I'm Easily Manipulated

Sigh, the long, rage inducing posts, I have been loathe to avoid. Unfortunately someone in the comments requests that we take on "The New Breed of Deadbeats" and I view this request as flattery, which gets narcissists like me out the door faster than free ice-cream. Here goes.

I am afraid that I am one of those people who have no patience for people who refuse to pay their debts. People who can't pay their debts? All the sympathy in the world, even if they accumulated those debts through a series of stupid decisions.

Excuse me, Megan, but color was invented quite some time ago. You can stop seeing in black and white now. I just love it when she fucking OPENS with a blatant contradiction. Sentence one judges the fuck out of a broad swath of people whose lives are unknown to her. Sentence two claims to give a similar group of people "all the sympathy in the world." Of course, there is no way the Venn diagram of these two people overlap and Megan has the immaculate detective skills necessary to discern the two.

Anyway, fuck those people for whom she has "all the sympathy in the world." Megan's not here to put a spotlight on the troubles of the down-trodden. She's here to chastise the down-trodden and spotlight the troubles of the already powerful. So let's go berate us some deadbeats. What kind?

people who were unequivocally using bankruptcy to game the system--filing and then vacating serial Chapter 13 petitions in order to keep from being evicted or foreclosed out of houses where they'd never intended making the monthly payments.

Those sound like horrible people! Although a sentence later she admits they are "few in number," that doesn't stop her from wagging her finger at them.

So who are these intentional fraudsters, well, according the Megan some were profiled in this Wall Street Journal piece. Let's see what this piece has to say about those serial fraudsters. Those scattered and few deadbeats bent on gaming the system. I'll just quote everything Megan quotes:

Ms. Richey, the teacher, arrived in Palmdale in 1999. In 2004, she and her husband, Timothy, bought a two-story home on Caspian Drive, near Avenue O-8, with a no-down-payment loan. They took pride in the amenities they installed: a powder room with granite countertops, a backyard pool and play area, and the purple-and-turquoise fantasy playroom upstairs for their three daughters.

But the value of the house plunged to less than $200,000 in 2009. Their $430,000 mortgage, with its $3,700 monthly payment, began to look more like an unwanted burden. By May, amid troubles getting tenants for two rental properties she also owned, Ms. Richey decided the time had come to cut a deal with America's Servicing Co., a unit of Wells Fargo & Co. servicing the mortgage on the house.

After three months of wrangling, she says she finally received a modification approval. The new monthly payment: about $3,300, far more than she had hoped. A Wells Fargo spokesman confirmed the bank offered Ms. Richey a modification under the Obama administration's Making Home Affordable program, and said, "The Richeys turned down the lowest payment we could offer."

Ms. Richey and her husband had already been working on Plan B -- exploring the neighborhood's "For Rent" signs.

On one trip, they drove by the house at 3152 Club Rancho Drive. It was bigger than their house on Caspian, had a pool with three waterfalls, and boasted a cascading staircase that Ms. Richey says she could picture her daughters descending on prom night. The rent was $2,195 a month.

. . .

Ms. Richey and her family made the move to Club Rancho Drive in August, when she was already several months behind on the mortgage. With Mr. Robbins's help, she recently sold the house on Caspian Drive for $195,000, money that the bank will accept to settle the $430,000 mortgage debt. She's also considering walking away from the mortgages on her two rental properties.

Showing a visitor the personal touches in her new home, including a $1,800 dining set she bought with some of her newly available income, she notes the advantages of being a renter rather than an owner.

"You take a risk for the American dream," she says. "I don't have to worry about paying property tax, homeowners' insurance, the landscaping, cleaning the pool or any repairs."

So, these people bought a house in which they intended to live. They subsequently went hugely underwater with it. The bank refused ot modify their loan more than 10% so they said fuck it. This makes them evil. OK, maybe, except what about the bank giving them the loans in the first place? What about the mortage broker that took a fat commission on a no-down-payment 500k house? What about the fact that these people were not the intentional "gamers" that Megan describes. THEY LEFT THEIR HOUSE! SOLD IT! DIDN'T EVEN TRY TO KEEP IT! They walked away from a bad investment.

This is the world in which Megan lives: When corporations are losing money because they have to pay union workers a decent salary this is horrible and they need to fuck over the little guy in order to preserve the stockholders. When a person makes a bad investment and is hemorrhaging money, they must stick to the payments even though the contract they signed has a clear foreclosure clause. I wonder why we think she's biased.

She goes on, but I can't. It's just more of the same shit. She actually tries to throw in a claim that companies don't behave this way to preserve their reputation. I guess that's why Union Carbide spent money cleaning up Bhopal. They didn't want to ruin their reputation by letting thousands of people continue to leave in industrial waste. No, corporations know not to do bad things.

Whatever. I'm done again. If you want to go over there and read it, be my guest, but there's faster ways to raise your blood pressure. May I suggest Pink Himalayan Salt?