Witness at Bank of America Shareholders Meeting

On May 11, 2011, North Carolina United Power (NCUP) gathered with some allies to challenge Bank of America to clean up its act concerning mortgage modifications and foreclosures.  We brought banners and posters, including a banner displaying the text of Micah 2:1-2.

Associated Press photo

Alas for those who devise wickedness
  and evil deeds on their beds!
When the morning dawns, they perform it,
  because it is in their power.
They covet fields, and seize them;
  houses, and take them away;
they oppress householder and house,
  people and their inheritance.

Rev. Clyde Ellis came from Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement (VOICE) came to speak about the disaster of foreclosures in Prince William County, VA.   Peter Skillern of Community Reinvestment Association-NC (CRA-NC) and Josh Zinner of Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP) in New York City addressed the slow pace of improvement made by Bank of America in dealing with the enormous number of troubled mortgages they service.

Iraq Veteran Blackmon of the Harry Veterans Community Outreach Service in Winston-Salem addressed B of A's work with military families.  Rev. Spencer Bradford of Durham Mennonite Church spoke about bankers and homeowners sharing the same neighborhood, in the spirit of rejecting the utilitarian vision condemned by the Prophet Micah.  Rev. Dr. Greg Moss of HELP, Rev. Dr. Carlton Eversley of CHANGE, and many more from Durham CAN, Davidson County HOPE, Orange County Justice United, and the NC Latino Coalition, gave comments or stood to represent the continued efforts to bring change and justice to the foreclosure crisis.

The big news of the day came from information shared with us by the County Clerk of Court of Guilford County.  In our effort to slow down the railroading of foreclosures perpetrated through "robosigning" and other fraudulent practices of a hasty and careless banking industry, we have been meeting with County Clerks of Court in NC to promote the use of best practices in foreclosure procedings, especially in the determination of who holds the original promissory note on the mortgage.  We found that in Guilford County alone, the Clerk of Court had identified over 4500 fraudulent or forged documents presented to support foreclosures.  That is one county.  We had specific numbers for each bank, as well as the names of robosigners whom banks had employed.  We are calling for a county by county audit of foreclosure documents in NC to get to the bottom of this illegal practice.

Associate Press photo

The following is the speech I gave to open the witness outside the shareholders meeting.

Good morning.  I am Dr. Mike Broadway of Shaw University Divinity School and Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church in Durham.

When theological educators in North and South Carolina issued a statement on this economic crisis, we identified key convictions about justice and the economy from our tradition of faith.  Among those convictions was that all people should share in the gifts of God's creation.  Another was that no society can allow a permanent debtor class to emerge, a kind of debt-sharecropping.  A third, among many more, was that the risks and benefits of the economy should be shared by all participants, not dumping all risks on the weak and paying bonuses to the elite.  It is with these kinds of convictions that we stand here today to address foreclosure fraud and mortgage modifications.

Some people say theologians and preachers should stay out of this business.  That's nothing new.  Long ago in the days of the Prophet Micah, the so-called leaders of the people  did not want to hear what he was sent to say.  The economy was in turmoil and people were suffering mightily.  But the leaders preferred a preacher who would gloss over it all and say, "Live it up!  Go have another drink!  Life is good!"  They wanted happy talk while people were losing their homes and livelihoods through fraud and injustice (Micah 2:6-7, 11; Isa. 1:15).

We don't want to be those kinds of preachers.  We don't want to be churches of the sort that Fannie Lou Hamer came to despise during her civil rights work.  She saw so many churches as hypocrites gathering "for the sake of paying the minister's way to hell and theirs, too."  No, we do not want to join the misleaders of the people.

Both the Prophets Micah and Isaiah challenged the financial and political elites of their day for being misleaders.  To the financial leaders they said, "you mislead and confuse the people," and "the spoils of the poor are in your houses" (Micah 2:1-2, 8-9; Isa. 3:12-14).  Back in those days, and now in our time, the financial elite manipulated the structures of the economy "because it is in their power" (Micah 2:1).  They preyed on the hard-earned livings of the working people.

The prophets said that the "add house to house" and "field to field," leaving "many houses desolate" (Isa. 5:8-9; Micah 2:2, 9).  In ancient Israel they foreclosed on the working class in massive numbers, transferring wealth from the producers to the predators, just as is happening in our day.  They turned from leadership to predation.  The prophets say the obvious:  the poor are losing their homes and livelihoods and widows and orphans are abandoned.

Why can this happen?  It seems patently unjust that some can ruin others simply "because it is in their power."  The prophets go on to say that the foreclosures and mass economic turmoil happen because political leaders "write oppressive statutes" and "turn aside the needy from justice" (Isa. 10:1-2).  Just yesterday, ten Attorneys General of the states met in Atlanta to oppose and try to derail a fair resolution of the mortgage crisis.  Recently, the Comptroller of the Currency suggested that the banks need not bear the weight of setting things right in this foreclosure crisis.  Then who will bear it?  If it is not a shared burden, then average homeowners will bear this burden that is too great for us.  We don't need this kind of misleader deciding our futures.

We think that Bank of America wants to be a leader for the average consumer.  We think that Bank of American can be a leader in finding a resolution for the foreclosure crisis that will be good for all parties.  That is why we are here today.  We are calling for leadership toward a just, streamlined process for mortgage modification, foreclosures as a last resort, and a solution that makes the Bank more profitable while keeping people in their homes.

It may seem that we are just a few average, unimportant people standing here today calling out for justice in the tradition of Micah and Isaiah.  But to quote Marian Wright Edelman, "You just need to be a flea against injustice.  Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation."  And enough fleas can transform the biggest bank, too.

Eat at Joe's

“I know what it’s like not to have.  My highest goal in life is to help people.”--Joe Bushfan

After Shaw University Commencement on Saturday, I finally made my way to a place I have been hearing about even before it opened:  Joe's Diner on Angier Avenue at Driver Street in Durham.  My friend Steve Bumgardner has been telling me about these great hot dogs that Joe Bushfan was selling out of a cart.  Quite a few years ago, Joe Bushfan married one of Durham's finest home-grown citizens, Elaine O'Neal Bushfan, that's Judge Bushfan to you and me.  He settled into Durham and made friends easily.  And he came up with a plan to make his life and work benefit a whole community.  I don't need to tell the whole story, because much of it has already been told here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

I do want to report on my first time to Joe's Diner.  It was mid-afternoon on a Saturday, so the pace was slow after lunch and before dinner.  I studied the menu, introduced myself to Joe, and told him Steve had sent me.  I looked over the diner options:  the feature is his all beef hot dog brand from Massachusetts, Pearl Frankfurters.  A quarter-pound dog is close to the size of a large hot dog you might be familiar with.  A half pound dog is not much longer than usual, but really big.  Then there is the one pound hot dog.  I saw one being cooked:  it looked like a great big red snake.  It is thick and about three times or more longer than your usual grocery store hot dog.  He does have some skinny dogs that look familiar.  I only saw a footlong.

The menu has many different ways to serve the hot dogs, as well as some spicy dogs and sausages.  I went fairly conservative for my first try:  half pounder with yellow mustard, ketchup, cheddar cheese, and chopped onions.  With such a big dog, I had to ask for a few more chopped onions to make it come out even, and they were glad to pile them on.  The flavor of the frankfurter did live up to the reputation.  It was good enough to enjoy it for its own flavor, not merely as an excuse for a big pile of condiments.  I'm going to try something else next time.  The Apollo Dog looks pretty good, if I don't have to buy a whole pound of frankfurter.  For folks from Chicago, New York, or other towns with specialized hot dog styles, you can get what you want.

