when the "Market" decides it so-my heart goes out to all of them who were intentionally trying to make a better life for themselves and their families and didnt have the prior education to know what was really gonna happen.

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life" from the Preamble of the Constitiution of the Industrial Workers of the World(I.W.W)
Go Obama!

Ah, the IWW... middle-of-the-road, logical, unbiased... ----- right [oops... NOT "right".] ---- i looked into The Fragile Middle Class via Amazon. Nice studies. Nice data. No comments visible regarding how bankruptcy laws CHANGED during the periods of their studies. .... some nice graphs which showed that medical catastrophic expenses were amongst the largest numbers of reasons for filing for bankruptcy. ----- so that is why you're bashing the upper classes and the "employers" as the bad guys???? how about some focus on why medical costs have gone up so much faster than inflation, or is that ALSO and inevitably due to that nasty "employer class"? ---- The Two Income Trap also talks about numbers of bankruptcies without relating them to the changes in the laws. one anecdote flatly points out that a couple with a home they could no longer afford and with two new young babies, didn't want to go back to a lower standard of living [presumably, renting?], so they filed. ----- you haven't proven it to me yet... i'll keep reading.

oooohhhh...Thom Hartman... http://www.thomhartmann.com/ totally unbiased and equal-handed towards business and labor, right [oops, again... NOT "right."]...... so your left-leaning references all prove i'm wrong.... welcome to the left-wing kool-aid, and it'll take you decades, if you're lucky, to discover that it isn't all that simple. -------- my dad never made more than $8000 a year in his life, up to the time he retired. my first year out of college, i made more than that. my life was incredibly better than my folks' in terms of finances. mom taught me to stay out of debt. your references repeatedly tell of the woes suffered by people who overextended themselves and went into debt in order to maintain lifestyles unjustified by their education, jobs and general situations. ------- and my dad barely graduated high school and my mom had no more than an 8th-grade education, so don't give me any crap about having to be well-educated in order to survive in this world or any other. today, my wife and i have a very comfortable house and have [brace yourself] ZERO DEBT. Not a penny. no mortgage on the house, no debt on either car. ------- why? because both of our sets of parents taught us to avoid debt "at all costs" [get the joke?].... when we need or want a new car, we write a check and drive home with the title and the car. --------- our credit cards pay off every month; mine automatically the day a charge comes in to the bank. --------- there's a lot of data YOUR authors won't show you that show that the middle class is shrinking... some fall into the lower levels, but MOST go OUT the top into better paying jobs and higher wealth........ depends on whom you read and whether you're at all open to the possiblity that your authors are misleading you for THEIR own beliefs and attitudes. YOU go read Atlas Shrugged. [you won't] and get some new ideas. [you won't.] --------- just as i started writing on this site's blogs because i didn't believe in Al Gore's Religion of Global Warming, either. you can stack up a lot of books that agree with your side, but the problem is: CONSENSUS is NOT the same as CORRECT. Al Gore versus the Consensus of the Catholic Church some centuries ago about which circled the other: the earth or the sun. lots of consensus. lots of people killed for not believing it. also, wrong. ------- ok, tee up a few more....

and the IWW???? let's see... from the wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_... .......... 200,000-300,000 members at its peak.... maybe 900 paid-up, in-good-standing members today... BOY, THAT'S A REAL SUCCESS STORY TO REFERENCE... [duh!]. ------- quit blaming "the man" for your lack of success or anyone else's........ wanna REALLY make life better for the people you're trying to defend and help? TEACH THEM how to live in the world by teaching them MATH AND SCIENCE and basic economics, ESPECIALLY if they're not getting that well enough from their [government-run, thank you very much] schools! -------- get off the guilt and blame trips. it should not take a college education [and it doesn't] OR even a high school diploma for a human being to look at a loan and see that IF ANYTHING goes wrong in the next year or two, the payments will jump beyond their gross income, let alone if any member of the family loses their job or gets seriously ill!!!!!! THAT takes a high school diploma????????? cut me a break. --------- neither the Wobblies [IWW] nor FDR were the heroes you make them out to be. imnsho, they did more damage to this country than virtually any "leader" since then, including the ones you hate from the last republican presidencies. ........ but you won't buy those arguments at all... you'll just keep reading the same books and agreeing with your same friends. --------- stay as stuck as you want to be.... and Never, Never, read Atlas Shrugged..... :)

see what LookInTheMirror wrote at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20... ......

The news has been littered with these stories for the past year, and I am getting sick of the theme of owners who didn't read the paper work.

I have a close friend who bought a A.R.M. mortgage thinking he could just sell it before his rate resets and he'll come out on top. Well that is what a good bunch of these buyers thought. PLUS! You don't have to worry about people coming after you for the foreclosure. They just jack your credit and you have to move out.

The reason these loans are attractive is because in the early 2000s and the recession the housing market slowed, lenders jacked up the A.R.M. deals and made it so subprimers didn't have to prove their asset value. Well to consumers that is great because if you can buy a home and not tell the bank you can't afford it that's great.

Mismanaged Consuming is the real theme here.

@StuntBunny... yep, plus the fact that the Federal Government [can you all spell "Congress"] removed the states' rights to enact usury laws.

such laws might have made it harder, if not impossible, for the banks and the loan-repackagers to jack the rates up so high at the first blink of the A in ARMs.

there's LOTS of blame to go around. some to the Feds, some to the banks [mostly for stupidity] and a bunch for folks with such lousy economics educations as to think that a year or two of "up and to the right" for their home values means "up and to the right FOREVER".

ignorance can be cured... stupidity is forever...