Briefly Considered: Scrimp and Save, Make Your Payments ... And Lose Your Home Anyway

We're going to see a lot more of this: Iraq War vet Shawn Howell worked two jobs but still couldn't keep up with his ARM payments and had to sell the house to avoid foreclosure. Thousands of families who made payments on time stand to lose their homes as their mortgage lenders go bankrupt.




Just for a minute imagine that you're a thrifty, responsible homeowner. Unlike many people, you've been conscientious in protecting your credit. Your mortgage payments have always been on time, and your property tax payments have been made through the mortgage company. With price inflation steadily worsening and your household income remaining stagnant, things are tight but manageable.

But then your mortgage lender goes bankrupt after being mortally wounded by the bursting housing bubble. As a result, the property tax checks issued by the lender start to bounce -- and now you stand to lose your home to tax foreclosure as a result.

This is the situation facing thousands of home "owners" whose mortgages were financed through American Home Mortgage Corporation Inc. (AHMC), which filed for bankruptcy in August. Like most mortgage companies, AHMC issued thousands of loans backed by Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, which are "government-sponsored" lending agencies.

When the company filed for bankruptcy, AHMC's corporate leaders hoped to auction its loans to other private investors in order to raise money to pay its creditors. But just before the company went under on August 6, Freddie Mac obtained a judicial order permitting it to seize the files on some 4,547 mortgage loans, as well as $7 million in escrowed "custodial account funds" that had been sent by home "owners" for mortgage, insurance, and property tax payments. A subsequent agreement between AHMC and Freddie Mac allows the mortgage company to continue "servicing a crucial portfolio of $5.2 billion in government-backed mortgage loans," which is just fine for both parties in that arrangement.

Meanwhile, thousands of home "owners" face economic ruin. Late mortgage insurance payments will cause their premiums to skyrocket. Late tax payments will result in late fees and penalties. The Wall Street Journal (sub. required -- but see here) reports that "Thousands of homeowners face an `imminent risk' of losing their homes" because property taxes are going unpaid."

With the clinical detachment to human suffering that typifies the bureaucratic mind, Freddie Mac's commissars note that while the agency remains in control of the contested mortgage loans, it can't sort out the details to make the required insurance and tax payments. "Therefore, there is the imminent risk that borrowers' insurance policies may lapse for nonpayment, subjecting the borrowers to a risk of loss of their mortgaged properties," observed a statement from the agency. Likewise, the non-payment of property taxes will result "in increased tax liabilities and possible tax-foreclosure sales."

Some of the affected home "owners" are fortunate enough to live in counties with relatively accommodating treasurers. A dozen residents of Frederick County, Maryland, for instance, have been told that they can make partial tax payments until the checks arrive from AHMC. As if they would.

Freddie Mac's corporate motto asserts that the federally-created agency "makes home possible." The agency boasts of financing some 50 million homes since 1970. I have no idea how many American households today have been "helped" by Freddie: In my home state of Idaho, one of the more thinly populated states of the Union, Freddie has helped to finance over 160,000 homes over the last ten years. (.pdf)

Given the extent of Freddie's entanglement in the housing market, it's reasonable to believe that the predicament faced by the 4,547 households caught in the AHMC bankruptcy is just a foretaste of sorrows to come.

Make sure to drop by The Right Source and to check out the Liberty Minute archives.

The Untouchables (Updated)

Of course, what they don't tell you is that "combative or resistant behavior" can include a word, glance, or momentary hesitation that a State-employed thug doesn't like.


I know little about the political views of the Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the "Hip Hop Caucus," and I care even less. For all I know he is a devoted left-wing agitator who keeps a copy of Marx's 18th Brumaire, or perhaps Carlos Marighella's Mini-Manual for the Urban Guerrilla, concealed within the covers of his Bible.

If so, I don't care.

What I do know, from the video below and eyewitness testimony, is that Rev. Yearwood, a U.S. citizen, waited patiently and peacefully in line to be part of the audience at a public congressional hearing, and was denied access while others behind him in the queue were admitted. I know that this was done because a strict and patently unconstitutional quota was imposed by Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Missouri), the presiding chairman, on "peace people" in the audience.