Besides hot dogs, Joe's has hamburgers, from normal to extra large, fixed up in a variety of interesting ways.  Then there are other sandwiches, including some pastrami that caught my eye (I'd better not tell my friend W. C. Turner, Jr., about the pastrami.  He says it is the only thing that successfully tempts him to give up his dietary discipline.)  And Joe's serves breakfast all day.  I definitely want to go back for that.

One of the specials on the day I went was a pork chop sandwich.  Now if I had not gone in planning to try the hot dog, that is what I would have eaten.  I can't vouch for Joe's pork chops yet, but I will not let a pork chop special pass me by again when I eat at Joe's.  There are some of the usual diner sides like fries, but I passed on all of that to make sure I could get through the big hot dog.  It was not as daunting as I had imagined.

Joe is a hard-working, friendly guy.  The other folks working at Joe's also aim to please, and they kept checking on me to make sure I had what I needed.  Tea and sodas are refillable, so I had my diet soda refilled to wash it all down.  Joe's got a score of 100 on its last health code inspection, and he has the good grade displayed on the front window for all to see.  The place was obviously spotless.  Joe did most of the work to restore the old building and install the fixtures himself.  A few of the more technical jobs were contracted out.  The black granite countertop he installed gave sitting at the counter a touch of class.  It has the look and feel of a place that has been around for a long time.  We all can hope it will be around a whole lot longer.

The place was kind of laid back while I was there.  A few people were eating, and the staff was serving and doing some cleaning up from the lunch rush.  Joe made himself a cheese steak sandwich while I was relaxing with my soda.  We chatted about the work he had done to get this fine establishment operational.  

The whole place livened up for a few minutes when someone brought up boxing.  Joe got animated talking about a recent pre-fight weigh-in.  Everyone had an opinion about who would likely win, where the best place to watch would be, or how these fighter compared to the ones from back in the day.  Customers hung on every word when Joe told about conversations with famous fighters from the past.  I suspect that kind of animated conversation is not unusual when the diner is busy.

I'll be in Durham for about six weeks this summer, teaching summer school and working on getting my house ready to sell.  I'll be checking back in at Joe's Diner to sample the food and fellowship again.  I hope you will do the same.

From the Jubilee File--Hon. Rt. Rev. Dr. Willie James Jennings

I have a file buried several layers down in my Documents file on the laptop.  I have visited it often in the past two years to save or retrieve documents relating to community organizing work on the economy.  I named it when I was working on a theological reflection on the economic crisis with a group of colleagues.  Since so much of the biblical discussion of usury kept taking us back to the Jubilee practices of the Israelite society.  So I called the file "Jubilee."  A big part of my life and creative work for the past two years gets documented in the Jubilee file.

It's been a Jubilee year, and in the past few days I have been reminded to count my Jubilee blessings.  Willie James Jennings, my younger brother, turned 50 last Friday.  I was in Texas, fittingly grading papers, on the birthday of my brother in the professoriate.  I lift an analytical reading report in your honor, my brother, to toast your Jubilee Day.

Willie has worked as hard as anyone has to be my friend.  I take it that some of my professorial instincts and habits--absorption in private study, narrowly focused thinking, lack of awareness of the passing of time, occasional absent-mindedness (to put it lightly), aversion to being told what to do and when, being enamored by my own words--make it a bit harder to be my friend.  I hope I have other qualities that compensate.  But Willie thought it worth his time to keep a friendship going.

Although we met as students, it was after marching for graduation in 1994 that we stoked the fires of friendship.  Willie and I shared Saturday morning coffee for many weeks while our daughters (my youngest and his oldest) hopped and skipped and leaped with joy in the little kiddie's dance class.  We talked through some hard times and some good times.  He put a black man's mirror up for me to look at my white man's life in a racialized world.  I knew that something bigger than I could handle was happening to me.  I had no idea that he was finding in me some hope for the church's deliverance from its demons of malformed desire and imagination. 

I did not know this because as a scholar-friend, Willie kept his cards close to his chest.  I understand this a little better now that I've seen him in action recently on a panel to discuss his book, The Christian Imagination.  Some people in the gathering raised questions which begged for a polemical response.  They either did not understand his arguments from the book, or they just wanted to see if they could get a rise out of him. 

But Willie did not take the bait in his Jubilee year.  He generously referred to the antagonistic comments as "matters of deep importance," or something to that effect.  I was ready to pounce, but Willie gave his winning smile.   It may be that he was simply being political, having learned such skills as a faculty dean for so many years.  But I think it was also a commitment to listen and remain in a friendly conversation with people who are sure that he has gone off on a fool's errand.

This Jubilee year I was blessed to read The Christian Imagination with a class of Shaw students taking Systematic Theology.  As with J. Kameron Carter's Race, in reading Willie's book with my students I continuously found ways that it could challenge my previous theology lectures and supplement the textbooks with which I have become so familiar.  The Christian Imagination opened doors for me and for my students that made theology more alive. 

So often when we take theology to be the gleaned gems of a long [tired] tradition, we find it hard to get a lever on how Christian faith, its leaders, its institutions, and its social productions could become so corrupted and contrary to the ways of the one from whom they take their name.  Books like Willie's give us hope that theology does not have to be merely the crusty oozings from the cracked plaster walls lining the edifice of Euro-American World Domination.  Can there be life within those walls of ageless stone?  Could the academy have a heart of beating flesh?  Or are we destined to have hearts of stone?

So it is that in this Jubilee year, Willie opened the floodgates which had held back a deep lake of theological reflection, fed by mountain streams and woodland springs, flowing through the dark places of middle passage, bottom lands of enforced toil, and the hopeful self-direction of a Second Great Migration.  Along the way, a few droplets from the deeps had come my way, but the halls of Duke and Shaw, only thirty miles apart, are worlds away from one another.  If there were open conversations in Durham, I was out of that loop. 

Moreover, the fast scholarly pace of read, reduce, destroy that makes up hyperacademia is not on the menu at Shaw.  I don't mean to be "hatin' on" Duke, but they really are caught up in the university-military-industrial complex, on a high-speed train toward producing the next world, and the next, and the one after that.  Surely, Willie wisely let only a few droplets out so that when the flood arrived, it would be a season of reckoning.  Folks on the train would have to stop and get off if they were going to have a word to say about it.  He gave us far more in this Jubilee year than we could chew quickly, unless we want to choke on it.

So the back and forth clicking to the Jubilee folder was more than I realized.  In his year of Jubilee, my friend ripped open a place in my heart through which the Holy Spirit may shine to make me a better man than I was, burn away the malformations of desire, and kindle an imagination of another way of being Christian, of being a community that longs to know one another as God's bountiful creation and election.

Happy Jubilee, Willie.  Love that house full of women with all that you have in you.  And save a minute for me so we can plot the revolution.

Improvised Egg Hunt

This is a funny story I posted on facebook.  I thought some of you might like it.

We have a few plastic Easter eggs somewhere in a box, but I could not find them. So after lunch, I got 7 egg cartons (1.5 dozen each) full of golf balls my dad has found in his yard.

That makes 126 golf balls. I tossed them around the yard for an egg hunt for the young adult chirrens.

They groaned about having an egg hunt.  Lydia even made the excuse that she had homework to do.  What's up with that?  I mean, they are only 19 to 24 years old.  Surely they still like egg hunting. 

Everly said it was because there was no candy reward.  We made the strategic mistake of handing out all the candy at lunch time.  So we came up with an other reward.  That made sense.  The egg hunts back in the day usually had a few eggs with money in them.  We did a little math, grouping the factors 7 x 3 x 3 x 2 until we came up with a plan.

