There are fewer more poisonous articles than those which lash nabbed terrorists together in search of a trend or a growing problem.
“Recent cases show challengeds of US terrorists,” reads the latest, from Associated Press.
Reporters Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett lash together a collection of designated bad people in the news and consults a variety of experts to read the future. The future, in these stories, being always rotten and getting worse. No context in terms of what problems the US faces by comparison, or the amount of miscellaneous mayhem that goes down every month on US streets, is furnished.
It reads:
One was a drywall contractor and father, another a petite woman who cared for the elderly, another a U.S. military officer. The most alarming thing about a string of recently arrested terror suspects is that they are all Americans.
And there’s the crazy guy who shot and wounded guards to the entrance of the Pentagon and the man who wandered around as a construction worker nobody at nuclear plants in the US and then went off to crawl the dunes of Yemen for years. The crazy kid is left out because he was not a Muslim. Same for the poor man’s Ted Kaczinski who flew his airplane into an IRS building. And the deadliest bioterrorist in history, against which individuals like Jihad Jane seem silly — Bruce Ivins — is also not here.
Just not the right religion.
And of the terrorists selected for this story, only the US Army-minted Nidal Hasan proved truly capable — killing thirteen.
One might venture to say the number still seems quite small in a country as diverse and vast as the US, particularly when considering the poor state of mind imposed on nearly everyone by current economic conditions.
” ‘These cases, [one counterterrorism expert] said, ‘underscore the constantly evolving nature of the threat we face,’” reads the AP piece.
Another way to look at it, logically, is to see that it’s a rather bad argument for endless war and increasingly oppressive snooping, vigilance and intolerance. And that next to everyday problems like rising unemployment, broken government, and the failure of the United States to effectively educate and lead as befits a country of its history and size, these are only small annoyances which — by their exaggeration — point to a self-imposed increasingly bleak future.
A drift into terrorism is “a combination of psychology, sociology and people who, just for cultural reasons, gravitate” [to Islamic extremism] … We can’t assume we’ve got months and years,” Michael Chertoff opines.
Chertoff can always be counted on to reliably deliver the noxious disguised as wisdom. Just last month he was part of a program which CNN ran repeatedly over the course of one weekend, a feature presentation selling the idea that cyberattacks will deliver the new WMDs.
Chertoff’s observation on US terrorists implies one ought to take up the very bad idea that we need to quickly develop the right amount of observation and surveillance, marked up against a scientifically approved list of social character markers, so that these troublesome people can be ferreted out sooner — before too many of them show up and the streets run red with blood.
I know there are more of them out there,” says someone named Jack Tomarchio, another former Dept. of Homeland Security employee.
In these stories the most toxic quote always seems to be delivered by the ubiquitous Bruce Hoffman, a “terrorism expert at Georgetown University.”
“The spate of cases over the past two years shows the conventional wisdom about who is a terrorist is dangerously outdated,” the AP says Hoffman informs.
“There really is no profile of a terror suspect; the profile is broken … It’s women as well as men, it’s lifelong Muslims as well as converts, it’s college students as well as jailbirds.”
These words work to create the impression that terrorism is sort of like a hard to diagnose disease or a trace poisonous gas, floating through the air, capable of infecting or tainting anyone at anytime depending on a panoply of inner weaknesses. And that the only way to stop it is to go to the source and deliver a regular prescription of root terrorism-killing antibiotic or antidote — the burning and stamping out of Muslims who look at the US with anger from other countries.
It is the most meretricious thing, a prescription for endless war, more threats to blow out of proportion next to more urgent problems diminishing the quality of life and blighting futures nationwide. Except for those in the business of explaining and countering terrorism.
Today, in from the wires on Satan’s favorite bank in Pasadena, OneWest:
Many borrowers complain they get the runaround when they call their lenders for help, receive contradictory information from different employees and are required to repeatedly fax the same documents.
At the same time, suicide threats from distressed borrowers are so common that one lender, OneWest Bank Group in Pasadena, Calif., had to establish procedures for alerting the police. Lenders’ call-center employees are under heavy pressure. “These people make $14 or $15 an hour, and we ask them to move mountains,” said a OneWest executive at an industry conference last month.
That’s so considerate. One can but be astonished at the great labor of the “lender’s call center” and pure milk of human kindness dispensed by OneWest.
