*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Mass outreach to build March 21 Demonstration--Saturday,
March 7 and March 14:
San Francisco: 12noon, meet at 2489 Mission St. #24 at 21st St.
East Bay: 10am, meet at MacArthur BART main entrance, Oakland
NEXT MARCH 21 COALITION PLANNING MEETING:
SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Winter Soldier: Testimony from US veterans on their experiences in Iraq, women's experiences, being a Muslim in the US military, war resisters and more.
Wed., March 11, 6 - 9 PM
150 Goldman School of Public Policy on UC Berkeley campus
Free.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
March against the war on March 21
Dear friends,
During his presidential campaign, Obama's popularity surged with the promise that he would bring the troops home from Iraq within 16 months. But his recently announced plan would continue the illegal occupation indefinitely. It would leave up to 50,000 troops in that war-torn country for who knows how many years. And it would delay the withdrawal of the first batch of troops to 19 months.
"When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, 'get out,' and everyone's gone. But that is not going to happen," said a senior military officer.
This plan doesn't "leave Iraq to its people and responsibly end this war", as Obama claimed during his Congressional address of Feb. 24. Instead it entrenches the U.S. in a brutal counter-insurgency war that helped to bankrupt our country and sends an endless stream of Americans to continue dying and killing.
The U.S. government, the American people, and the Iraqi people need to hear our voices of opposition on March 21.
Last week, Sec. of Defense Gates and President Obama announced their plan to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan - that's a 50 percent increase - despite the fact that the Department of Defense has no exit strategy. And the U.S. is expanding the covert war run by the CIA inside neighboring Pakistan.
We cannot afford another quagmire.
Please join us in Washington, SF, and LA on March 21.
Go to www.pentagonmarch.org for more information
Meanwhile the U.S.-funded occupation and blockade of Gaza continues after an assault in which 100's of civilians were killed and even a United Nations school was not spared from the onslaught of human rights crimes and violations of international law.
The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine are struggling to rid themselves of deadly, racist occupations. We need to unite in the realization that the movement in solidarity with the people of Palestine is the same as the movements in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us stand together with each other and with them, and say:
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, occupation is a crime!
The people of the world need to hear from Americans that we are against the racist U.S. wars of aggression and occupation. We have an historic responsibility to raise our voices and be heard, to march with our banners held high and be seen, demanding
Bring ALL the troops home NOW!
Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
End U.S. support for the occupation of Palestine!
No war on Iran or Pakistan!
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations is joining with a broadening alliance of 100's of coalitions, organizations, and networks in a united MARCH 21 NATIONAL COALITION to mobilize people across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon on the sixth year of the military invasion and occupation of the Iraq War: Saturday, March 21.
Demonstrations will also be held on that date in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities across the U.S.
For updated information about buses and the national March 21 coalition, which includes labor unions, peace and anti-war groups, veterans and community groups and more, see: www.pentagonmarch.org
These actions will remind the nation and the world that the U.S. antiwar movement - marching behind a banner demanding "Out Now!' - will intensify its struggle to stop the wars.
The actions are needed to assure the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and other countries threatened by Washington's expansionist policies that tens of millions of people in this country support their right to settle their own destinies without U.S. interventions, occupations and murderous wars. International law recognizes - and we demand - that the U.S. respect the right to self-determination. We reject any notion that the U.S. is the world's self-appointed cop.
The March 21 united mass actions are also needed at this time of economic meltdown to demand jobs for all; a moratorium on foreclosures; rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure; guaranteed, quality health care for all; an end to the ICE raids and deportations; and funding for sorely needed social programs. So long as trillions of dollars continue to be spent on wars, occupations, and bailouts to the banks and corporate elite, the domestic needs of the people of the U.S. can never be met.
For more information about the National Assembly please visit: www.natassembly.org
March 21, in D.C., will culminate in a dramatic direct action where hundreds of coffins-representing the multinational victims of militarism, Empire and corporate greed-will be carried and delivered to the headquarters of the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death.
From the Pentagon, we will march to the nearby giant corporate offices of Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corporation, General Dynamics and KBR (the former subsidiary of Halliburton).