I announced a bounty of $1 for every three golf balls, and they flew out of the house to get their share of $42.  I got just what I wanted:   David, Naomi, Lydia, Megan, and Casie (Lydia's buddies from Baylor who live too far away to go home for the long weekend)  giggling and running around the yard like old times.

We tallied up the collections:  19, 22, 23, 27, and 33.  Of course, David has always taken on egg hunts as serious business, and he got the most.  I think it's time for him to go professional.  All but two golf balls got picked up.  We rounded up to the nearest dollar, then scrounged together dollar bills, dollar coins, quarters, fives, and tens.  Everybody got a nice payout. 

For me and Everly, Hugh Delle and W. D., it was $42 very well spent.  Quoting a lyric from Michael Card:  "I would wander weary miles, and welcome ridicule, my child, to simply see the sunrise of your smile, to see the light behind your eyes, the happy thought that makes you fly."

The joy kept on giving.  W.D. came in the next morning having found one of the stray golf balls, and he was as happy as could be.

These few minutes of joyful play are not all that we did on Easter.  Earlier in the day, we worshiped at First Baptist Church, Austin, where I raised the eyebrows of the girls by singing loudly on all the harmony parts.  Roger Paynter preached an excellent sermon, almost slipping into a hoop, about the way that the greeting from Jesus to the Marys was one word that changed everything.  One good turn of phrase said, "He had us from 'Hello.'"  Out front of the sanctuary, church members had brought and placed flowers on the Easter Cross.

Storm at Shaw University on April 16

It occurred to me that some of you may have heard about the tornadoes that swept across parts of the Midwest, South, and Southeast in the past two weeks, and particularly about a tornado that hit Raleigh and Shaw University's campus.  I was present and teaching on campus during that storm, so I am posting the report I gave to my dean about the events of that afternoon.

Hello, Dr. Grady, 

As you requested, I am sending you a narrative of the events of yesterday afternoon on the Shaw campus.  Around 1:30 pm, a student spoke with me about the anticipated storm and its effect on our schedule for divinity classes.  I told him my opinion, which was that we would be safer in the building than we would be out in our cars if a dangerous storm did hit.  I went online to WRAL and checked the live radar reports on the storm.  It was still in the Winston-Salem area at the time and not anticipated to arrive very soon. 

After meeting with a student until about 2:30 pm, I went to meet my class in room 302 of Leonard Hall.  I noted to the students that the attendance was low, and they responded that some students had stayed away because of the predicted storm.  I repeated my opinion that we would be safer in the building tan out in our cars.  We checked the radar, which I projected onto the wall.  It showed storms which would arrive in our area in the next hour or so.  Then we proceeded with class. 

With occasional checks out the window, we proceeded with classes.  Apparently, at least two other classes were meeting in the building.  Sometime near 4:00 pm, we noticed the storm becoming much more intense outside.  Within a brief period, several things happened to alert us.  A student received a phone call from his wife, reporting that the TV weather report was placing a serious storm approaching downtown Raleigh.  Another student whose laptop was online received a weather alert about severe weather approaching downtown Raleigh.  And I noticed that the scene outside the window had become a blur with objects moving horizontally and none of the usual buildings, trees, parking lot, etc., visible. 

I advised the students to come out of the classroom into the hallway between the classrooms.  About that time the electricity went out in the building.  I closed every classroom door so that there would be no direct line to a window from which flying glass might approach us.  Some students asked whether we should move to the central staircase.  Certainly, a lower floor would be better, but passage to the staircase would require moving into the hallway between the restrooms and the main building, and I thought passing through there would be unsafe.  I urged students into the short hallway of the classroom wing, and we waited while the building shook violently for some time. 

When the intense storm had passed, and light began to come from windows around the building again, we reentered the classroom.  The outer window had bowed inward but not broken.  Water and debris had entered the room, getting all over Michelle Outlaw's books, computer (a closed laptop that seemed to only get wet on the surface), papers, and bags.  Otherwise, the room was in the same condition as before.  There were no broken windows on the third floor.   Cornelius Atkinson checked the restroom and told me that there was considerable water damage in the men's room.  I later went to check and found that light was coming through from above the false ceiling and some ceiling tiles were broken or damaged.  The women's room also had damaged ceiling tiles. 

Students milled around, talked with one another, and made phone calls for a few minutes.  We had a prayer of thanksgiving led by Horace Mason, and then we began making our way out.  I looked around the building.  In the Lewis Lecture Hall, at least one window had bowed under pressure sending water and debris into the room.  Overall, no damage was visible there.  I did not check the second floor, although other classes may have been meeting there.  I checked all the Wiggins Library windows, and no water had come in through them.  I saw Dr. Greaux also scouting the building before he left. 

A number of students, Mrs. Goldston, and Dr. Brock continued to assist one another and check out conditions in the building and parking lot.  Dr. Walker-Barnes, her husband, and her son were in their car as the storm approached, and they drove to the Leonard Building for shelter.  Students went outside to find that their cars had been damaged by broken trees and flying debris.  Claudia Cofield had a very large dent in the driver's side of her car from a fallen tree.  Cornelius Anderson had a broken window.  James Collins had the rear hatch of his vehicle pulled open by the storm.  Other students had windows broken.  My raggedy old 1989 Corolla was untouched. 

A tree was blocking the entrance to the Leonard parking lot, so people had to drive over the curb and grass to exit to the road.  Some of us attempted to pull the tree out of the way, but it was intent on staying where it was.  Two oil tanks were pushed over by the wind.  Between the two doors at the end of the Duplex building there is a tank painted silver.  It was lying on its side.  As best I could tell, it is not currently in use and likely had no fuel in it.   Around the back of the Duplex another oil tank painted brick red had been knocked down and pulled around the AC unit and the back porch until it reached the limit of its fuel line going to the furnace.  I sniffed around and smelled a faint whiff of oil when I got right next to the fuel line.  I could see no obvious leak at any of the joints, valves, or pressure points. 

I attempted to report the roof leak and the oil tank to security numerous times, but the power outages prevented my getting through to them.  Sometime after 4:30 pm I left to return home.  A few students were working together to tape up their car windows.  Dr. Brock, showing his pastoral heart, was doing his best to take care of everyone that he could.  Mrs. Goldston was also still in the building.   

You spoke with me around 5:00 pm as I was driving home, and you took an oral report on these events.  At that time I brought these two matters of the roof and oil tank to your attention.  I have seen reports of the Fire Department inspecting the Shaw campus today, so these matters should be inventoried and resolved soon.  It still may be advisable for you to forward this information to persons in charge on campus. 

After seeing the damage to the cars outside, I was glad that I had advised students to stay in the building rather than risk driving through the storm.  Of course, none of us could have predicted that Shaw's buildings would be right in the path of such an intense storm.  Even so, all who were in the building were safe with no injuries. 

Submitted respectfully, 

Mike Broadway 

Theology and Economy Update

For those of you who check in here now and then, you probably know that in 2009 a group of theological professors in North Carolina and South Carolina distributed a working paper, "Theological Reflection on the Economy."  It was an early step in a series of actions and campaigns through which faith communities have organized around economic justice in the current economic crisis.  Since that time, I have occasionally communicated with the group of professors about active campaigns, particularly the "10% Is Enough" work on usury pertaining to credit cards and other consumer interest.  This week, I sent a note to update them on the range of actions and campaigns in which North Carolina United Power has continued to organize in the past year and a half.  Here is an excerpt of the note I sent them.

Hey, folks,

A year and a half ago I was sending you lots of emails as we started work on a major organizing campaign dealing with economic justice issues.  As theological scholars and servants of the church, we recognize our responsibilities to follow Jesus in the task of serving the poor, offering ministry of relief, building ecclesial structures to reshape economic life in our neighborhoods, and seeking justice in the face of economic powers.  Thus, the theological reflection leading to the "Theological Reflection on the Economy" of 2009 was an exercise of our vocation which helped to provide grounding for faith-based people's movements which have gone many directions.  The document has been studied in churches, in minister's conferences, in seminary classes, and far beyond North and South Carolina. 

