Cottonmouth Press

Here’s an eye-opening web address:  http://change-congress.org:80/

Go there, click on your Congressional district on the map and see how much bundled money your representative is getting. What is bundled money? It’s money collected from different corporations and lobbyists by a political action committee, or PAC, that hides who the true giver is.

For example, large coal and methane producers might form a PAC, give it a name like “Energy PAC, ” throw in a half million each and VOILA!  That’s a nice gift to a candidate at election time.

Why should we care? Because it is a way that special interest groups and powerful companies can get to your elected Reps and hold influence over them. For instance, the next time a clean-air bill comes up for a vote, Energy PAC might send a friendly reminder to the lawmaker about that campaign gift.

Could you or I compete? Do people who live near smokestacks get to play golf with Dennis Hastert and Mitt Romney? That’s a negative.

In Alabama, Artur Davis, a Democrat representing Birmingham, got 57 percent of his campaign moola from PACs. That kinda surprised me because Artur is so progressive — at least he talks the talk. None of ’Bama’s Congressmen took zero PAC money. A few, like the GOP’s Mike Rogers took less than a third of their campaign dollars from PACs. So, obviously, we in Dixie have a long way to go before we wean our politicians from the Big Corporation teat.

There is a movement to change Congress and to take the zero-PAC-money pledge. Good luck, right?  Some of the good guys include: Clyde Malloy of Florida’s 7th; John Driscoll out of Montana’s 1st; Josh Lanier from Georgia’s 1st. Current Virginia candidate Sam Rasoul had this to say in his video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HFhGJnVLnE

Posted by Gita under National & Regional | No Comments »

One of the newest and most repugnant features of the mortgage foreclosure crisis is the rise of “foreclosure rescue” scams.  Imagine if you will a vulture picking at the bones of an almost-but-not-quite-dead rabbit.  Also imagine that the vulture tells everyone (including himself) that he’s “helping” the rabbit, and you get the picture.

As a fair housing attorney, I deal mostly with discrimination cases but have been peripherally involved in predatory lending issues and only somewhat aware of foreclosure rescue programs.  Then I answered the phone yesterday morning.

The caller was a guy whose employee (we’ll call her Jane) had fallen behind on payments on a home equity loan she took out a couple of years ago.  The payments had been manageable until she got a cancer diagnosis.  Foreclosure proceedings had begun, which in Tennessee means that the foreclosure had been advertised and a sale was to be scheduled.  The employer wanted to pay the lender almost $3,000 to bring the loan current and cancel the foreclosure.

That was all well and good, except that Jane had already signed a contract to sell her house to a real estate agent.  The agent was then going to find an investor with the understanding that the investor would allow Jane and her family to stay in the house as tenants, paying a rental rate roughly twice what her payment on the loan had been.

As for the sale itself, Jane had bought the house for about $90,000 cash a few years ago, but the agent was only going to give her about $33,000.  Of that, she would get $4,000 in cash (that was to help her pay the rent, the agent explained to me).  The rest would go to pay off her home equity loan.

 But was Jane out in the cold?  No!  Not only would she get to live in the house as a tenant, she’d have two years to re-purchase the house.  At what price, you ask?  Well, at the rock-bottom price of $128,000!  What a deal!  The agent helpfully explained that the house had a current tax assessment of $106,000, so $128,000 in two years was perfectly fair.  He was unable to explain how giving her $33K now and charging her $128K later could both be defensible.  One or the other, maybe, but not both.

Obviously we had to get her out of this deal.  She and her husband had signed a document granting power of attorney to an employee of the title company that was working the deal, so they could have closed the loan without her.  Obviously, the first thing I and my fellow attorney did was revoke the power of attorney so that the closing couldn’t go forward.  (It was a close call - the closing could have happened on the 13th but for a cloud on the title.)

At this point, Jane can choose not to go to the closing, which has been rescheduled to the end of the month.  The agent can then sue her for damages or to force her to go through with the sale.  He won’t dare, though, because then the utter unconsionability of the contract would come to light, along with the fact that about 75% of the contract is illegible.  Below is a thumbnail to a small excerpt of the contract.  Seriously, if you can figure out what it says, let me know, okay?

When I spoke with the agent earlier today, my question to him was this: “If your mother or your sister were offered this deal, would you recommend that she take it?”  He didn’t answer other than to mouth some words about “it depends on the situation.”

I also have a question for the title company’s attorney, who told me yesterday that he represents both parties in the transaction: How can one attorney represent two parties knowing that one is so flamboyantly screwing the other?  How is that even remotely consistent with the ethics rules he and I both are supposed to follow?