A March 21 Labor Rally and contingent to March 21
will be held in the grassy area just South of Market
Street in Justin Herman Plaza
Saturday, March 21
Rally at 10:30 a.m. // Form contingent to march at 11:45 a.m.
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=18479
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Donate to Courage to Resist
A message from Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo,
Iraq War veteran and war resister
Since the day I surrendered to military custody after refusing to return to Iraq, Courage to Resist has been there for me and my family as a constant fountain of support. This support has come in many forms, from a friendly call, to organizing a campaign to cover my legal expenses and basic needs. I believe only an organization with altruistic motives that truly cares would have done this. As someone who has felt the enormous relief of having a strong support group behind me, it is a privilege now as a member of Courage to Resist to help others as I have been helped.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/26/
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
http://www.wakeupfreakout.org/film/tipping.html
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ARTICLES IN FULL:
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) New Owners to Reopen Window Plant, Site of a Sit-In in Chicago
By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27factory.html?ref=us
2) 70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html?ref=us
3) As Livelihoods End, Bowed but Proud
By KEVIN COYNE
Jersey | Florence
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/nyregion/new-jersey/22colnj.html?ref=nyregion
4) Even Worse for Young Workers
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28herbert.html
5) A Clean Fight
By TIMOTHY HSIA
Op-Ed Contributor
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28hsia.html/
6) Forced From Executive Pay to Hourly Wage
By MICHAEL LUO
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/us/01survival.html?hp
7) Guess What Got Lost in the Loan Pool?
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01gret.html?ref=business
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) New Owners to Reopen Window Plant, Site of a Sit-In in Chicago
By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27factory.html?ref=us
CHICAGO - The 250 workers who staged a December sit-in at a Chicago window factory to protest losing their jobs were celebrating Thursday, after another window manufacturer announced plans to reopen the plant and start hiring back the displaced workers within months.
The sale of what had been Republic Windows and Doors to a California company, Serious Materials, for $1.45 million, was completed in bankruptcy court this week, with company officials promising United Electrical Workers Local 1110 to rehire all the laid-off workers at their former rate of pay.
"We see this opportunity to expand our operations in direct relation to the stimulus package, which includes the greening of federal buildings and the weatherization assistance program," said Sandra Vaughan, the chief marketing officer for Serious Materials, which also manufactures energy-efficient windows and building products in Boulder, Colo., and Vandergrift, Pa.
Ms. Vaughan said it could take months to get the company's equipment up and running in Chicago, but to former Republic Windows workers like Armando Robles, a father of five who lost his health insurance in January, the prospect of the factory's reopening was "a dream come true."
"They are promising to hire all of us back sooner or later, but they will start with a small crew," said Mr. Robles, 39, who had been a maintenance technician. "Having another company reopen the factory was always our hope when we occupied the factory in December."
Serious Materials' acquisition of the 125,000-square-foot warehouse that housed Republic Windows comes just days after Republic Windows' former owner, Rich Gillman, ceased operations at his new window plant in Red Oak, Iowa. Mr. Gillman opened that factory late last year as a nonunion plant, after abruptly shuttering the one in Chicago.
"We are sad that the inability to make the company succeed represents a loss for more than 100 workers and their families, and investors who held great hope for this enterprise," Mr. Gillman said in a statement.
Melvin Maclin, 55, a former technician at Republic Windows, said his bitter emotions of the last few months turned to joy this week, after learning that he could soon be back at work, cutting designs into glass windows at the Chicago plant.
"When I got the phone call, I woke up my wife, and we did a little victory dance," Mr. Maclin said. "This is not only a victory for the Republic workers, but for laborers and unions everywhere."
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) 70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html?ref=us
More than 70 juveniles and their families filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against two former judges who pleaded guilty this month in a scheme that involved their taking kickbacks to put young offenders in privately run detention centers.
The suit contends that before resigning last year, the judges "used kids as commodities that could be traded for cash," placing an "indelible stain" on the juvenile justice system of Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania.
The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Scranton by the Juvenile Law Center, seeks to have all profits that the detention centers earned from the scheme placed in a fund that would compensate the youths for their emotional distress.