The paths of discipleship continue to open before us even now.  Let me highlight some of the work linked to our efforts of 2009.

1.  The "10% Is Enough" campaign in the Eastern US, London, and Berlin, has continued to bear fruit.  We did not convince banks to voluntarily cap credit card interest rates, nor did with convince Congress to cap consumer interest rates.  But we have built relationships with bank executives which are paying off in continued access and influence.  Moreover, leaders of the "10% Is Enough" campaign have met with Dr. Elizabeth Warren to help shape the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  Caps on interest rates continue to be a lively topic, in part because of the strong work of MetroIAF, of which we have been a part.

2.  The "6% Is Enough" campaign to protect military families from predatory credit practices and foreclosure has been an overwhelming success.  This is a NC United Power campaign, and we have worked with Wachovia/Wells Fargo and Bank of America.  B of A held ongoing conversations with us for over a year.  Last summer they agreed to everything we were asking for, extending benefits beyond the legal requirements for nine months of protection from rising interest rates.  For several months, they were reluctant to admit publicly that they had changed their policies in response to negotiations with NCUP.  This month, in a surprise turn, CEO Brian Moynihan publicly thanked NCUP and Gerald Taylor for our work in this crucial area.  Our fellow signatory, Dan Rhodes, was present to meet personally with Moynihan, the first time he has met personally with members of our organization.

3.   The effort to bring justice to the foreclosure crisis has taken off in recent months, in part because of the attention that NC Attorney General Roy Cooper has given to foreclosure fraud as President of the National Association of Attorneys General.  For this work, NCUP (also going by the name IAF-SouthEast) has made partnership with People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), National People's Action (NPA-US), Alliance for a Just Society, and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), all faith-based community organizing groups, stretching our organizing from the west coast to the east coast, from the Rocky Mountains to the midwest to the south.  We have met with key leaders, including Iowa AG Tom Miller and NC AG Roy Cooper, all the while keeping our efforts alive with Bank of America.  One summary of our proposals, "The Homeowner's Bottom Line," has gained significant interest, and most of its proposals remain on the table in the nationwide AG's investigation and potential settlement with the major banks to improve the foreclosure process.

4.  In conversation with a major funding organization (no funding yet) for theological education research, I have piloted a course at Shaw University Divinity School, "Pastoral Readiness for Economic Crises."  We covered financial literacy and financial freedom for pastors as well as a form of Christian formation for churches and their communities.  We looked at a wide range of theological sources on money, possessions, economics, and consumption from the earliest churches down to our times.  We looked at tools for churches to evaluate their relationships with banks that may or may not be serving poor communities.  We looked at models of community development, such as the Christian Community Development Association model of ecclesial politics of neighbor love.  Finally, we looked at faith-based community organizing.  With this trial run under our belt, I am hoping to work with some of you as partners in developing a proposal for adapting this sort of clergy training to other seminaries and to continuing education programs for current pastors.

5.  The predatory practices of payday lenders and car-title lenders will not die without a fight.  From Texas to North Carolina, from Mississippi to New Hampshire, strong lobbying efforts to open the door to astronomical interest rates on small dollar loans are alive and well in the state legislatures.  I've testified before legislative committees in Texas, mentioning you all and our work.  Just this past week, a bill was introduced in the NC legislature to reopen the door to usurious rates.  When there is the chance of ripping people off legally, there will always be people trying to do it.  Contact your legislator right away to stop the progress of HB 810.  South Carolina, having passed important reforms in 2009, seems not to have any pending legislation at this time.

On two matters I am seeking your response to moving forward with this work. 

First, . . . we are considering a clergy witness [at an upcoming event], with particular attention to dealing justly in the foreclosure crisis. 

The text of Micah 2:1-11 is directly relevant to this matter (not to ignore Isaiah 5:8-17).  The injustice of Samaria and Judah included coveting and seizing houses, ruining people financially (v2).  The powerful put people out of their homes (v9).  All the while they continue to practice the trappings of faith.  Predictably, they demand that anyone who might preach judgment against their greed should stop saying that stuff (v6).  The prophet says they only want a preacher who says, "Go on and get drunk.  Live it up!" (v11), while they "rise up against my people as an enemy" (v8). 

We hope we might gather 100 clergy and seminarians to speak a word of witness about the injustices of foreclosing on people whose financial security was destroyed by the greed, risks, and fraud of bankers, brokers, and insurers. . . . Details of when and where to meet will be forthcoming, depending on whether we believe we can gather an appropriate-sized group for witness.

Second, I will be trying to convene a meeting of some of you professors in late May.  If you would be interested in meeting for three or four hours to evaluate the course I put together and to brainstorm about expanding clergy training for economic life, let me know. . . .

For more information, see

News coverage of recent NCUP action:  here and here

Foreclosure Justice:  Homeowner's Bottom Line 

Broad Campaign for Financial Reforms:  Showdown in America

Against Usury:  10% Is Enough 

Military Families:  6% Is Enough 

Periodic updates on "earth as it is in heaven"

Madder as the Day Went On!

Last night, I fell asleep looking at a news story about the bombshell budget proposal whose poster boy is Rep. Ryan, R-Wisconsin.  Then I woke up this morning thinking about it, so I finished reading the article.  Then, as the day went on, I kept reading and kept getting more upset.

As has been the case with the Party of NO for the past few years, Social Security, Medicare, and the social safety net have been held up as bankrupting the country.  There is no doubt that the cost of health care is at the heart of what is destroying the people of the US and the economy.  But Medicare and Medicaid are not the cause.  Medicare and Medicaid are expensive because the health care industry is operating with out-of-control greed, and the health care industry lobbyists are running the government.

Pres. Obama and his advisers offered ideas about reform, but before reform could get started the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, the hospital industry, and on and on had derailed real reform.  What we got was, I think, a step in the right direction.  But it did not do what was needed to slow the growth of health care costs.  Its opponents also have no interest in slowing the growth of health care costs.  They only want to make American safe for health care profits.  So if health care is going to cost more and more, they want to make sure that taxpayers are not paying for the poor and elderly to get some.  That might require the wealthy to pay their fare share of taxes, and the sinister dementia of current right-wing politics is that the wealthy deserve all that they have gotten, and the rest of us deserve to do without.

As you can tell, I have been getting madder as the day has gone on.  I have tormented my facebook friends with post after post, which of course they have been free to ignore.  So I decided I would collect them all into one blog post for those who want to think through this with me.

around 11 am

Thank you, government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Don't forget, corporations are people, too. In fact, they are special people who get a better deal than the rest of us lowly human people. Mr. Obama, Mr. Ryan, stop posturing and FIX THIS!

10 of the Biggest Corporate Tax Cheats in America

f you or I were running a small business and we kept one set of books showing how much money we were making and a second set for the IRS that painted a picture of an enterprise on the brink of bankruptcy, we'd end up behind bars.

But that's standard operating procedure for corporate America.

around 3 pm

Let's see: spinach, hamburger meat, peanut butter, chicken, tomatoes, and besides food there's lead paint on toys, radioactive compounds in toys. All in all, doesn't Ryan's budget make sense when it fires all the inspectors? Mr. Obama and Mr. Ryan--tell the truth, serve the people, do what is right, FIX THIS.

Congress: Support funding for FDA food safety

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, urged Congress to support funding for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)s food safety functions in advance of a House hearing on the FDA budget.

around 3:30 pm

I gave some effort but should have tried harder at my kids' high schools. Let's hear it for this Atlanta group's recruitment for non-violence.