The House has passed a far less than satisfactory bill on predatory lending.  But eventually we are going to have to deal with these rescue scams.  It’s been my experience that no matter how much education you do on issues like this, it is no match for those clever souls who feed off the misery of others.

For further reading:  NCLC’s Dreams Foreclosed: The Rampant Theft of Americans’ Homes Through Equity-Stripping Foreclosure ‘Rescue’ Scams,” June 2005

Things like this will, I suppose, keep us busy until February, when my agency will probably close for the most part unless our appeal of our HUD grant score goes through.  Non-profit work rocks!

Posted by Tracey under National & Regional | No Comments »

In Alabama, Daniel Lee Siebert, 53, is facing the death penalty for strangling two women and two young boys in 1986. He was scheduled to be put to death yesterday, Oct. 25. But a court has intervened, and he’s alive on death row where he’s been for more than 20 years.
Siebert is dying of pancreatic cancer. His life expectancy is a month, give or take.
Alabama’s Gov. Bob Riley had refused to stay the execution, saying that the fact of Siebert’s terminal cancer is irrelevant. “To not go ahead with the execution (by lethal injection) would mean we had commuted his sentence to life in prison,” Gov. Riley said.It took me a while for that logic to sink in. It had to permeate several layers of brain cells, the outer layer of which is sternly guarded by my bullshit alarm. Then Riley’s sentence was parsed by my left brain, then handed off to my cerebellum which, in its animal memory, stores the same type of reasoning in a primitive cell mass called the POLITICO-FECALIS-MEDIATORUS.

“Ohhhh! I understand,” my animal brain relayed back. “What he means is, ‘We ain’t gonna let no stinkin’ cancer trump our right to snuff him.’”

Daniel Siebert committed a heinous crime 21 years ago when he killed two children and their mom and neighbor. He is no one we need feel sorry for. (His death row drawings are highly pornographic, by the way,  and are for sale.)
The fact that he is still alive is due to a Kentucky case about the nature of lethal injection, on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court. And until THAT case is decided, Siebert’s execution has been stayed by a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Alabama’s attorney general, Troy King,  and the Goober are pissed off at that. They want to shoot the death cocktail into Siebert’s cancer-ridden body pronto. They say that, by the time the Kentucky case is decided, Siebert will be dead.

Let me reiterate: Siebert will be dead before they have a chance to make him dead.

This is not a blog about the correctness of the death penalty, one way or another. It is about the pigheadedness of politicians who —- what? Want to give the victims’ families closure?
Pancreatic cancer will do that.
Want to teach Siebert a lesson? I think that dying of cancer in prison is doing that.  After all, how much painkiller do you think a convicted murderer with a terminal illness gets? Less than you and I, be sure of that.

No, I think this case just demonstrates how the death penalty plays out politically, at least in Dixie. It is about seeming to be tough and full of righteous indignation, despite the facts of a situation. It is about seeming punitive, at least publicly, because that is what the politicos think the public expects from them.
But I believe if you polled 100 ordinary Alabamians right now, better than 90 of them would say, “Aw, hell, let the man die his natural death. It ain’t like he’s gonna live to see the Super Bowl.”

That’s Alabama logic. And I can’t argue with it. Let it lay.

Posted by Gita under Alabama & Regional | 3 Comments »

As some of you may know about me, I have deep family ties in Jena, La.  Both my parents were born and raised there, and I still have a lot of relatives there.  I am white, and I am appalled at the conduct of the powers that be in perpetuating a dual system of justice in Jena.  As you can imagine, I’m Googling the news for Jena every day.

Reed Walters, the Distric Attorney of LaSalle Parish, La., has an op-ed that just appeared in the New York Times online for publication in tomorrow’s paper.  In it he attempts to explain the decisions he’s made as a prosecutor in the Jena 6 case.

While some who are inclined to agree with him might find his op-ed an articulate and convincing self-defense, its omissions are glaring.

Here are a few excerpts from Walters’ op-ed:

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But that’s not what happened at Jena High School.

Fine, Mr. Walters, but that doesn’t explain why they were first charged with attempted second-degree murder.  The blatant overcharging of these kids is a huge part of what set this whole thing off.  That you subsequently came to your senses and found slightly more appropriate charges is too little, too late.

Now, about those nooses:

I cannot overemphasize how abhorrent and stupid I find the placing of the nooses on the schoolyard tree in late August 2006. If those who committed that act considered it a prank, their sense of humor is seriously distorted. It was mean-spirited and deserves the condemnation of all decent people.

