Wells Fargo Offers "Ghetto Loans" To "Mud People"

[Telefrog]

Wells Fargo loan officers may have purposely targeted blacks and low-income neighborhoods (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/07baltimore.html) for subprime mortgages.

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

“We just went right after them,” said Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”


The New York Times, in a recent analysis of mortgage lending in New York City, found that black households making more than $68,000 a year were nearly five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as whites of similar or even lower incomes. (The disparity was greater for Wells Fargo borrowers, as 2 percent of whites in that income group hold subprime loans and 16.1 percent of blacks.)

“We’ve known that African-Americans and Latinos are getting subprime loans while whites of the same credit profile are getting the lower-cost loans,” said Eric Halperin, director of the Washington office of the Center for Responsible Lending. “The question has been why, and the gory details of this complaint may provide an answer.”


Stay classy, Wells Fargo!

[roboninja]

Luckily, racism is dead in our advanced 21st century society. Get over it, black people!

Do I really need the sarcasm colour here?

[DoctorFinger]

A lot of black people in this country are extremely distrustful of banks. This validates that lack of trust.

[J Arcane]

Holy fuck. Boy am I glad those cocksuckers don't have my money anymore. What a bunch of disgusting human beings. Hooray for the Lawful Evil society!

[Telefrog]

Yeah, there's really not much more I can say about this. It's pretty much one of the worst things a financial institution can do.

I will say that I'm thankful that we keep our money in a small lockbox buried under a fake rock in the field behind our house. I have tin cans tied to it, so if anyone digs up the gamblin' money, I'll hear them cans a janglin' and come runnin'.

[Ancalagon]

Yeah, there's really not much more I can say about this. It's pretty much one of the worst things a financial institution can do.

I will say that I'm thankful that we keep our money in a small lockbox buried under a fake rock in the field behind our house. I have tin cans tied to it, so if anyone digs up the gamblin' money, I'll hear them cans a janglin' and come runnin'.

So, if I were, hypothetically, to cut the string to the cans, I could, hypothetically, take all of your money? Where do you live again?

[Telefrog]

So, if I were, hypothetically, to cut the string to the cans, I could, hypothetically, take all of your money? Where do you live again?

Ya gots ta git past my dawgs, furst! :p

Seriously though, Wells Fargo can eat a dick.

[Inspector Fowler]

So I spend time in the car for work, and I try to keep things balanced. I listen to NPR for my hippie side, 850 KOA (more the sports show and the late night weirdos than the Rush bullshit) for my conservative side, and then there is: AM 1360, the American Freedom Network with shows like Patriot News. This satisfies my crazy side.

The crazy guys don't trust banks, and insist on all their savings in gold and silver. Some of them will sell you a book for cheaper if you send them a certain weight in silver instead of, as they call it, a "fraudulent Federal Reserve note".

Hearing shit like this WF story almost makes me think these guys are on to something...next time we buy a house maybe I'll try to offer the sellers a certain weight in gold or something.

[Telefrog]

The crazy guys don't trust banks, and insist on all their savings in gold and silver. Some of them will sell you a book for cheaper if you send them a certain weight in silver instead of, as they call it, a "fraudulent Federal Reserve note".

http://i39.tinypic.com/2rcya86.jpg

It's hilarious to me that the Liberty Dollar (http://www.libertydollar.org/) folks have a viable business. :p

[DoctorFinger]

Never bet against crazy.

[Ox]

There actually is a good reason to market subprime loans in poor black communities: it's just about the only form of credit they can get. The federal government under President Clinton aggressively encouraged banks to market these instruments in poor communities because it raised homeownership. Note also there's a distinct racial difference, even within the same income bracket, in accumulated wealth (and therefore creditworthiness). In the lowest quintile of income, white Americans have an average household net worth of $27,000. The average black household with the same income has a net worth of $50. No, I didn't forget a zero.

[Narradisall]

What Ox said.

You think it's just them doing it?

They target poor people, as they're desperate enough for the money and its easier to keep them in your pocket. In a general trend analysis black communities often have much lower income.