American Friends Service Committee/Atlanta: SCAP Brings Non-Military Options to Stephenson High

Stephenson High school invited Student Career Alternatives Program to their first spring career fair, which took place today. This marked our second visit to the Stone Mountain high school. One striking thing that we again noticed today that the student body is over 99% African American, which seems to further confirm the fact that Atlanta Metro school have become resegregated over the past 20 years.

We were all impressed with the counseling staffs dedication to the students and their post high school careers. So many high school counselors cave into parents request to hold career fairs after school instead of during school. The fairs that take place during school hours are so much more accessible to students.

We had hundreds of students come talk to us through the course of the fair. Students explored ways to serve their country, travel the world, find adventure, get money for college, develop artistic skills, and other job skills training without out having to join the military.

around 3:30 pm

Recruiting for nonviolence

Before You Enlist! (2011 revision)

Straight talk from soldiers, veterans and their family members tells what is missing from the sales pitches presented by recruiters and the military's marketing efforts. Produced by Telequest, Inc with support from AFSC. See http://youth4peace.org/ for more info.

around 4 pm

Here is the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Bill to Massively Increase Senior Adult Medical Bankruptcy presented by Rep. Ryan.

Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Health Care

That is what headlines would look like if the United States had an independent press. After all, this is one of the main take aways of the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the plan proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee.

still around 4 pm

The budget debate is between those who would reign in the mountains of money going to pharmaceutical corporations, physicians, for-profit and "non-profit" hospitals, and private insurance companies, and those who would keep letting them rob the rest of us to pay bonuses to their top executives.  Mr. Ryan and Mr. Obama, tell the truth, stop the "giant sucking sound" of money going from the people to the corporations.

The New York Times Thinks That Congress is Full of Philosophers | Beat the Press

The New York Times apparently missed the elections last fall. This is the only possible explanation for its assertion that the budget debate in Congress "is likely to spur an ideological showdown over the size of government and the role of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare."

The people serving in Congress got their jobs because they are effective politicians. This means that they have the ability to appeal to powerful interest groups; there is no requirement that they have any background in, or adherence to, any political philosophy.

The debates over competing plans for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are most obviously about the distribution of income between the wealthy and the less wealthy.

a little later, around 4 pm 

Look at the third graphic line from the bottom: this is the projected percentage of health care cost turned back upon the retiree on fixed income in Ryan's plan.  Of course, if most of the seniors go bankrupt, then we can put them on Medicaid instead--oops, that will be gone, too.  Sorry, Mom and Dad, but we're better off if you die.  Ryan says this will save the taxpayers $400 billion over 10 years, which may or may not be accurate.  Ten years of war in Afghanistan has cost $400 billion, and eight years in Iraq has cost $800 million.  This year $119 billion is budgeted for Afghanistan alone.  Ron Paul, where are you when we need you?  Cut the cost of these wars and bring the troops home.  That way we can keep medical care available for seniors.  Cutting the cost of medical care is essential, but this is not the way to do it.

around 7:20 pm

Calculating the costs of killing--Cadillac Death Machines and Yugo Safety Nets

MLK, Jr., speaking about the war in Vietnam in 1967:  "You may not know it my friend, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 dollars to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only $53.00 dollars for each person classified as poor.  And, most of that $53.00 dollars goes to salaries for people who are not poor."

Available data on enemies killed per year in the past three years is sketchy, ranging from under 2000 (Army data in mid 2009) in a year to about 4000 (Wikileaks) to 5225 (Afghan government).  At a cost of over $100 billion a year that would mean somewhere between $20 million and $50 million dollars to kill each enemy soldier.  Grisly.  Sickening.  Expensive.

Who is benefiting from such an outsized cost for the blood and guts of war?  Not the taxpayers.  Not the soldiers.  Not the seniors on Medicare or the malaria sufferers of Africa.

So there you have it.  Mad.  Sick and tired.  The world is not the church.   Too often, the church is not the church.  The phrase "hell in a handbasket" comes to mind.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.  Where there is despair, let me sow hope.  Where there is darkness, let me sow light.  Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.

The "Giant Sucking Sound" Recession--What Ross Perot Did Not Tell Us

A month ago I gave testimony at a Texas Senate committee concerning bills to close a loophole in Texas lending law.  Last week I had another opportunity to speak before the Texas House of Representatives Committee on Pensions, Investments, and Financial Services.  The loophole has allowed an abuse of the Credit Service Organization (CSO) law, designed to regulate businesses who help people with bad credit "repair" their credit.  To operate, they need to charge fees, and this law sets the terms for their operation.  They are not lenders, but provide a service.

Unscrupulous lenders came along and decided to create a business model which would make use of this law to prey on borrowers who believe they cannot get traditional loans from banks, credit unions, or consumer credit storefronts.  These lenders claim to be CSOs.  Officially, they are not the lenders.  They have a cozy relationship with a lending organization which operates under the restrictions of the usury laws.  Therefore, the borrower gets a loan at a low rate of interest around 1% per month.  THE CATCH is that in order to get this loan, the payday lender or car title lender charges a CSO "fee" of $20 per $100 for a 10-day or 14-day or 30-day loan.

That "fee" is really interest, masquerading as a CSO fee.  The loans cannot be paid in installments.  If they can't repay the whole amount of the short-term loan, the "CSO" can arrange another loan for another "fee."  Let's get this straight.  On a regular schedule, the borrower pays a "fee" in order to keep a loan from going into default.  The principal does not decrease, and a "new loan" replaces the "previous loan."  Again, the borrower is forced to come up with the entire principle within a few days or face another "fee" to get a "new loan."  I'm setting a record for scare quotes here.  That is a bunch of technicalities and paperwork to bury the truth that lenders are charging usurious interest rates on short-term loans designed to be hard to pay off.

If I pay a $20 (20%) fee to use $100 for a month, the annualized rate is 240%.  On this business model, if I am living close to the edge in my finances and the month lasts longer than the money, I could end up paying $240 in a year without paying off any of my $100 debt.  The average short-term payday loan is $300 to $500, so the amounts would be three to five times as much as this case:  $720 to $1200.  But that is for a 30-day term, while most payday loans can recycle two or three times a month, charging "fee" after "fee" after "fee."

Pastors, priests, and church community ministers from around the state delivered testimony about the effects of payday lending on their parishioners and neighborhoods, along with the Better Business Bureau, United Way, and City Government:  Del Rio, San Antonio, Houston, Midland, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, Palestine, LaPorte, El Paso, and all around the state.  Thanks go out to Suzii Paynter of Texas Baptists, to Texas IMPACT, and to the Texas Catholic Conference for their leadership in this effort.  Only two lobbyists stood up to oppose the bill.  I guess they could see what was coming and decided to do their work behind the scenes.  We found out that day that $8 million has been spent by the payday lending industry to kill this legislation, so I was not fooled into thinking that they were conceding this fight.  In fact, it seems they are increasing their efforts.

Sadly, the chair of the committee, Rep. Vicki Truitt of Tarrant County, who treated us all with respect on the day of the hearing (even if she did think I was talking too loud), has come out against closing this loophole in the name of "finding a compromise which can keep these lenders in business."  In other words, she is caving in to the industry demand for higher interest rates even though there is no credible evidence that people using these predatory financiers would not be able to get a loan if the loophole is closed.  Maybe some kinds of lending businesses would close, but the lending will go on at rates less likely to create a system of permanent indebtedness.  If fairer lending goes on, then the jobs the lending provides will not go away.  Reps. Ken Legler of Harris County, Rafael Anchia of Dallas County, and Marc Veasey of Tarrant County all seemed very knowledgeable about this issue, but it was not clear where on the committee there was strong support for closing this loophole.