From the Wall Street Journal inside a larger article on how another big menace, Bank of America, locked a woman out of her home unjustly and stole her pet parrot.
Now if Jihad Jane had been caught doing such things, the US government’d handle things a little differently, DD thinks.
A couple facing foreclosure from OneWest Bank has joined the growing number of homeowners, attorneys and real estate professionals who believe the bank would rather foreclose than modify a loan.
“It comes down to money and greed. All they want is your home,” said Tom Cravalho, who with his wife Mona has been working for nearly two years to get out of an adjustable rate mortgage.
The Cravalhos said their original lender, IndyMac Bank, agreed to a loan modification in the summer of 2008 that would have offered them a 3 percent interest rate for five years. But then IndyMac was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which sold the bank’s assets to a group of investors who formed OneWest Bank in March 2009.
Tom Cravalho said OneWest Bank has refused to honor the original agreement or discuss new terms. The Cravalhos’ attorney believes OneWest is more interested in reimbursement from the FDIC for the bad loan under a so-called “shared loss” agreement than it is in modifying the Cravalhos’ mortgage.
DD began writing on Satan’s favorite bank when the Huffington Post started its celebrity-run campaign to get people to move their money from big evil parasite banks to small community-oriented banks that allegedly care about their customers.
Just to keep current, I went back to Move Your Money to check if OneWest was still in the list of recommended allegedly not-evil banks.
Yep. No change. Large evil bank still in master list of allegedly small not evil banks.
“AlterNet writer Stephen Pizzo has a simple question for people still using a big bank,” states the Move Your Money blog fatuously. “Why? They’re bad for you, bad for the country, and everybody knows it.”
From an old Ted Nugent column on healthcare reform, at Human Events, the extreme right website/magazine for assorted lunatics:
Let’s get one thing straight about health care. The biggest problem with health care is not the assured escalating costs, but rather that too few Americans actually care about their health. Look around you if you doubt me. We are the most blubber-infested, obese nation in the history of the world. Not only do many Americans eat far too much, others still suck on cancer sticks, others drink too much, and yet others fail to do anything to improve their health.
Yet still some of these bloodsuckers have the audacity to believe someone else should pay for their health care when they obviously do not care about their health. Is this the Planet of the Fat Apes or America?
A dose of truth: health care is not a right. It is a personal responsibility. If you don’t give a damn about your health care, how dare you demand another free man to pay for it. Only the bloodsuckers need feel guilty.
Here’s the short version: Sick people are bloodsuckers. They wouldn’t be sick if they didn’t eat too much, drink alcohol, or spend what little money they have on drug habits.
It’s stupid, heartless and blunt. But it’s what the GOP believes. Health care is only for people who deserve it, like Ted Nugent.
Krugman, today, in a column entitled Afflicting the Afflicted:
The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.
While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is.
There’s another line from Ted Nugent’s explication of what health care ought to be.
It concerns how businesses and the government are run and it’s a real rib-tickler:
If a business was run the way our bandit politicians have run our government, the owners of the business would be charged with any number of crimes.
“Bank of America Corp’s (BAC.N) investment banking chief Thomas Montag received $30 million in total pay in 2009, driven by the company’s buyout of Merrill Lynch, according to the company’s proxy filing on Friday,” it is read here today.
“The compensation for the senior executive team of the largest U.S. bank by assets highlighted the pay curbs tied to the $45 billion in U.S. government aid the bank repaid in December 2009.”
“U.S. communications regulators will unveil on March 17 a blueprint aimed at bringing fast affordable Internet access to more than 90 million Americans being held back by fees and technology,” reported Reuters today.
Cue big horselaugh.
Such a promise must be anathema to current US Internet service providers, regularly bent on advertising connection speed ‘bargains’ that aren’t bargains at all — marketed as as ‘bundling.’
Reuters continued:
The Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday that the long-awaited National Broadband Plan will try to help connect 93 million Americans to high-speed Internet to find jobs, access educational and healthcare services, and reduce household energy costs … The FCC, which in August started a series of fact-finding workshops, will submit its recommendations to Congress on March 17, in an effort to lift the United States out of the 19th spot behind Japan, Korea and France — the leaders in a 2008 world ranking for broadband speed.