In an earlier filing, the law center, based in Philadelphia, asked the State Supreme Court to clear the records of all juveniles who appeared before the judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan.
The suit brought Thursday is the third filed on behalf of juvenile offenders. The two others, one of which also seeks class-action status, were filed by private lawyers.
Mr. Ciavarella and Mr. Conahan pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to federal charges of wire and income-tax fraud for having taken more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to the two privately operated centers, run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.
"Judge Ciavarella's placement of so many children in juvenile facilities without regard for their underlying charges suggests a Procrustean scheme that violated one of the core principles of the juvenile justice system - the right to individualized treatment and rehabilitation," Lourdes M. Rosado, associate director of the Juvenile Law Center, said in a statement.
Lawyers for the two former judges declined to comment on the suit.
As for the criminal investigation of court personnel, two additional people have already been charged, and federal officials say they may soon charge others involved in the scheme.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) As Livelihoods End, Bowed but Proud
By KEVIN COYNE
Jersey | Florence
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/nyregion/new-jersey/22colnj.html?ref=nyregion
Florence
ON his last day of work at the sprawling riverfront foundry here, Tom Darmo looked up from the stacks of pipes he was counting and decided that, after 22 years, the time had come for him to visit the one spot where he had never set foot before: the peak of the cupola, the five-story furnace where scrap metal was melted and transformed into something new.
The cupola is the highest point at Griffin Pipe, and on this last morning before the plant's closing it was probably the coldest, too. Winds were gusting near 50 miles an hour, whipping up whitecaps on the gray Delaware. Mr. Darmo, 42, tightened the band inside his hard hat and, with three colleagues from the quality control department, started climbing the narrow ladders toward the uppermost catwalk.
"It was like us going to Mount Everest," he said later, after he and roughly 200 other workers had left their old jobs for the last time. "I've looked at it from afar for many years, but I've never been up to the top. I will never forget that. It was a special time for us."
He could see everything from up on the cupola, more than 200 acres of a foundry whose roots were more than 200 years deep, a place most people around here presumed was too old and too big to ever close. "The First Company to Manufacture Cast Iron Pipe in the United States," the sign out front declares; before it was bought by Griffin Pipe in 1962, it was the R. D. Wood Company, which was founded in Millville in 1803 and took over an existing foundry here in 1867. If you live anywhere in the northeastern United States, you have almost certainly used water that has flowed through a pipe that was made here.
But those 200 years ended quietly on Lincoln's Birthday, while Congress was still debating an economic stimulus package that was arriving too late to save these jobs in this old river town just south of Trenton, where too many families already know what happens when a factory locks its gates.
"We were expecting a temporary layoff, maybe three months," said Mark Babula, 38, unit chairman of Local 2040B of the United Steelworkers, the union that represents 175 hourly employees at Griffin. But the economy was worse than anyone had ever imagined: Housing starts had plummeted, and so had the demand for water pipes. Just a year earlier, just three miles downriver in Burlington, another old foundry, U.S. Pipe, had closed.
The news arrived several weeks before Christmas: a complete shutdown of production. It was the same kind of hammer blow that hit Mr. Babula's father and grandfather in 1974, when the Roebling steel mill - the center of the meticulously planned industrial village just three miles north of Griffin, and the maker of the suspension cables that hold up most of the landmark American bridges of the 20th century - shut down, and tossed them out of work.
The final day at Griffin was marked by no ceremony. "Everybody just kind of drifted away," said Mr. Babula, whose father grew up in a house built by Roebling for its workers and who lives with his wife and their 2-year-old son in an R. D. Wood house, a seven-minute walk from the plant where he worked for 15 years. "But everybody went out proud."
Production had stopped almost a week earlier, so when paychecks were distributed at midmorning, most workers saw little point in sticking around till the end of the shift. One by one, they trickled out through the gate, carrying bags filled with dirty clothes from their lockers, some with several pairs of boots dangling like strings of bass.