And it's clear from the video below that Yearwood did nothing to justify his arrest, let alone being the victim of an act of gang violence by a pack of cowards in uniform who promptly charged him with "assault on a police officer":



Spectacles of this sort offer what I call a "shibboleth/sibbolet" bright-line test of one's principles and moral orientation: When you see a group of six large armed "men" swarming an unarmed, peaceful person, whose side do you take?

This wasn't the street arrest of Rodney King following a high-speed pursuit that put innocent lives at risk. Whatever one thinks of that notorious episode from a decade and a half ago, it was a manifestly different thing from what we see in the video above.

This incident brings to the forefront a point I have made before: "Resisting arrest" should not be a crime. Indeed, for much of our nation's history it was considered perfectly legal and appropriate for a citizen to resist arrest -- to the point of using lethal violence, if necessary -- where probable cause didn't exist.

As attorney Roger Roots points out in an essay published by the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal:

"Under the common law, there was no difference whatsoever between the privileges, immunities, and powers of constables and those of private citizens. Constables were literally and figuratively clothed in the same garments as everyone else and faced the same liabilities — civil and criminal — as everyone else under identical circumstances.... Nothing illustrates the modern disparity between the rights and powers of police and citizen as much as the modern law of resisting arrest. At the time of the nation's founding, any citizen was privileged to resist arrest if, for example, probable cause for arrest did not exist or the arresting person could not produce a valid arrest warrant where one was needed. As recently as one hundred years ago, but with a tone that seems as if from some other, more distant age, the United States Supreme Court held that it was permissible (or at least defensible) to shoot an officer who displays a gun with intent to commit a warrantless arrest based on insufficient cause. Officers who executed an arrest without proper warrant were themselves considered trespassers, and any trespassee had a right to violently resist (or even assault and batter) an officer to evade such arrest."

This is exactly how it should be.

If resistance is put up by a legitimate criminal suspect, he's doing pretty much what we expect him to. If it is offered by a genuinely innocent person, it's not a crime of any sort, merely the understandable and quite commendable act of a free person exercising his God-given right to self-defense against the single biggest threat to life and individual liberty we confront: The State's armed agents of coercion.

Yet it's not uncommon for people to be arrested for resisting arrest; this reminds me of the East German government's practice of suppressing the speech of those who accused that regime of suppressing free speech.

And we've reached a point in our descent into despotism where the mere act of "resistant" physical contact between a civilian and a State-employed thug wearing a gun and body armor is prosecuted as felony assault.

As agents of the State, the police are literally untouchable -- licensed to dispense violence at whim, and empowered to treat any resistance by word or gesture as an attack.


These guys can kick in your door, kill your pets, trash your home, throw you to the floor and put a boot on your neck, and kill you with impunity -- but if you utter a syllable of protest you can be prosecuted for "assaulting an officer."


In the incident displayed above, it was the "assailant" who ended up, however briefly, beneath a crushing, suffocating scrum of armed goons (reportedly suffering a broken leg ). The only contact that occurred took place when the armed hirelings grabbed Rev. Yearwood, tackled him to the floor, and then piled on top of him, thus displaying the sacrificial courage for which our constabulary is famous in the era of the Homeland Security State.

Note as well how at least one of the heroes did what he could to impede the view of the witness who was recording the assault.

The District of Columbia ordinance under which Rev. Yearwood has been charged offers five elements of the offense of "assault on [a] police officer," the second of which is that the defendant "assaulted" -- well, duh; a tautology is always so helpful -- "resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated, or interfered with" an officer.

Under that language, Rev. Yearwood was liable to be charged with "assault" merely for demanding an explanation from the police who denied him access to the committee room, or for exclaiming "I won't be arrested today!" as the officers moved to take him into custody.

Some might contend that this kind of treatment is exceptional, given that the assailants were the Capitol Police and that security standards are necessarily higher on Capitol Hill. But Rev. Yearwood's exclusion was apparently not based on security concerns; it was dictated entirely by his political views.

And it's worth noting that one of the assailants told Yearwood he was being arrested for "defying an officer's order" -- the kind of spurious charge routinely used to justify arrests not only in Mordor-on-the-Potomac, but elsewhere across this once-relatively-free land.

What could be a better illustration of the reality that we live in a regimented, militarized police state -- patrolled by armed enforcers, rather than peace officers -- than the fact that any citizen can be arrested anytime for refusing to follow "an officer's order"?