One could spend hours musing how the GOP might reframe any US government effort to improve broadband in the country as tyrannical and un-Constitutional. Or consider the words of little Tommy Friedman on Sunday, advising that everyone will have to cope with having much less of everything. Except him.
It will never get to that, though. The US is not a ‘can do’ country. It’s not much a leader in anything except on what can’t be done.
To succeed would require an actual investment in infrastructure upgrading, creation of a resource not shaped by current Internet access sale as an unfairly priced commodity rather than a utility which must be delivered to all cheaply, and a dedication to see something happen that was good for the civilian population, not the free market.
Readers will note the prescription/prediction, safely moved into the distant future so no one will remember the big words a year from now,
“Last week [an FCC official] said he wants Internet service providers to offer a minimum connection speed of 100 megabits per second by 2020,” it was told.
As opposed to the greater than one order of magnitude less crap you have now.
The future of FAIL in the US is immense. FAIL holds such an advantage in the way things are done now that nothing can impede it much. Certainly not promises and talk from someone in the FCC.
California makes up at least ten percent of the US GDP. Since it is so large, it only makes sense that it’s the same as the country as a whole in 2010. Irresponsibly run, almost broken beyond repair.
A good example of the dysfunction is Meg Whitman’s run for governorship.
The video is her campaign commercial, which runs frequently. Here, some wag has posted it to YouTube, apparently when it interrupted an comedy skit.
Whitman is a standard 2010 GOP candidate. Anti-big government, anti-tax — which actually got California into its current mess, anti everything but sycophants wishing to kiss her ass.
Like many very wealthy people, it’s a trait that serves reasonably well in 2010 US. It banks on a solid belief among many in the citizenry that it’s good practice to be lickspittle to rich people, to blindly accept everything they suggest, because as my idiot mother used to put it irrefutably: “If you’re so smart, howcum you ain’t rich?”
The corollary to that would then seem obvious.
In Whitman’s commercial, one immediately notices the pics of her on the covers of magazines, underlining the message that here is someone who’s rings deserve kissing.
Whitman’s two big recommendations are to cut spending and ‘fix education.’
In this, she also hews to ruling orthodoxy in 2010 US. That the two prescriptions are incompatible in 2010 California is not important.
Her motto is “Mean what you say, say what you mean.” That this is senseless and hysterical when coming from her means nothing. She was, after all, on the cover of business magazines and the head of eBay.
In an editorial in Canada’s Globe and Mail recently, one columnist described California thusly:
Mired in partisan bickering, the state has shown itself incapable of managing its finances in recent years. It’s now facing a $20-billion (U.S.) budget shortfall in the current fiscal year, and another big gap in 2011. Even with brutal planned cuts to government services and dramatic tax hikes, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked for nearly $7-billion from Washington to fill the gap – a sum he is unlikely to get.
The reason for this, unmentioned, is the affliction in Sacramento is the same one infecting the US government. As in the US Senate, an overwhelming majority is required to pass legislation. This has allowed the GOP — the minority part in the state — to block everything. And so California cannot be governed.
Whitman espouses fixing education in California but it was tax revolt which broke that in the state. And it is the current GOP-controlling minority which gums up everything now.
In fact, spending has been cut radically in California. One of the very noticeable results has been the continued firing of teachers.
Districts are handing out the notices of potential layoff to teachers and other staff in response to the state budget crisis. The recently enacted state budget included $11.6 billion in cuts to public education budget over the next 15 months.
“School districts up and down this state are sending out pink slips to tens of thousands of hard-working, dedicated teachers, administrators, and school staff,” O’Connell said. “Cuts of this magnitude will have devastating effects in our classrooms across the state.”
The recently enacted budget cuts come on top of several years of reduced support in the state budget for public education. Last year, roughly 10,000 teachers received pink slips and an estimated 5,000 ultimately lost their jobs.
“Before the current cuts were enacted, California already ranked 47th in the nation in per-pupil spending,” O’Connell said. “These current cuts are sure to push us further down the scale.
The Newport-Mesa Unified School District Board of Education will vote Tuesday night on a resolution that calls for the elimination of nearly 125 full-time positions, and more than half of them will be young elementary school teachers fresh out of college.
The recommended layoffs, including the dismantling of the district’s Adult Education program and its ESL classes, are expected to save the district $13.5 million in the 2010-11 budget.
