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Welcome to the new EEKONOMY

"Stop calling it greed!  We just take what we need!"

Share your examples of economics that make you say EEK!

To submit your favorite example of Eekonomics, with links to verify the facts, click EEKONOMICS .

October 18, 2014: Should students just STOP paying student loans they cannot afford?

Click to read the opinion in this STUDENT DEBT FORGIVENESS ARTICLE IN SALON.

July 3, 2014:  EEKONOMICS broke the floor!

SunTrust Mortgage figured it was more profitable NOT to implement the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP), although they received $4.85 billion ($4,850,000,000) in federal taxpayer funds through TARP for HAMP, and they collected plenty of homeowners' HAMP applications-- which they piled into a room until the floor buckled under the weight of all those unopened packages. See the report from the Department of Justice, especially the second-to-last paragraph of this press release: "SunTrust Mortgage Agrees to $320 Million Settlement" DEPT OF JUSTICE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OF SUNTRUST MORTGAGE (The entire settlement is only 6.5% of the taxpayer dollars that SunTrust received.  Do you think any settlement money really will be sent to the homeowners who were harmed?) To quote the Department of Justice, directly from this report: "Unwilling to put resources into HAMP despite holding billions in TARP funds, SunTrust put piles of unopened homeowners’ HAMP applications in a room. SunTrust’s floor actually buckled under the sheer weight of unopened document packages. Documents and paperwork were lost. Homeowners were improperly foreclosed upon. Treasury was lied to. The negligence with which SunTrust administered its HAMP program is appalling, miserable, inexcusable, and repulsive. Real people lost their homes, and many others faced financial ruin."

EEKONOMICS hit on the morning of Wednesday, May 15, 2013:

Seattle home defender JEREMY GRIFFIN was joined by volunteers for Day 1 of a vigil to protect him from eviction, and has continued for months! To follow his struggle, eventual (brief) eviction, arrest, and home-reoccupation, see Jeremy's video, and this SLOG article, May 15, 2013, and the video for July update and the news article for August update. 

What other word could describe Jeremy's situation, and so many others among home defenders?  EEKONOMICS defies all the normal rules for regular economics-- that quaint old stuff about market forces like supply and demand-- as a citizen tries to eke out a living while a financial institution enslaves public funds and public servants to violate ethics, common sense, and the law in ways that (don't, didn't, shouldn't) make sense. Here's a brutal sequence of "legal" and "illegal" craziness from the New EEKONOMY:

• The bank was "bailed out" with taxpayers' money, and is now legally required by the state of Washington to negotiate with homeowners. But the bank apparently sold the loan to a trust, which will not negotiate.
• His house was foreclosed after he had trouble off and on, trying to pay the mortgage, and the bank put the house up for auction. WHY? This is in Seattle, where a third of the houses are, like Jeremy's house, "underwater" (current value is less than the loan amount).  Banks should be happy if anyone wants to pay mortgage on a house with negative equity.
• He could have walked away from it and left the bank (read: the trust) to deal with yet another vacant house, because the primary mortgage was in the name of his ex-partner, who moved out years ago. But his name is on the deed, and he stayed, and paid mortgage whenever he could.
• Sometimes he tried to pay mortgage but the bank refused to take his check. Read this carefully: One time, the bank office closed an hour early in order to avoid taking the check he brought to them in person.
• The auction failed. Nobody bid on the house, so the bank "bought" it at the auction.
• Now he has employment, and has offered to buy back the house at current market value (about $20,000 more than the bank paid at auction), if only the bank will negotiate with him. The bank (trust company) wants full payment up front... which is apparently what they wanted when they put the house up for auction, which was when they failed to get any bids.
• May 9, the sheriff posted a warning of eviction, and the sherriff can come at any time to evict him by force. Is this the best way to use the sheriff's valuable time? Probably not; their workload is "pretty horrific," so they warned that they might not get to it until June.  But at least in this one agency, the taxpayer-funded civil servants would be following the law. 
• As we see from the updates of July and August, 2013 (linked above), Jeremy's eviction and arrest were brief; his neighbors and supporters re-opened his boarded-up house, and he moved back in! In this way, through Jeremy's sensible but illegal actions, Seattle was saved the expense of having another homeless person on the streets, and Jeremy went back to maintaining his home instead of allowing it to be another vacant house blighting the neighborhood.

To submit your favorite example of Eekonomics, with links to verify the facts, click EEKONOMICS .

Help Make It Happen! We have plenty of red ink to explain this Mortgage Meltdown. What more do we need? YOU!

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