By midafternoon a couple dozen of them had convened at a place called Wesley's up in Roebling, across the street from the mostly vacant parcel where the old mill had once stood. They traded stories about their lost world at the same long mahogany bar where the Roebling workers had once traded stories about their own.
There was some grumbling: about who got the few jobs that will remain as the plant becomes a distribution center for pipes made at Griffin's other locations, in Virginia and Iowa; about the recent ascendancy of managers unschooled in the ways of the old foundrymen; about what seemed a myopic strategy of shutting down, rather than riding through the rough times with a layoff; about the gyrations that R. D. Wood must be making in his grave.
But mostly there was sadness, and worry about the prospect of finding new jobs in an economy so bad that it killed a plant that had survived so many other downturns. "I went from making $48,000 a year to unemployment," said John Sheehan, who worked at the foundry for 22 years, and whose wife's father and grandfather had worked there before him. When his health coverage ends in four and half months, his insurance will become unaffordable: $1,000 a month, he said, half his unemployment check. "I have to start all over at 42 years old."
Hourly wages at Griffin ranged from $18 to $23, but in good years, when demand was high and overtime was plentiful, some workers made more than $60,000. "Everyone needs water and sewer lines," Mr. Sheehan said. "I never thought this would happen."
More workers arrived at Wesley's as the afternoon deepened, and they helped themselves to the spread of free food the owners had put out for them: pulled pork, Cajun wings, vodka rigatoni. A few had leads for new jobs, but more did not, and the chances of finding ones like the kind they had just left seemed to be growing dimmer each day.
"When you lose your manufacturing base, you're losing your backbone, you're losing your strength," Tom Darmo said. "Now we're enslaved to China and these underdeveloped countries where they treat the workers terribly and they don't have pollution controls."
Mr. Darmo had a new listener, and he was telling the story again of his ascent to the summit of the cupola, a perch from which he had seen not just the foundry that he was about to leave, but also all the way north to the memory of another plant from which an earlier generation of workers had once been expelled: the remnants of the Roebling mill just across the street.
"It was so windy it was scary," he said. He held on tight, though, braced against the wind that threatened to blow him away, but never quite managed to.
e-mail: jersey@nytimes.com
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) Even Worse for Young Workers
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28herbert.html
The employment situation in the U.S. is, if anything, worse than most people realize. And huge numbers of young people, ages 16 to 30, are being beaten down in ways that could leave scars for a lifetime.
Much of the attention in this economic downturn has focused on the growing legions of men and women who are officially counted as unemployed. There are now more than 11 million of them.
But a better picture of the economic distress related to employment emerges when the number of jobless Americans is combined with two other categories of workers: the underemployed (those who are working part time, for example, because they can’t find full-time work) and the so-called labor force reserve, workers who have abandoned their job searches but who would work if employment became available.
This total pool of underutilized labor has now risen above 24 million, according to researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That total will only grow in the coming months.
The Obama administration has more than enough on its plate at the moment, but before long it will likely have to consider a range of additional strategies, beyond the recently passed stimulus package, for putting jobless Americans to work.
A comparison of the number of people being thrown out of work in this recession with that of the severe recession of 1981-82 will indicate why. The peak unemployment rate was higher in that earlier recession than today’s 7.6 percent, largely because the last big wave of the baby-boom generation was entering the job market in the early ’80s. Those boomers who couldn’t find work were officially counted as unemployed.
What is different and more frightening about the current downturn is the number of people actually losing their jobs — being laid off or fired. That number is dramatically, dangerously higher.
The government uses two different surveys to gauge employment data. The household survey, based on telephone interviews, showed that job losses in the 13 months that followed the beginning of the 1981-82 recession reached 1.53 million. In the first 13 months of this recession, the number of jobs lost, according to the household survey, has been a staggering 4 million.
The payroll survey, which is based on employment records, showed job losses of 1.7 million in
the first 13 months of the earlier downturn compared with 3.5 million in the current recession.
Pick your poison. This is not the kind of downturn Americans are used to.
The ones who are being hit the hardest and will have the most difficult time recovering are America’s young workers. Nearly 2.2 million young people, ages 16 through 29, have already lost their jobs in this recession. This follows an already steep decline in employment opportunities for young workers over the past several years.