But it broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none.

Point taken.  But the fact is that these morons were barely punished at ALL.  Maybe that’s not your fault, but it’s part of the overall narrative here.

And I’ll bet the Louisiana criminal code has something to say about pulling a shotgun with a pistol grip at a convenience store, yet the white dude who did that wasn’t prosecuted - hell, he wasn’t even arrested.  Instead, the kids he pulled the gun on were charged with second-degree battery, assault, disturbing the peace and theft of the weapon after wrestling it away from him in self-defense.  Why?  Because the white guy felt “threatened.”

And what about Justin Sloan, the guy who attacked one of the black students with a bottle at a party?  Charged with simple battery and given probation.

Yes, “Free the Jena 6″ has become a rallying cry around this whole sorry mess, but I’m not sure even the protesters believe the six should get out of jail free if they were involved in the attack on Justin Barker.

It’s just that so many others ought to be going to jail as well.

Mr. Walters, I certainly hope that there are enough fair-minded people in Jena that they will find someone to challenge you in the next election, someone who won’t bring further shame on Jena.  I can only hope you’re feeling that fear and that’s why you’ve finally decided to attempt to explain yourself.

But it’s too late for that.  It’s time for you to find another line of work.

Posted by Tracey under National & Regional | No Comments »

My parents were born and raised in Jena, La.  Until very recently, my grandmother lived there (she now lives near my parents in another state), and I still have aunts, uncles and cousins in Jena.  I have spent lots of time in Jena over my 41 years, most of them as a child.  I even lived there and attended middle school for a short time in the late 70s while my family was moving.  So the Jena 6 situation has really hit home for me and my family.

Most of my family are pretty apolitical - I’m the raging lefty in the family.  A phone call from my mother today has gotten me concerned.  From what she said, there’s starting to be a bit of a panic in Jena over the bus rides planned for Mychel Bell’s court hearing.  Jena has barely over 3,000 people, and my mother said that 40,000 people are expected to come into town for the rally.  I can’t vouch for that figure, but I know that bus rides are being organized from all over the country (including here in Nashville) and that the Jena Six has become quite the cause celebre on African-American talk radio (as well it should).

Adding to the fear is that anywhere African-Americans gather to support their own, the KKK will also put together a contingent, and my mother said the Klan is planning to rally there too.  I haven’t seen this reported online anywhere, and I hope it’s not true.

But if it IS true, this little town, crappy as it is, is a powder keg, because no matter how peaceful everyone intends to be, all it takes is one or two loose cannons to get something very tragic started.  A town the size of Jena simply can’t sustain that kind of crowd to start with, let alone a clash between KKK members and pro-civil-rights protestors.  (Of course, most white people in Jena, especially the older ones, are laying all of this at the feet of the “outside (black) agitators” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.)

My mother is begging her older sister to leave town and stay with my family for a few days, but my aunt won’t budge.  I told my mother I didn’t expect people to rampage the town and burn down homes, but the town is so tiny (as a kid, I would routinely ride my bike from one end of it to the other) that it wouldn’t take much for nastiness near the courthouse or in the city park to spill into neighborhoods.

If there IS serious civil unrest, blame for it will lie at the feet of one person - District Attorney Reed Walters.  None of us can look inside his heart and know whether he’s a racist.  But we can all look at his actions and conclude that he is exceedingly stupid, perhaps even more stupid than Mike Nifong in North Carolina.  From his threats to the students to “end your life with the stroke of a pen,” to his egregious overcharging of the students, to his failure to similarly charge whites who committed similar crimes, to his failure or refusal to explain himself, he has created a vacuum of common sense that has allowed accusations of racism to take hold.  Racist or not, he’s so arbitary as to have the appearance of a racist.

This is Jena’s loss of innocence, its not-so-peaceful introduction to the 21st century where most of the rest of us live.  Jena has always been so insular, so small, so white and so segregated that it has been allowed to wallow in its pre-1960 mindset for all this time.  Things like this don’t happen in Jena, because everyone knows their place, or at least they USED to.  (According to my grandmother, the problem is that these kids are Katrina evacuees.  She didn’t use the word “uppity,” but you can read between the lines).

I am hoping against hope that things can remain peaceful in Jena and that justice will somehow be done.  I also hope that Jena will emerge from this a town in which its few African-American residents will no longer be content to live “over in the Quarters” if they don’t want to or be subjected to a dual system of justice.

I hope for the sake of my mother and the rest of my family that Jena comes out of this a better place.