What these businesses do is target communities of very low income working poor.  In Austin, they targeted school teachers when the press was claiming as many as 30% of teachers could be laid off before the coming school year.  They locate in clusters in order to make as many short-term loans as they can to people who are led to believe they have no other options.  They feed off each other's business because people take out a second loan down the street to pay off the fees on the first loan.  In the process, we hear what Ross Perot once called a "giant sucking sound."  That is the sound of low- and middle-income paychecks being sucked out of their communities into the executive bonuses of the payday lending corporations.

This entire recession is about that giant sucking sound.  It started with mortgage-backed securities, and when the demand for those grew, it became a feeding frenzy of sub-prime lending, speculative real estate pricing, and a housing bubble.  Then it matured into a labyrinth of credit default swaps and bonus-incentivized selling of toxic assets, creating an unregulated house of cards which crashed on the backs of the middle class workers.

What follows is the testimony I offered on March 22.  It is similar to what I said at the Senate committee in February, but reorganized and tweaked at a few points.  You can hear it down below.

My name is Dr. Mike Broadway.  I am a Baptist minister and theological professor living in Salado.  I come representing myself and any citizen offended by predatory lending.

         I have been working for the past two years with pastors, seminary professors, and all sorts of church people to address economic injustices pertaining to predatory lending and usury in its many forms, from high credit card fees, to foreclosure abuse and fraud, to tax refund loans, to predatory payday lending. 

My colleagues and I have met with top executives of Bank of America and Wells Fargo/Wachovia, with AGs Tom Miller of Iowa and Roy Cooper of NC who are leading the national investigation into foreclosure fraud, and with congressional leaders in various states and Washington, DC.  Predatory lending is a national problem, and it is a local problem, that has to be addressed on every front.  I’m here today because you have a chance to make a difference for the citizens of Texas.

         The biblical tradition makes a clear statement concerning usury, or unjust lending practices.  It says that no society can be a just society if it allows lending practices that create and maintain a permanent debtor class.  Laws against usury go back at least four thousand years, more broadly than the Jewish and Christian traditions.  Yet the writing of new laws in Texas and across the US as recently as 1979, 1980, and 1987 has ignored the wisdom of millennia and allowed the protections against usury to be swept away. 

         Lenders claim when they speak to you and to the press that they have to be able to charge usurious rates to stay in business.  They must be terribly inept financiers, because for four thousand years financial institutions have flourished under regulations against usury.  Why do these people need to make so much more in interest?  They don’t.  There are many current business models which flourish serving the communities where payday lenders do their predatory work, but without preying on their customers.

         Payday lending as we know it is a new financial form of sharecropping.  It is debt sharecropping.  Just like the unfair systems which kept sharecroppers always indebted to the landowners whose land they cultivated, payday lending places barrier after barrier in the way of borrowers in order to maintain a subscription to their future income. 

The business plan is perpetual indebtedness for those who are struggling to make ends meet.  Portraying themselves as a friend who is doing a service, they draw people into the trap of usurious borrowing.  Under the guise of being a CSO, these lenders are “the guy who knows a guy who can get you the money right away, but it’ll cost you.”  We all know what to call this kind of lender:  the term is loan shark.

         The current law allows this trap to be set.  The law has a loophole, and predatory lenders squeezed through it and stretched it wide.  One of their favorite deceptions is the doublespeak that calls interest by another name—a fee.  But if I borrow money from you, and you charge me for borrowing the money, then that is interest, no matter what you call it. 

The ancient text of Deuteronomy makes it very clear that usury is usury, whether you collect a fee up front, you charge it along the way, or you claim it at the end of the agreement.  Playing with the words, this smoke and mirrors, uses a loophole in the letter of the law in order to disregard the spirit of the law.  It also ignores what Jesus called the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy.

         Rampant injustice in CSO lending is why you must close this loophole.  Stand in the heritage of Texas, a heritage of protecting workers and homeowners from usury, protecting us from large national corporations who suck the life out of neighborhoods so that they can pay huge bonuses to executives who have devised these schemes of debt sharecropping.

Response from State Representative after servant church action

I should follow up on the previous entry about servant church.  I wrote a letter to my state representative, Ralph Sheffield from Bell County, asking for specific action to prevent massive cuts to the education budget in Texas.  One of those actions was to support the use of a "rainy day fund" to plug the gaps in education funding.  If this recession isn't a rainy day, I don't know what would be.

I got a call yesterday from one of Rep. Sheffield's staff.  This is pretty unusual, I think.  I've not gotten very many such calls in my lifetime.  He told me that Rep. Sheffield was one of four legislators who had signed on to a bill to use the rainy day fund for education a couple of weeks ago.  As he explained, this was even before the Governor had come out in favor of using money from the rainy day fund.  Apparently, they were paying attention to our letters.

I went on to talk with him about HB 410 and closing the loophole in the law that has allowed payday lenders and car-title lenders to twist the law and charge "fees" that amount to 500% and more for short-term loans.  I'll follow up later to see how he stands on that legislation.

servant church, Austin: Another Coffee-Friendly Congregation

On Sunday, March 13, I attended servant church in Austin.  Everly and I were staying in Austin at Ruth and John's house while they went on vacation.  I was glad for a weekend in Austin so I could go to another church and learn some more about Austin's eccesial communities.

I chose servant church because a friend of mine is the pastor.  Eric Vogt is a fellow traveler of mine.  We first met when I was passing through Jackson, MS, one summer Sunday, and he was the guest preacher at Voice of Calvary Church.  Eric had been in a summer internship with the CCD ministries in Jackson, working with John Perkins and others who had forged a new model of faithful church life among the poor of Mississippi.  It turned out Eric was a student at Duke Divinity School in Durham, where I also lived at the time.  Before going to Duke, he had participated in another creative experiment in church life in Austin, TX.  A small start-up congregation had at that time been meeting in the building of First Baptist Church, where another friend of mine is pastor, Roger Paynter.

As our life stories had already intersected in many ways, eventually Eric enrolled in a class I was teaching at Duke Divinity, called "Church and State:  Modernity, Liberalism and the Nature of Political Engagement."  My friend Willie Jennings thought up the title to make it grab the attention of Duke Divinity students.  But I digress.

Church growth technocrats would be happy about at least one feature of servant church:  it is not hard to find.  A few blocks into residential neighborhoods on a street that has an exit from the interstate, I found my way straight to the location.  Signs outside assured me that I was at the right location, a Methodist church site where two congregations are meeting.  Without difficulty, I parked and made my way to the location.  I stumbled into a prayer meeting already in progress, but was greeted warmly and located the coffee without difficulty.  Yes, it was another coffee-drinking-allowed-and-encouraged congregation.

Wearing my standard uniform (guayabera and jeans), I was a little overdressed for this crowd.  Besides a couple of women in what my gramma would have called "everday dresses," jeans and t-shirts were the rule.  Oh, yeah--one guy had khaki pants on.  At 53 I would have to say that I was the senior adult of that Sunday's gathering.  As my daughter Naomi loves to remind me, I was probably at the distant end of the "cool" continuum as well.  Not being clued in to much of the Austin culture, I learned during conversations that the insider's way to refer to the big music festival is the shorthand "South By."  I was proud to know that later in the week when a NC public radio broadcaster, in a halting voice, called it "Ess Ex Ess Double-you" (SXSW--South By SouthWest).  Again, I digress.