UPDATE

Assault victim Lennox Yearwood gives an account of the crime committed against him by rented thugs at the U.S. Capitol:



(h/t Scott Watson)

Be sure to check out The Right Source, and listen to the latest Liberty Minute commentary.

UPDATED -- Briefly Considered: Gen. Petraeus -- US Security Not An "Objective" in Iraq

[The following transcribed excerpts have been updated and corrected from the first version, thanks to a suggestion from a reader -- WNG.]

Senator John Warner: "[I]f we continue what you have laid before the Congress here as a strategy [to continue the war in Iraq], do you feel that that is making America safer?"

General David Petraeus: "Sir, I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq."

Warner: "Does that make America safer?"

Petraeus: "Sir, I, I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind. What I have focused on, and been riveted on, is how to accomplish the mission...."

Notes David Corn of The Nation: "Warner did not press the general any further on this point. The senator's time was up. That was quite a statement from the fellow who is supposed to save Bush's war. He advocates pursuing Bush's course of action in Iraq but he cannot attest that this effort is crucial for America's safety. Is that being a good soldier?"

Bear in mind that David Petraeus -- the Bush Regime's military messiah du jour -- wasn't in danger of a perjury charge, since the Regime refused to permit the General to testify under oath. (This is standard operating procedure for the Bu'ushists, incidentally.) Yet even under those conditions, Petraeus wasn't willing to claim that the continuing "war of choice" in Iraq is making the United States safer and more secure.

The unalloyed truth is that the war is radically undermining our national security:

*It has abetted the growth of Jihadist radicalism;
*It has provided Jihadis-in-training with an invaluable training ground;
*It is rapidly depleting our wealth (the plunder of domestic wealth through taxes and inflation is the chief war aim of any regime, of course);
*The Regime's ineptly disguised grab for Middle East energy resources has provoked the creation of new and potentially dangerous anti-US coalitions -- something that may lead to a painful illustration of how subjects inevitably get the worst of fights their rulers pick on their behalf;
*It has left the military depleted and over-committed -- a good thing, in the sense that an overtaxed military is less suitable as an instrument of domestic tyranny, a bad thing in the event the coalitions referred to above decide they want a piece of us.


Custom poster courtesy of William Wallace Grigg, age 9.


Outside of the ranks of those who have succumbed to the self-inflicted handicap called "Hannitization" -- you know, mouth-breathing neo-Brownshirts of the sort gathered today for the last of this year's Cornpone Nuremberg Rallies -- nobody believes that the Iraq war is anything other than a world-historic strategic catastrophe. Only a few have the honesty and character to admit as much, and urge an end to the needless bloodshed. The rest are willing to abide additional thousands of deaths in order to save the prestige of the Regime that led our nation into this disaster.

Well, thanks to Gen. Petraeus, we now have a perfect argument to throw in the face of anyone who's willing to listen:

By the tacit admission of the general in command, the war has nothing to do with the safety and security of the United States.

So ending the war is not a defeat.

Q.E.D.


UPDATE, 9/12

Four years ago, as noted in this story from the utterly indispensable McClatchy Newspapers service (the only wire service that specializes in journalism, rather than stenography, where the Iraq war is concerned), Gen. Petraeus was willing to express open skepticism regarding the wisdom of, and strategy behind, the invasion of Iraq. Today, as our military desperately tries to tread quicksand, Petraeus is choking down the key questions he was willing to ask back then, if only in rhetorical fashion.

At yesterday's Capitol Hill hearing, "there was one question that Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, couldn't, or wouldn't, answer. It was the question that Petraeus himself posed rhetorically back in 2003 when he led the Army's 101st Airborne Division into Iraq: `Tell me how this ends.'"

As noted above, that wasn't the only question Petraeus (and Crocker, who may as well have been an animatronic mannequin) refused to answer. The combination of the two ducked questions leaves us with this: The military in Iraq is pursuing a course unrelated to our national security, under civilian and military leadership with no idea of how to end the war.


Obiter Dicta

This time I mean it! My new book, Liberty In Eclipse: The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State, is about to go to press. I'll let you know as soon as it's available.

Meanwhile, I'm about three chapters into my contribution to another book project (I just finished the draft of a chapter today), about which I'll have more to say later.

Please stay abreast of critical stories at The Right Source, and check out the Liberty Minute archives.