Posted by Tracey under Regional | 1 Comment »

Posted by Gita under National & Regional | No Comments »

Don’t believe the Hollywood version of military training in America, y’all.  Recruits in the movies always break under the fierce regimen of boot camp and become respectful, highly disciplined team players. They’d do anything for the guys in their unit because, by golly, they’re all in it together.

In Bush’s all-volunteer army, it’s a different script. A CBS News special report and an article in Stars and Stripes shed light on the rise of gang activity and crime in the military. The evidence comes from an FBI investigation into gang-related violence inside the army and Marines. The FBI study calls gang allegiances “a threat to law enforcement and national security.”

Marines who form gangs that exclude other Marines? What about Semper Fi ?

Chris Grey, chief of public affairs for Army CID, said most of those cases involved misdemeanors. “It’s important to keep the numbers in perspective,” Grey said.

But among the cases are the murder of a soldier during a fight outside a nightclub at Fort Campbell,  a murder charge against a soldier related to a robbery near Fort Bragg, a rape by a soldier at Camp Taji, Iraq, and five drug possession and dealing cases.

“It’s obvious that many of these people do not give up their gang affiliations,” said Hunter Glass, a retired police detective in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the home of Ft. Bragg and the 82nd Airborne. He has been keeping watch on gang activity at the base and across the military.

Gang activity clues like graffiti are appearing in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. The soldier who took photos of the graffiti for CBS News said that he’s been warned he’s a dead man if he ever returns to Iraq.

One army official explains the phenomenon like this: “We represent America – our demographics are the same – so the same problems that America contends with we often times contend with,” said Colonel Gene Smith of the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal.

I thought that military training was supposed to make our armed forces BETTER than the streets of America. I  believed that white militia gangs and black inner city gangs would, once in the same uniform, link hands to fight the common enemy and take orders from a common superior officer.

It is my opinion that this presidency is shabby and full of lies. Why should Bush’s military be any different?

The president and his veepee are members of a gang: Big Oil’s Boys. Or Haliburton’s Heroes.
Why should his soldiers be any different?
If the only person a green, young recruit trusts is another from the same hometown or racial background, he’ll rely first on his gang.

That doesn’t make it right.
Nothing about this war is right.
Goodbye, Semper Fi.

Posted by Gita under National & Regional | No Comments »

We are now officially at that most interesting stage of American politics I like to call the Tabula Rasa Game — that’s Latin for “blank slate.” Gather ’round and hear my tale.

Across the nation, and most recently here in Alabama,  former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee is the leading candidate for president among folks  likely to vote in the Republican primary next year. BUT: Thompson has not yet declared himself to be a runner and we don’t know what he stands for.

This whole scenario is straight out of the wonderful Peter Sellers-Shirley MacLaine movie, “Being There.” If you recall, Sellers played Chance the gardener, an autistic man whom no one really knew. Chance had never left the Washington D.C. estate where he lived and worked until his employer died, and then he was put out on the street.  His simple, TV-informed utterances were mistaken for profundity by all he met. All he had to do was be there, and people projected onto him all their hopes and needs. They started calling him Chauncey Gardener, as if that was his full name. Men and women wanted him to run for president. Meanwhile he was nearly mute with autism, with no education and no ambition other than to be a gardener.

So: The three-ton elephant in the room right now is that Fred Thompson, 64, a former TV actor and a senator from 1994-2003, is playing the Tabula Rasa game like nobody’s business. As long as he hangs back and says fairly little, we can project onto him all kinds of sterling qualities. Wisdom. Seniority. Strength and affability.  

Meanwhile, others are speaking for him and about him. Mike Hubbard, chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, called Thompson “a true conservative”  and “a Southerner who people can relate to and like.”

In this recent July poll, 34 percent of GOP voters said they would cast ballots for Thompson. 

WOW. That’s more than Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and even the 80s wunderkind, Newt Gingrich, all of whom have track records and whose views we know.

Support for Thompson indicates that the race for the Republican nomination in Alabama is wide open, said Brad Moody, a professor of political science at Auburn University, Montgomery. Yes, it is, and I would add to the comments of the learned political scientist my unscientific, political, personal observation.

Lots of Americans are still children at heart, and we want a strong but loving Daddy to make the bad things go away. The victor in this election will be the one who best projects a Gary Cooper-like image onto the blank screen of our hopes.

Strong and silent wins the race.

Posted by Gita under Alabama & National & Regional | No Comments »

This morning, our esteemed pretzeldent made an appearance in Nashville to tour a bakery and to make a speech at the Opryland Hotel.  My office is not even a quarter of a mile away, and I could have walked down to the corner to join the protesters waving signs for the motorcade as it passed by.