I was blessed to sit next to a young woman who grew up in Austin and had recently married in servant church, with Eric officiating at the ceremony.  She was warm and sincere, and worshiping alongside her and her husband made me right at home.  I could tell I was in a university town by the sound of the congregational singing.  My experience in Waco, Austin, Durham, and other university towns is that there are an abundance of people who have vocal training, and with the Austin music industry that gets magnified.  Lots of folks were willing to cut loose and experiment with harmonies, exactly how I like to sing.  The guest worship musicians for the day were two young women.  The lead played acoustic guitar and the other played soft percussion.  There was a kind of Emily Saliers feel to the singing.

The music impressed me, as it had at Ecclesia Church in Houston.  Many familiar hymns formed the core of the singing, along with some contemporary worship songs (but not the mindless repetition of emotive states).  The lyrics were posted to help the uninitiated.  The rest of the liturgy may have relied a bit too much on a single projection screen, and sometimes there were too many words on the screen at once, meaning the font may have at times been too small.  That sort of minor issue goes with the territory of being a very new congregation, still charting its ways. 

Eric's sermon addressed the lectionary text from the Gospel of Matthew, the narrative of Jesus' temptation.  The central theme of the sermon was that Jesus did not choose the easy way, but was willing to suffer for doing right.  It was a respectable interpretation and reflection, so his Duke teachers should be satisfied.  The call for a response to the Word included coming to the Lord's Table, bringing prayer needs to the altar, writing letters to leaders about the state or national budget as a moral document, using art supplies to explore one's faith response, or looking for ways to become more part of the life of servant church.  Tables with appropriate materials were strategically located around the room, with paper and "talking points" for letter writing, a place to write out and place prayer requests or to light a candle in prayer, announcement boards and sign-up sheets, and art supplies.

This congregation is definitely on the youthful side, as congregations go.  Young adults, married and unmarried, with and without children, and a children's area for smooth movement in and out of the formal worship made this a comfortable setting for those who find certain patterns of traditional worship unnecessary or out-of-date.  Yet it was not a rush to contemporaneity for its own sake.  The traditional liturgy remained the backbone of the service.  Biblical and theological texts shaped the sermon and reflective conversations.  Ancient symbols of the faith remained prominent.

I was proud to see what this congregation had done and what my friend Eric was helping to lead.  If you are in Austin on Sunday, don't be timid about "hanging out" at servant church.

Prayer of the Military-Industrial Complex

(With apologies to St. Francis for the adaptation of his blessed prayer of peace)

This morning I read the news of the launch of 110 Tomahawk missiles to destroy key anti-aircraft defenses in Libya.  Not mentioned were the people living, working, and playing in the vicinity of those targets, nor the people whose misfortune was to be near missile strikes that hit something besides a military target.  Nor was their mention of the cost to taxpayers of 110 Tomahawk missiles, which themselves were only a downpayment on further escalating military spending.

A Tomahawk missile costs $756,000, a bargain by aircraft standards.  Of course, it is a single-use item.  Those 110 missiles cost a total of $83,160,000.  The first thought I had was that blowing up cruise missiles was another stimulus package targeted at the weapons industry.  The executives are counting their bonuses now and giving thanks to the god of war.

Then by a perverse turn of imagination, the words of St. Francis of Assisi came to my mind, and the play of parodied lyrics got underway.  It's not elegant, but here is what I wrote down.

Lord Mars, let me make instruments of destruction;
Where there is hatred, let me sow weapons;
Where there is injury, carnage;
Where there is error, annihilation;
Where there is doubt, true believers;
Where there is despair, electronics and explosives for suicide bombers;
Where there is darkness, fire and smoke;
And where there is sadness, weeping for Rachel's and Hagar's children.

O divine Mammon,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To have convictions, as to be convincing;
To be understood, as to incite fear;
To be loved, as to love money.

For it is selling that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we lay off workers;
And it is in their dying that we are borne to eternal profit.
Amen.

Finally, let me tip my hat to Bruce Cockburn's "Call It Democracy," where he showed he saw the big picture:

Padded with power here they come--
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers,
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor,

Who rob life of its quality,
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps--
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom.

Sins of Economics: Ash Wednesday Liturgy

Today my dad, W. D., and I went to the Episcopalian Ash Wednesday Service at noon in St. Joseph's Chapel in Salado.  Each of us had found our way into such unheard-of settings in the years since I left home, but this is the first time we ever shared an Ash Wednesday service.  It was obvious to me that we were in Texas when the celebrant reached a point in the liturgy when he repeated three times, "LammaGod, who takes away the sins of the world."  Of course, that is what the shift to vernacular languages is all about.

The Litany of Penitence pressed our hearing ears toward the personal and corporate sinfulness that brought down the economy.

Our self-indulgent appetites and ways and our exploitation of other people, we confess to you, Lord.
Our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves, we confess to you, Lord.
Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work, we confess to you, Lord.

I was forced to remember that an entire culture and milieu fed the speculative, overreaching consumption of the past few decades.  I have been guilty of spending what I did not have, willing to buy underpriced goods and commodities while turning a blind eye toward the exploitative global systems of low wages, workplace dangers, and child labor.  I have to admit the temptation to muse about how much better I would do with millions of dollars than the greedy Wall Street bandits have been--no doubt a dangerous self-deception.  There is plenty of blame to go around.

For the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty, accept our repentance, Lord.
For all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us, accept our repentance, Lord.
For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us, accept our repentance Lord.

Even so, with plenty of blame to go around, this week's interactions in Washington, DC, between the Showdown in America movement, the state attorneys general, federal regulators, and bankers, bring our attention to the abuse of structures by robber barons.  One of the most troubling absences of moral conscience is the attitude of brokers and financiers who operated on the assumption that they would "get theirs" before the house of cards began to collapse.  Too many were willing to stretch the system to its breaking point with little concern that children and families would lose their homes, that elderly people would lose their pensions, that workers would be laid off, and that many banks would fail. 

One of the most haunting interviews I heard was on This American Life, in a program called "Crybabies." The relevant part of the show is Act One, "Wall Street:  Money Never Weeps."  It took place in a bar filled with financial executives who a year after the economy crashed were angry with government for proposing regulations on their freedom to do whatever the hell they want to do to make a dollar.  None of the Wall Street executives and managers interviewed would accept any of the fault for the economic collapse and its effects on millions of people.  None of them felt that there might be an injustice in the fact that their bonuses got bailed out while millions more who had nothing to do with killing the economy lost homes and jobs.  Instead, one man had the gall to claim that it was right to bail out his job because he is smarter than everyone else and deserves to continue to be in charge of the economic fortunes of the rest of us.

We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us.
We have not been true to the mind of Christ.
We have grieved your Holy Spirit.
Have mercy on us, Lord.

Big Banks See Fines and Penalties Coming

Bloomberg reported on Saturday that Bank of America and Wells Fargo/Wachovia, the biggest mortgage lenders, are anticipating significant fines, penalties, and legal costs to come from the many current investigations into questionable mortgage lending and foreclosure practices.  This news comes as the "Homeowner's Bottom Line" campaign has been meeting with states' attorneys general across the country to press for justice in the foreclosure crisis.

Of course, the devil is in the details.  What will and will not be addressed in the results of the foreclosure investigation has yet to be seen.  However, these big banks see enough significant impact coming that they felt the need to inform the public in a recent report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Foreclosure Fraud Day of Action

I've finally finished breaking down the proposals in the "Homeowner's Bottom Line."  In the meantime, the campaign has continued to progress.

Around the country, citizens groups met with their state Attorney General during the past week to discuss the ideas in the "Homeowner's Bottom Line."  On Thursday and Friday, from Massachusetts to California, they pressed the agenda to be included in the potential settlement between the state Attorneys General, the thirteen federal agencies with a horse in the foreclosure derby, and the powerful banking interests.  In North Carolina, fourteen leaders,  representing six broad-based organizations with over 250 congregations, institutions, and community groups, met with the NC Attorney General's senior staff.  We came from Charlotte, Davidson County, Winston-Salem, Guilford County, Orange County, Durham, and Raleigh, and our constituents stretch across most of the state.  We are blacks, whites, and Latinos seeking the common good.