Good jobs were hard to find for most categories of workers during that period. One of the results has been that older men and women have been taking and holding onto jobs that in prior eras would have gone to young people.
“What we’ve seen over the past eight years, for young people under 30, is the largest age reversal with regard to jobs that we’ve ever had in our history,” said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies. “The younger you are, the more you got pushed out of this labor market.”
There were not enough jobs to go around before the recession took hold. So the young, the poor and the poorly educated were already suffering. Now that pool of suffering is rapidly expanding.
This has ominous long-term implications for the country. The economy cannot perform well with such a large cohort of young people condemned to marginal economic status.
Young men and women who remain unemployed for substantial periods of time find it very difficult to make up that ground. They lose the experience and training they would have gained by working. Even if they eventually find employment, they tend to lag behind their peers when it comes to wages, promotions and job security.
Moreover, as the economy worsens, even the college educated are feeling the crunch.
According to a report by researchers working with Mr. Sum: “While young college graduates have fared the best in maintaining some type of employment, a growing fraction of them are becoming mal-employed, holding jobs in occupations that do not require much schooling beyond high school, often displacing their less-educated peers.”
Employment problems have festered in the United States for decades. The economy will never be brought to a state of health until those problems are more thoughtfully and more directly engaged. This will become more and more clear with each passing month of this hideous recession.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) A Clean Fight
By TIMOTHY HSIA
Op-Ed Contributor
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28hsia.html/
BEFORE my Stryker squadron deployed to Iraq from Germany, the 500 of us cleaned up after ourselves. We spent a day removing every environmental trace of our training activities in the Bavarian heartland. Plastic and paper were sorted to comply with German recycling policies. Soil and plants contaminated by fuel leaks were dug up and placed in sealed bags. Depleted batteries were collected for proper disposal. We left our training grounds pristine.
This was America’s 21st-century military at work: soldiers are trained not only to battle insurgents but also to be good stewards of the environment. Sadly, during combat tours, we have forgotten the strict environmentally friendly procedures we practice in the United States or in host countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea.
On military bases in Iraq, plastic, paper, aerosol cans, Styrofoam plates, food waste, batteries, digital equipment and hygiene products fall under one category: waste. It is simply dumped at the edge of the base, then burned at night, irritating soldiers’ lungs. Untreated wastewater is also haphazardly disposed of and gradually finds its way into Iraq’s waterways, which can pose health risks for Americans on the base and Iraqis who live nearby.
It would be convenient to blame the chaos of a war zone for the military’s mismanagement of waste. But the issue is far more complex. Indeed, a major part of the problem is that the military has absolved itself of dealing with waste in Iraq and has contracted out the collection and disposal of it.
These companies — usually American firms that subcontract to foreign workers — operate free of regulation by either the Iraqi government or the United States military. Sometimes they simply remove waste to an abandoned field — out of sight, out of mind. Often, they use burn pits. Soldiers at a base in Balad have accused one contractor, KBR, of making them ill from burning toxic materials like aircraft fuel and arsenic, and medical waste, including amputated limbs. But in my experience Balad is not an isolated incident and waste mismanagement occurs on many bases.
All this trash has caught the eyes of enterprising Iraqis looking for scrap metal or reusable objects like discarded headphones and DVDs. When commodity prices increased, they resorted to picking up used ammunition brass as soon as soldiers left a practice firing range.
Although this inadvertent recycling might seem like a fine way to deal with trash, some of this material has gotten into the wrong hands and has been used to deadly effect against American and Iraqi soldiers. There have been accounts of insurgents dressing up in discarded uniforms and hiding explosive devices in abandoned equipment. Yet the Army’s counterinsurgency manual still gives sparse attention to the proper disposal of equipment and supplies, as well as other environmental concerns.
Waste is an overarching problem: our counterinsurgency policy of securing the populace and providing access to essential services can’t be separated from environmental considerations. It’s vital that the people we live among are getting clean water, that farmers are able to grow their crops, that communities aren’t buried under trash.