The anticipated job losses are a direct result of the state’s recent cutbacks in education due to the fiscal crisis playing out across the entire state, said Laura Boss, a spokeswoman for the district.
Whitman’s strategy is a standard GOP line, more nicely-put Ted Nugent-like philosophy, suitable for framing: If we can just get rid of all the welfare leeches, parasites in state government, and a bunch of undeserving union-protected teachers, that will fix things.
“What has struck me about Whitman is how normal she seems,” writes courtesan Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard. “She’s rich. She donated $30 million to Princeton to build a sixth college on campus (dubbed Whitman College).”
The Wall Street Journal says:
Ms. Whitman, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in California, is fashioning herself as the latest crusader promising to crack down on abuses of the welfare state, which is nowhere more corrupt and costly than in the Golden State … California is twenty years behind the curve on welfare reform, and Ms. Whitman may be the first candidate in a generation with a concrete plan to replace lifetime welfare with work and dignity.
One peruses the abstract of a paper, entitled “A desperate means to dignity: Work refusal amongst Philadelphia welfare recipients”:
Sentiments favoring a sweeping overhaul of the United States’ social welfare system culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 – a law that mandates states to move almost all recipients from cash assistance on welfare to paid work. This ethnographic study examined work refusal among women who left menial jobs to return to welfare, or to subsistence by other means. Seventy interviews and 18 months of participant observation revealed a pattern of confrontations with authority figures at various job sites as well as resentment of the subservience often demanded of workers in the lowest tiers of the primary economy. Confrontations in training programs and at work afforded impoverished women the chance to express their resentments about being relegated to unrewarding, low income work and to maintain vestiges of even a defiant dignity in the face of a hostile social order.
Related:
“Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel,” writes little Tommy Friedman at the New York Times today.
“We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag … The president needs to persuade the country to invest in the future and pay for the past — past profligacy — all at the same time. We have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever, when public trust in government is lower than ever.”
There are no more vilified figures in the US than Wall Street bankers and health insurers.
For being the objects of unrestricted hate, there’s no topping them.
Nevertheless, some try. Here’s Fox Business News, portrayed everywhere this morning, castigating a Wellpoint/Anthem insurance p.r. man not for gouging and looting customers — but for gouging and looting them at just the wrong time, giving the Obama administration ammunition to push again on healthcare reform.
DD is a resident of California with Anthem coverage.
Here’s how Anthem works. It takes premiums and never pays out.
The deductibles and co-pays are so high one learns to never go into the doctor’s office for illness or health problems that don’t immediately threaten to put you in the emergency room.
I learned this the hard way years ago.
Growth on your nose that might be cancerous?
Forget it. Pay for removal and biopsy yourself.
Painful skin condition? Pay for the drugs to control it with own coin. Or endure it even though the cure is a matter-of-fact one.
I’m certain it’s that way for thousands who now constantly must wonder why they have health insurance at all.
In any case, these are wonderful Sheriff of Nottingham-like quotes:
“Even a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was compelled to feign concern …”
Fox Business News: But [Mr. Wellpoint/Anthem man] this is like Jaws 2, just when you thought it was safe to get out of the healthcare debate, you brought everybody back into it. [...] Didn’t someone though, wasn’t there a committee that said listen, let’s take Wall Street’s lead, do the minimum we can, wait for this to blow over and maybe a year from now try to hike rates?
DD is going to leave it to the President and Democratic Party to turn this into a disaster as only they can.
In a month or two we’ll see that government initiatives to make robbing customers blind are horrendous things, fought tooth and nail by many of those being robbed blind.
Here’s a British video showing actor Bill Nighy as a banker reduced to squirming when being questioned about the proposal for a Robin Hood Tax on bank transactions.
The British newspaper The Guardian writes about the campaign to introduce the tax and how bankster firm Goldman Sachs immediately tried to game an opinion poll on the matter at the tax proposal’s website.
Contrast this with video from Fox Business News where a couple of guys, one glabrous and one odious, castigate Barack Obama for wanting to rob from the banks to give to the poor.
You see, in the United States the good guys are the Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy of Gisborne. Everyone knows that.
And DD still can’t find a YouTube video of the Jack In the Box commercial, now playing all the time, portraying an employee who poses as Robin Hood as a laughable buffoon. Because he wants to take from the rich and has a fat ass in green tights.