Attorney General Roy Cooper currently serves as the President of the National Association of Attorneys General.  In that office, he has played an important role in pressing for a fifty-state investigation into foreclosure fraud.  We were pleased to find that a new staff member who oversees the Consumer Protection Division is now devoting much of his time to this foreclosure fraud investigation.  The AG's staff were well-informed on our proposals and demonstrated a commitment to pursue an agenda very similar to ours.  Since AG Cooper was one of the instigators in bringing about this investigation, we were not surprised to find that to a great extent, our leaders and his staff were on the same page.  Good exchanges of information and assistance were followed by agreements for continued cooperation.

We have a follow-up meeting with AG Cooper himself scheduled for April.  The investigation on foreclosure fraud is apparently moving very fast, and it could be that significant announcements will appear within the next month.  When I hear reports from other states, I will post again about this Day of Action.

Foreclosure Fraud 6: Appeals, Resetting the Market, and Criminal Charges

The "Homeowner's Bottom Line" concludes by addressing a few additional concerns.  The issue of appeals echos earlier concerns with transparency.  This process cannot be left to autocratic decisions by banks and mortgage servicers.  The formulas they are using, the comparisons they are making, the documents they are relying on--all of these need to be available for examination by homeowners and their advocates.  Moreover, if a decision seems unfair to the homeowner, there must be an appeals process for reexamining the decision to foreclose.

Second, the insistence on loan modifications and principle reduction should not become a point of contention between homeowners facing foreclosure and other homeowners who have been able to continue paying their mortgages.  This crisis, and the lending feeding frenzy that led up to it, has harmed the entire economy.  Speculative, inflated prices of real estate harm entire neighborhoods, not only the homeowners facing foreclosure.  If houses in a neighborhood face sharp devaluation, underwater mortgages, and foreclosure, it hurts everyone there.  Neighborhood devaluations spread to entire municipalities as housing values drop.  People who bought homes during the housing bubble may have payed inflated prices and interest rates.  To get the housing and mortgage market back to a rational level of valuation, we recommend loan modifications be made available to all homeowners.  Mortgage principle and mortgage interest rates should be reset at the current market levels for all borrowers who want loan modifications, whether or not they are facing foreclosure.

Finally, the reckless, devious, and unscrupulous actions of some mortgage brokers, bankers, and other financial executives betrayed their primary fiduciary responsibilities to homeowners, workers, investors, and the common good.  Some have committed criminal acts.  As in the investigation of the savings and loan scandal, appropriate authorities at state and federal levels should bring criminal charges against any and all persons responsible for contributing to this crisis of credit, unemployment, foreclosure, and economic collapse.

Problem: Under the current system, borrowers who are denied for loan modifications do not have access to any kind of appeals or escalation process to have the decision reviewed for accuracy.

Solution:

Every borrower must have the right to appeal to an independent third party-a court, mediator or public agency-that can review the servicer's loss mitigation effort.  Foreclosure must be stayed during the appeal.

Problem: Mortgage fraud has caused a ripple effect of negative consequences for families, communities and government, including reduced property values, negative equity for millions of American homeowners, widespread job loss, and massive state revenue shortfalls.

Solution:

Allow homeowners to refinance at current interest rates and market values.

Problem: Throughout the entire mortgage process, from origination to servicing and modification, banks and bank executives have consistently broken the law.  Bank executives knowingly made and purchased deceptive and predatory mortgage loans; fraudulently packaged those risky loans as AAA high quality investments; ignored the securitization rules they themselves wrote; and systematically falsified loan documents in a rush to foreclose on families.  But so far, not a single bank or bank executive has had to face justice or pay for their crimes.

Solution:

As the top law enforcement officials in our states, Attorneys General must seek criminal penalties as they discover bankers and servicers who broke the law.  Banks and bank executives are not above the law and should not escape the consequences for their illegal actions.

 

Foreclosure Fraud 5: Help for All Who Have Been Harmed

The relentlessness of the current foreclosure crisis can push one to despair.  There is endless talk about solutions, but too many people get their hopes up only to see nothing change.  Many striving for some way to keep their homes wait and wait until the time and opportunities run out and their homes are taken. 

There have been many stories of improper foreclosure proceedings through which people who had not missed any house payments found their homes sold at auction.  They were told that since it was a legal sale, they could do nothing about it.  Even more people, guided through a loan modification process and assured by a bank that the modification is forthcoming, have awoken one day to discover that their homes will be sold at auction anyway.  This does not even take into account the foreclosures completed by banks and servicers who have not produced any proof of their right to foreclose on the home.

In the meantime, millions more homeowners are facing foreclosure in the coming year.  A loan modification solution needs to be available soon so that these foreclosures will not continue to drive people from their homes and further undermine and harm the housing market.  Yet fairness requires that those whose homes have been fraudulently foreclosed have recourse to recover their home and investment.  A just solution must take all of this into account.

Problem: Because of entrenched problems and long-standing fraudulent practices, many families who should have received a loan modification have already been harmed, including the loss of their homes.

There are two basic categories of homeowners who have been harmed by servicers' malfeasance: (1) those who have lost their homes; and (2) those who are still in their homes, but have been denied a loan modification, pushed into default, or merely had improper fees tacked onto their account.

Solution:

• Remedies for Those Still in Process

For homeowners who have not yet lost their home in a foreclosure sale, servicers should institute a supervised, full review of every file marked in default. This review must include a review of the payment history, including the timing and application of payments and the validity of fees charged.

1. Homeowners found not to be in default should be removed from foreclosure, corrections of credit reporting status must be provided to the credit bureaus, and accounts should be fully corrected.
2. All pending foreclosures should be halted while this review takes place, and dual track processing must be stopped on all loans so that the modification review can be completed.
3. Fees should be rolled back and limited to reasonable and necessary ones.
4. Recalculation of principal balances should be done to account for improperly assessed fees or overcharged interest.

• Remedies for Those Whose Foreclosures Have Been Completed

The servicers should also be required to undertake a review of all completed foreclosures to identify any cases where the foreclosure was executed on the wrong home, where the homeowner was not in default, and where the foreclosure was completed without completing the loan modification review process, providing a written denial to the homeowner, or failing to offer a qualifying homeowner an appropriate modification.

1. If the home has not yet been sold to bona fide third party, the servicer should offer to restore the mortgage, with a reduction of the principal balance to account for all assessed foreclosure fees, as well as any improper fees.  If the homeowner cannot afford the current mortgage payments, they should be assessed properly for a loan modification under the procedures established above.  Servicers must further provide corrected credit reporting to the credit bureaus to mitigate the negative credit reporting.  A restitution fund should be established, funded by the servicers, to provide damages to this class of injured party.  

2. If the home has already been sold to a third party or if the homeowner no longer wishes to retain the home, the servicer should be required to refund to the homeowner all foreclosure fees assessed against the homeowner's account, plus the amount by which the valuation the servicer relied on exceeds the foreclosure sale price.  Servicers must also take steps to repair the homeowner's credit in these situations.  A restitution fund should be established, funded by the servicers, to provide damages to this class of injured
   party.  

3. If the homeowner who was subject to a wrongful foreclosure cannot be located, the servicer should be required to deposit the money that would otherwise be paid to the homeowner into the fund for legal services and housing counselors.

The last post in this series will cover a few final concerns, including the criminality of foreclosure fraud.