With President Obama’s planned drawdown of our military forces in Iraq by mid-2010, we need to ensure that our environmental legacy there is a positive one. But the security agreement between Washington and Baghdad contains hardly any details about protecting the environment. The United States is committed only to respecting Iraqi laws — a low bar because Iraq’s environmental agencies are still in their infancy. The United States military should take the lead by adopting — and requiring all contractors to adopt — American recycling practices.
In the last few years, the United States military has become a much more environmentally conscious organization. But these eco-friendly practices need to be applied every place where the military and civilian contractors operate, including Iraq. The military will not only protect the health and safety of American troops and local populations, but also leave behind a greener country.
Timothy Hsia is an Army infantry captain.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
6) Forced From Executive Pay to Hourly Wage
By MICHAEL LUO
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/us/01survival.html?hp
TEMPE, Ariz. — Mark Cooper started his work day on a recent morning cleaning the door handles of an office building with a rag, vigorously shaking out a rug at a back entrance and pushing a dust mop down a long hallway.
Nine months ago he lost his job as the security manager for the western United States for a Fortune 500 company, overseeing a budget of $1.2 million and earning about $70,000 a year. Now he is grateful for the $12 an hour he makes in what is known in unemployment circles as a “survival job” at a friend’s janitorial services company. But that does not make the work any easier.
“You’re fighting despair, discouragement, depression every day,” Mr. Cooper said.
Working five days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mr. Cooper is not counted by traditional measures as among the recession’s casualties at this point. But his tumble down the economic ladder is among the more disquieting and often hidden aspects of the downturn.
It is not clear how many professionals like Mr. Cooper have taken on these types of lower-paying jobs, which are themselves in short supply. Many are doing their best to hold out as long as possible on unemployment benefits and savings while still looking for work in their fields.
About 1.7 million people, however, were working part-time in January because they could not find full-time work, a 40 percent jump from December 2007, when the recession began, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And experts agree that as the economic downturn continues and as more people begin to exhaust their jobless benefits and other options, the situation Mr. Cooper is in will inevitably become more common.
Interviews with more than two dozen laid-off professionals across the country, including architects, former sales managers and executives who have taken on lower-paying, stop-gap jobs to help make ends meet, found that they were working for places like U.P.S., a Verizon Wireless call center and a liquor store. For many of the workers, the psychological adjustment was just as difficult as the financial one, with their sense of identity and self-worth upended.
“It has been like peeling back the layers of a bad onion,” said Ame Arlt, 53, who recently accepted a position as a customer-service representative at an online insurance-leads referral service in Franklin, Tenn., after 20 years of working in executive jobs. “With every layer you peel back, you discover something else about yourself. You have to make an adjustment.”
Some people had exhausted their jobless benefits, or were ineligible; others said it was impossible for them to live on their unemployment checks alone, or said it was a matter of pride, or sanity, that drove them to find a job, any job.
In just one illustration of the demand for low-wage work, a spokesman for U.P.S. said the company saw the number of applicants this last holiday season for jobs sorting and delivering packages almost triple to 1.4 million from the 500,000 it normally receives.
When Ms. Arlt applied for the job, she sent in a stripped-down résumé that hid her 20-year career at national media companies, during which she ascended to vice president of brand development at the On Command Video Corporation and was making $165,000 a year. She decided in 2001 to start her own business, opening an equestrian store and then founding a magazine devoted to the sport. But with the economy slowing, she was forced to shutter both businesses by June of last year.
After applying for more than 100 jobs, mostly director-level and above in marketing and branding, and getting just two interviews, Ms. Arlt said she realized last fall that she had to do something to “close the monthly financial hemorrhage.”
Her new job at HometownQuotes pays $10 to $15 an hour and has mostly entailed data entry. But even though she has parted ways with some friends because she is no longer in their social stratum, Ms. Arlt said she was glad she was no longer sitting at home, “thinking, ‘Who have I not heard from today?’ ”
Her new paycheck covers her mortgage but not her other living expenses. Recently, she cashed out what was left of her retirement portfolio, about $17,000.
“It has been the hardest thing in my life,” she said. “It has been harder than my divorce from my husband. It has really been even worse than the death of my mother.”