John Pike, a defence analyst and founder of Virginia-based Global Security, said he doubted the test would change Gates’s view. “[Bob Gates] seemed to believe that there was no prospect of the plane engaging targets at ranges of several hundred kilometres, and that engagements at ranges of less than 100 kilometres were not militarily interesting,” he said.
The [Missile Defence Agency] statement did not specify what the range was during the test.
Ivan Oelrich, a physicist and vice-president for strategic security programmes at the Federation of American Scientists, said: “What would be interesting would be how far away it [the missile] is.” He said that to be useful, the laser would have to be able to shoot down missiles from at least 100 miles. It would also be expensive to keep one or more planes on stations waiting for a missile.
Good news, lads! Good news! President Obama has cozied up to the banksters, calling them savvy businessmen for looting the country, wrecking the world economy and rewarding themselves with huge bonuses.
Sign No. 11 that you live in a dysfunctional country: Your President turns into a nauseating suck-up.
The Prez: Oh, the banksters will take all their money to the Republicans later this year! Tell me what should I do, Timmy and Larry?
Timmy & Larry: Bow and scrape.
Being republished thousands of times around the web right now:
President Barack Obama has praised the bosses of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as “very savvy” and insisted he does not “begrudge” them their success and wealth, in a significant softening of the White House’s attitude towards multimillion-dollar Wall Street bonuses.
Once a staunch critic of outsized pay packets, Obama adopted a strikingly consensual tone when asked this week about a $9m (£5.8m) bonus awarded to Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein and a $17m (£11m) payday granted to JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon.
“I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in a interview with Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek magazine. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”
What you mean by ‘most’, Kemosabe?
Prediction: After ridicule by everyone except the banksters for a week: “What I meant to say was [mumble]…” And it won’t make a difference.
“During a recent protest outside his Walnut Street bank headquarters, OneWest CEO Terry Laughlin came down with the bank’s head of mortgage services for a little face time with borrowers,” reported the Pasadena Star-News recently.
“The idea was to ‘reach out’ Laughlin said, and see what he could do or say to help them with their home loans – which they angrily – and frequently – complain have yet to be modified.”
And for the newspaper, Laughlin’s interview was an attempt to ‘reach out,’ to counter the boatload of really bad press OneWest, or as it is called here — Satan’s Favorite Bank in Pasadena — has accumulated over the past few months,
Message to CEO: It’s not gonna help.
Banksters are less popular than soiled toilet paper on the bottom of one’s shoe now. And rightly so. Nothing can change that. And this is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Nevertheless, OneWest’s CEO told the newspaper that the giant vulture capitalism bank was now a community-oriented southern California bank interested in depositors and making affordable loans. And the newspaper could but go along because to get interviews like this one, the interviewee has to know that the interviewer won’t be anything but a lickspittle. That’s how America works.
The newspaper explained:
As of December, the bank, which entered the Obama administration’s Making Loan’s Affordable Program in August, had permanently modified 1,226 loans under the program, with 23,012 in the pipeline as trial modifications. If you count the loans modified under the FDIC’s control of IndyMac before the purchase, total permanent modifications come to 15,000 …
But readers know OneWest has been mostly publicized for foreclosing on people around the country rather than modify home mortgages.
This was explained in our Satan’s Bank post thusly:
[OneWest] uses government guarantees for distressed assets in its rescue to ensure a profit on forclosures. In essence, the US government uses taxpayer money indemnifying OneWest against loss on a distressed property it owns, indeed guaranteeing a certain good amount of profit on it. It is the very essence of vulture crony capitalism and its main purpose, socially, is profit for OneWest through capitalization of the very badness of its former self through the working over of subprime mortgage holders.
“The realities of the economy – unemployment, lack of income – are at odds with a key term of the government’s loan-modification program: Borrowers who want better terms must be able to prove that their current monthly mortgage payment is more than 31 percent of their gross monthly income,” OneWest’s CEO told the Pasadena Star-News.
Dig the foreclosure news
DD dug into Google to find OenWest foreclosures nationwide during December and January.
It was at this time that negative publicity on OneWest reached something of a peak, forcing the company into a cosmetic measure. It said it would halt foreclosures during the holiday season.
If it did, it was hard to notice.