But I didn’t.  Instead, I was feverishly drafting a three-page letter to another attorney on behalf of one of my clients, a gentleman with a mental disability who’s about to be evicted from the subsidized apartment complex where he’s lived for almost 30 years.

In addition to the obvious trauma my client would face having to find a new place to live, and the adjustment difficulties all his friends and family say he will have, I had a further concern - there is damn little housing for people who are surviving on Social Security disability.  Every subsidized development he’s visited has told him he’ll be facing a waiting list of up to six months.  That means he’ll be effectively homeless for a period of time, but he’s one of the lucky ones whose family will find him some room on the couch if worse comes to worst.

You will be shocked - shocked! - to learn that housing for the poorest among us has gotten significantly harder to obtain since GWB took office.  Housing assistance has declined as a percentage of non-defense discretionary spending during Bush’s two terms in office from 8.8 percent in 2001 to 7.7 percent in 2006.  It was 10 percent in 2006. (Trying to remember who was in office then… hmm…)

First, they cut Section 8 assistance to local public housing authorities (PHAs).  In case you’re not familiar with Section 8, the voucher program provides direct rental assistance to poor families.  A typical family with a Section 8 voucher pays about 30 percent of its adjusted gross income to the landlord, with the federally funded voucher making up the rest.

But not only did cuts to the program mean that families would have to pay a larger share of their housing costs, it also meant fewer vouchers overall.  Not only are there waiting lists for vouchers in Nashville and throughout the state, but those waiting lists are so long that they’re closed to new families.  (There is hope for Section 8 now that Dems are in charge, but Bush will probably veto it.)

According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) Tennessee for a two-bedroom apartment is $604 . In order to afford this level of rent and utilities, without paying more than 30% of income on housing (in other words, without becoming what we call “cost-burdened”), a household must earn $2,012 monthly or $24,149 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of $11.61.

My client gets a check of about $400 a month, significantly less than even minimum wage.  In fact, the NLIHC says, for the first time since its research began in 1998, “the national average rent for a studio apartment exceeds the average Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payment.”  Get that?  Even if my client could pay his WHOLE check for rent (eating is overrated), he probably couldn’t find anything.

And I know that Tennessee is not even the worst of it - compared to a lot of states with more large urban areas, Tennessee’s housing costs are probably positively reasonable.

What’s that?  You’re asking why he can’t just apply for public housing?  Great question!

Nashville is one of the many cities that have embarked upon the housing experiment called “Hope VI.”  To advocates, Hope VI means replacing blighted public housing with scattered-site development that fosters more healthy communities.  To me, it means a loss of about half the public housing units in Nashville and waiting lists of three months were there were none previously.  There is no one-to-one replacement requirement under Hope VI, which is why Nashville could get away with this.  No one knows what happened to the many, many people displaced when their housing developments were torn down.  Some got Section 8 vouchers.  Some got transferred to other developments.  Some got to move back in.

And some, no doubt, ended up sleeping down at Riverfront Park.  But hey, that’s not our problem, and isn’t Sam Levy Homes beautiful now?  Look at those bungalows!

The only good housing decision the Bush administration has made so far is to zero out Hope VI, although it’s probably not for the reasons I have articulated so far.

And then there’s the HUD program that funds my agency and my job, the budget for which has remained essentially flat for many, many years.  We didn’t get a grant in 2006, and if we don’t get one in 2007, we’re toast.  I’m not sure who will write that three-page letter for my client when I’m managing a McDonald’s somewhere.  I’m sure something will get worked out.

Posted by Tracey under National & Regional | 3 Comments »

Political cartoonist Doug Marlette, a hero of mine, died this week in a car crash on a wet Mississippi road. The North Carolina native graced the editorial pages of many Southern newspapers during his too-short 57 years of life. His 1988 Pulitzer prize was earned at the Charlotte Observer and the Atlanta Constitution. He gored many political oxen, equally I should add, on both sides of the aisle. Religious hypocrisy was a favorite target of his.

The first cartoon below is a favorite of mine.

The next cartoon earned him hundreds of death threats from Muslims when it was published in 2002 in the Tallahassee Democrat.

 Marlette also drew the ire of North Carolina’s former segregationist senator Jesse Helms, and he angered Christian fundamentalists for his Pulitzer-winning satirical ‘toons about fallen TV preacher Jim Bakker.

God rest you, Doug. I’ll miss you huge.

Posted by Gita under National & Regional | No Comments »