Nearly all of those interviewed said they considered their situations temporary and planned to resume their careers where they left off once the economy improves. But there are people like John Eller, 51, of Lee’s Summit, Mo., who offer a glimpse of how difficult it can be to bounce back.
Mr. Eller had been a senior director at Sprint, earning as much as $150,000 a year and overseeing 7,000 employees at 13 call centers, before being laid off in 2002 amid the economic contraction after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A year later, he found another job, at roughly half the pay, managing a call center in New Jersey. After he lost that job two years later in a downsizing, Mr. Eller found himself out of work for another year before landing a contract position running two call centers in Kansas and Illinois, earning close to six figures.
But after that ended a year later, he was unable to find work for several months. In July 2007, he took what he thought would be a temporary job for $10 an hour as a baker in a grocery store. He was laid off again last October.
Mr. Eller quickly landed a new survival job, working as a supervisor on the overnight shift for a contractor processing immigration applications for the federal government at a salary of about $34,000 a year. But with eight children and a wife to support, Mr. Eller said he was still “below poverty level.” The family has not been able to make mortgage payments in five months and has been on the brink of foreclosure.
“I’m still scratching and clawing and trying to work my way back,” he said.
In Mr. Cooper’s case, relying on unemployment checks was never a serious consideration. The maximum benefit that jobless people can collect in Arizona is $240 a week, among the lowest in the country — and much less than is required to cover the mortgage on the comfortable four-bedroom home in Glendale that he and his wife, Maggie Macias-Cooper, share.
Mrs. Macias-Cooper, who works as a personal trainer in a gym built in what used to be the couple’s three-car garage, has seen her client base shrink to 10 from about 50 over the last year.
In addition to giving Mr. Cooper a job as a janitor, his friend agreed to pay for the couple’s benefits through Cobra. Maintaining health care coverage was paramount for the family because Mrs. Macias-Cooper recently had breast cancer.
Some unemployed professionals said they decided not to seek even part-time work because it might interfere with their job searches. But Mr. Cooper rises every day at 4 a.m. and, after a time of prayer, devotes two hours to his job hunt on the computer. He prints out a detailed call list of prospective employers to take with him, squeezing in phone conversations during breaks throughout the day from his pickup truck, which he calls his “office.”
“There were times I broke down,” Mr. Cooper said. “I broke down thinking, ‘This is what I’ve become.’ ”
But Mrs. Macias-Cooper, who admitted that she was initially embarrassed about her husband’s new job, says she is now grateful.
“There is no shame,” said Mrs. Macias-Cooper, who grew teary during an interview at their home. “I am very proud of my husband that he will go to any lengths, do whatever it takes, to keep his family afloat, if it means mopping floors, cleaning urinals.”
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) Guess What Got Lost in the Loan Pool?
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01gret.html?ref=business
WE are all learning, to our deep distress, how the perpetual pursuit of profits drove so many of the bad decisions that financial institutions made during the mortgage mania.
But while investors tally the losses that were generated by loose lending so far, the impact of another lax practice is only beginning to be seen. That is the big banks’ minimalist approach to meeting legal requirements — bookkeeping matters, really — when pooling thousands of loans into securitization trusts.
Stated simply, the notes that underlie mortgages placed in securitization trusts must be assigned to those trusts soon after the firms create them. And any transfers of these notes must also be recorded.
But this seems not to have been a priority with many big banks. The result is that bankruptcy judges are finding that institutions claiming to hold the notes that back specific mortgages often cannot prove it.
On Feb. 11, a circuit court judge in Miami-Dade County in Florida set aside a judgment against Ana L. Fernandez, a borrower whose home had been foreclosed and repurchased on Jan. 21 by Chevy Chase Bank, the institution claiming to hold the note. But the bank had been unable to produce evidence that the original lender had assigned the note, which was in the amount of $225,000, to Chevy Chase.
With the sale set aside, Ms. Fernandez remains in the home. “We believe this loan was never assigned,” said Ray Garcia, the lawyer in Miami who represented the borrower. Now, he said, it is up to whoever can produce the underlying note to litigate the case. The statute of limitations on such a matter runs for five years, he said.