DD found OneWest foreclosures from Hawaii to Topeka to New Orleans and all the way to Vero Beach, Florida.
A Hawaii newspaper, for instance, noted OneWest owned at least 26 homes in that state. Meaning it had foreclosed on all of them.
DD found two OneWest foreclosures in Topeka — one in mid-January, one about a week ago. And one in Boulder, Colorado, last mid-month.
On December 18, national publicity over a foreclosure in San Diego forced the company into p.r. defense.
“Just in time for Christmas, Brian Wofford has learned that his large family won’t be evicted from the house he mortgaged to the hilt after it was renovated for free five years ago on the ABC show ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,’ reported the San Diego Union on December 18.
“Wofford, a widowed father of eight, is in default on his Encinitas house. He owes $770,000 after he refinanced several times and took out home-equity loans to get cash.
“He has been seeking a loan modification since 2007 and stopped making payments this year. The house was scheduled to be auctioned Dec. 14, but the Woffords received a last-minute reprieve from OneWest Bank after nationwide media coverage.”
A week earlier, the New York Post ran a story on the opposite side of the country entitled: LI MOM: Bank Strung Us Out.
“A Long Island family battling runaway medical bills for their two special-needs pre-schoolers are, days before Christmas, in danger of losing their house to foreclosure after their bank offered – and then retracted – three mortgage-modification plans, the frantic mother claims,” reported the newspaper.
The story continued:
Caryn Fleming, of Miller Place, said she and her police officer husband were at first overjoyed at the lower monthly payments under the modification offers – but were then shocked back into a real estate hell when their bank, OneWest, said they didn’t qualify for any modification because they made too much money.
“They knew exactly how much we made from the beginning of the process because they gave us our mortgage five years ago,” Fleming said.
OneWest, which last month made the news after a Suffolk judge ripped up a bank mortgage because of its deceptive, underhanded ways, was dealing with 111,674 mortgages that were 60 or more days delinquent as of Nov. 30, according to the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable program.
The bank has extended 35,315 trial modification plans but has concluded zero permanent modifications, the Treasury Department reported this week.
Because the Flemings made reduced payments for 18 months – as instructed by the bank – they have accrued $40,000-plus in arrears and are facing eviction. Fleming said she recently offered to start making full mortgage payments and to pay off the arrears next October – when her husband retires from the NYPD. OneWest rejected the couple’s offer, she said.
A Long Island couple is home free after an outraged judge gave them an amazing Thanksgiving present — canceling their debt to ruthless bankers trying to toss them out on the street.
Suffolk Judge Jeffrey Spinner wiped out $525,000 in mortgage payments demanded by a California bank, blasting its “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive” acts.
The bombshell decision leaves Diane Yano-Horoski and her husband, Greg Horoski, owing absolutely no money on their ranch house in East Patchogue.
Spinner pulled no punches as he smacked down the bankers at OneWest — who took an $814.2 million federal bailout but have a record of coldbloodedly foreclosing on any homeowner owing money.
OneWest’s conduct was “inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious,” Spinner wrote.
He canceled the debt because the bank “must be appropriately sanctioned so as to deter it from imposing further mortifying abuse against [the couple].”
The bank is involved in a similar case in California, where it’s trying to foreclose on an 89-year-old woman, despite two court orders telling it to stop.
Stung by the whip of bad reviews, OneWest announced it was turning to charitable giving at the beginning of the new year.
“With a seed of $10 million, OneWest Bank announced this week that it has created a nonprofit foundation to help develop the communities it serves,” reported Monterey County Herald on January 2.
“The Pasadena-based bank, which took over failed IndyMac in March, established the foundation ‘to actively invest’ in priorities such as affordable housing, health care, education, financial literacy and rehabilitating underserved communities, foundation bank officials said.
” ‘We are very committed to supporting the community in meaningful ways through our charitable efforts, including significant contributions from our employees in community service activities,’ ” foundation Chairman Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.”
Community service. Affordable housing. Fine words.
“The bank has 72 retail branches in Southern California and total assets of $24 billion,” one news story on OneWest informs.
Let’s see.
10 million / 24 billion = 0.000416666667
In other words, another ‘achievement in giving’ worth the stink eye. The amount is OneWest/Satan’s Bank equivalent of pocket lint. Maybe less.
