President Obama should go to Foreclosure Court

You do get the feeling the President just doesn't get it. There is a Herbert Hoover quality to his pronouncements that the economy should be doing better with the stimulus packages his administration has passed and that many jobs have been created and people really are doing better. The President should go sit in foreclosure court. That might just jump start his awareness.

In foreclosure court you sit in the back and wait while the attorneys for the banks march up to the judge. The attorneys sit on the other side of the low wainscoted divider in high backed leather chairs. They are there for the banks. The people getting foreclosed sit in wooden benches next to each other like criminals waiting trial. There is no talking in court. Many of the defendants need a interpreter who gets up and speaks loudly in Spanish so everyone in the court will hear. On this particular day the judge makes the announcement that there will be no more interpreters after today because of cutbacks.

So then you wait and watch. One by one people go up before the judge and plead for time. That is the best you can do. The banks lawyers have foreclosure orders in hand and they want to foreclose...now! The judge gives some people twenty eight days, but others he grants the order of foreclosure. The people shuffled out glumly knowing they have to leave their home or the sheriff will evict them.

The President doesn't seem to understand this reality. The people in the courtroom are from all walks of life. Some people come as husband and wife, many times only one spouse shows up to get the bad news. Foreclosure court never ends. The court fills up as fast as the judge gavels the cases along. The lawyers troop in and out. The banks have at least five attorneys present. It is always the bank versus the individual. It is an assembly line in reverse. This is not production, but destruction. Destruction of an American Dream gone horribly wrong.

So I think President Obama should stop in just for a little while. You sit there for an hour and you get it. Sometimes there is a tearful woman and everyone feels really bad for a moment. Everyone remembers these are peoples homes and not just judgements of default on loans. The lawyers pause, the cops look away. The judge waits for the woman to compose herself, then everything gets rolling again. The sad assembly line of our bleeding nation.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man trying to hold onto his home. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Our Herbert Hoover

In the waning days of his administration, it is said that Herbert Hoover sat in the White House and literally didn't know what to do. The nation had slipped into a depression and the best he could say was that the economy would have to take it's course. This was after the famous, Prosperity is right around the corner speech. Hoover was a rich man who didn't understand struggle and the nations woes just seemed like a distasteful mess that was beyond repair. He did not like Roosevelt. He did not understand a man who had become a cripple and seemed to exude a confidence and enthusiasm that should have been his. Riding to the inauguration, neither man looked at each other.
Now we have our Hoover. The automakers are closing. Interest rates are at zero. Credit is frozen, people are losing their jobs in a tidal wave of corporate panic. Yet our Hoover sits in the White House and does nothing. After the firecracker of the Great Bailout, we are left with a man who just wants to go back to his ranch. You can see it in his face. I didn't make this mess fairly screams out at you. He is busy giving oil companies their last shots at Federal Land out west and pardoning cronies and putting his boots by the door. Time to go back to Texas and live like a rich oil baron again. Maybe it is his due. But the truth is he doesn't know what to do. Like Hoover, Bush is a duck hit on the head with the concussive effects of nuclear force bad news. The waves just keep coming and he is not a man for this type of crisis. Like Hoover, Bush has always been a rich man comfortable with steering the ship, not charting new courses. Like Hoover, his best effort was to reassure the American public the economy was fundamentally strong before handing over the keys to the bankers to keep their own respective ships afloat.
Now the car manufacturers are dying. They are looking to Washington for help, but Hoover is not thinking about that anymore. He is thinking about that final ride into the sunset where the world is right and let's leave it to that new guy. While not a cripple, Obama climbed out of obscurity and he knows how to fight. The ride to the inauguration will be a repeat of two fundamentally different men sharing a common space. Then they will both be on their own.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/