A spokeswoman for Capital One, which is in the process of acquiring Chevy Chase, did not return a phone call on Friday seeking comment.
Mr. Garcia has another case in which a borrower tried to sell his home but could not because the note underlying a $60,000 second mortgage cannot be found. The statute of limitations on the matter will expire in October, he said, and if the note holder has not come forward by then, the borrower will be free of his obligation on the second mortgage.
No one knows how many loans went into securitization trusts with defective documentation. But as messes go, this one has, ahem, potential. According to Inside Mortgage Finance, some eight million nonprime mortgages were put into securities pools in 2005 and 2006 and sold to investors. The value of these loans was $797 billion in 2005 and $815 billion in 2006.
If notes underlying even some of these mortgages were improperly assigned or lost, that will surely complicate pending legislation intended to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms for troubled borrowers. A so-called cram-down provision in the law would let judges reduce the size of a loan, forcing whoever holds the security interest in it to take a loss.
But if the holder of the note is in doubt, how can these loans be modified?
Bookkeeping is such a bore, especially when there are billions to be made shoveling loans into trusts like coal into the Titanic’s boilers. You can imagine the thought process: Assigning notes takes time and costs money, why bother? Who’s going to ask for proof of ownership of these notes anyhow?
But as the Fernandez case and others indicate, bankruptcy judges across the country are increasingly asking these pesky questions. Two judges in California — one in state court, another in federal court — issued temporary restraining orders last month stopping foreclosures because proper documentation was not produced by lenders or their representatives. And in another California case, a borrower’s lawyer was awarded $8,800 in attorney’s fees relating to costs spent litigating against a lender that could not prove it had the right to foreclose.
California cases are especially interesting because foreclosures in that state can be conducted without the oversight of a judge. Borrowers who do not have a lawyer representing them can be turned out of their homes in four months.
Samuel L. Bufford, a federal bankruptcy judge in Los Angeles since 1985, has overseen some 100,000 bankruptcy cases. He said that in previous years, he rarely asked for documentation in a foreclosure case but that problems encountered in mortgage securitizations have made him become more demanding.
In a recent case, Judge Bufford said, he asked a lender to produce the original of the note and it turned out to be different from the copy that had been previously submitted to the court. The original had been assigned to a bank that had then transferred it to Freddie Mac, the judge explained. “They had no clue what happened after that,” he said. “Now somebody’s got to go find that note.”
“My guess is it’s because in the secondary mortgage market they have been sloppy,” Judge Bufford added. “The people who put the deals together get paid for the deals, but they don’t get paid for the paperwork.”
A small but spirited group of consumer lawyers has argued for years that the process of pooling residential mortgages into securities was so haphazard that proper documentation of the loans was never made in many cases. Leading the brigade is April Charney, a foreclosure lawyer at Jacksonville Legal Aid in Florida; she now trains consumer lawyers around the country to litigate these cases.
Depending on the documentation defect, lawyers say, investors in the trust could try to force the institution that sold the loan to the trust to buy it back. Many of these institutions would be unable to do so, however, because they are defunct. In the meantime, when judges are not persuaded that the documentation is proper, troubled borrowers can remain in their homes even if they are delinquent.
THE woes brought on by sloppy bookkeeping in securitizations will be on the agenda at the American Bankruptcy Institute’s annual spring meeting on April 3. An article titled “Where’s the Note, Who’s the Holder,” co-written by Judge Bufford and R. Glen Ayers, a former federal bankruptcy judge in Texas, will be the basis of a discussion at the meeting.
Mr. Ayers, who is a lawyer at Langley & Banack in San Antonio, said he expects that these documentation problems will halt a lot of foreclosures. That will mean pain for investors who hold the securities. The problem for those who expect to receive the benefit of the note, Mr. Ayers said, is that they “may not be able to show to the judge they have a right to foreclose.”
“It’s a huge problem,” he added. “It’s going to be expensive, I don’t know how expensive, ultimately to the bondholders.”
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
No comments:
Post a Comment