They wouldn't be doing business there if there wasn't a market.

[Ink Asylum]

Just so long as they don't bet the health of their companies on systemically risky loans.

....well crap.

[Vector]

I thought the govt encouraged this sort of practice and that's how we got into this whole housing crisis to begin with.

[Telefrog]

There actually is a good reason to market subprime loans in poor black communities: it's just about the only form of credit they can get. The federal government under President Clinton aggressively encouraged banks to market these instruments in poor communities because it raised homeownership. Note also there's a distinct racial difference, even within the same income bracket, in accumulated wealth (and therefore creditworthiness). In the lowest quintile of income, white Americans have an average household net worth of $27,000. The average black household with the same income has a net worth of $50. No, I didn't forget a zero.

I normally would agree, but the article mentioned that black people that qualified for and could've gotten better loans were pushed into taking subprime loans by Wells Fargo. (I realize that during the subprime boom everyone was pushed into taking the crap loans.) Coupled with the obviously racially prejudiced language used by the loan officers, it's tough for me to chalk this up to business as usual.

[Ink Asylum]

Government encouragement is no excuse for huge companies supposedly run by highly intelligent people to engage in self-destructive behavior.

[roboninja]

Note also there's a distinct racial difference, even within the same income bracket, in accumulated wealth (and therefore creditworthiness). In the lowest quintile of income, white Americans have an average household net worth of $27,000. The average black household with the same income has a net worth of $50. No, I didn't forget a zero.

Which even more strongly points to a deep-seated, inherent racist slant to our society.

[Vector]

Government encouragement is no excuse for huge companies supposedly run by highly intelligent people to engage in self-destructive behavior.

Ever heard of enron?

Successfull intelligent people are often successfull to begin with because they go for broke and have type A personalities. This sort of behavior isn't surprising.

[Vector]

Which even more strongly points to a deep-seated, inherent racist slant to our society.

No it doesn't. Simply pointing out a difference in wealth doesn't take into account why its there to begin with.

[roboninja]

No it doesn't. Simply pointing out a difference in wealth doesn't take into account why its there to begin with.

I never said Ox was racist for pointing it out. I am simply saying the reasons for this disparity have their origins in racist practices.

[Vector]

I never said Ox was racist for pointing it out. I am simply saying the reasons for this disparity have their origins in racist practices.

I'm sure the origins were racist in nature....but in 2009 you can't just look at the gap and say it's an indication of racism. There all sorts of factors including some that are entirely internal to the black community.

[Ink Asylum]

If you looked only at the situation in 2009 it's you can't completely blame racism, but african-americans and other minorities didn't end up in their current situation without heavy doses of racism throughout American history.

[torrefaction]

There actually is a good reason to market subprime loans in poor black communities: it's just about the only form of credit they can get. The federal government under President Clinton aggressively encouraged banks to market these instruments in poor communities because it raised homeownership. Note also there's a distinct racial difference, even within the same income bracket, in accumulated wealth (and therefore creditworthiness). In the lowest quintile of income, white Americans have an average household net worth of $27,000. The average black household with the same income has a net worth of $50. No, I didn't forget a zero.

This is why I place a good portion of blame of the current crisis on the Clinton administration.

[Ink Asylum]

There is blame to go around for politicians and administrations that pushed for more homeowners in poorer communities. However, there was a responsible way to do that and an irresponsible way. The banks and other financial institutions chose possibly the most irresponsible way to do so because it had the highest short term profits.

[torrefaction]

There is blame to go around for politicians and administrations that pushed for more homeowners in poorer communities. However, there was a responsible way to do that and an irresponsible way. The banks and other financial institutions chose possibly the most irresponsible way to do so because it had the highest short term profits.

Not sure I agree with this (Keep in mind, I believe the Bush administration bears a fair share of blame for keeping such low interest rates while they knew these ARM's were being marketed.)

But the instruments used for low-income families were the only ones that stood a chance of profits, period, not just short term profits. Certain companies clearly did this wrong, and over leveraged their assets in ridiculous ways. But in other ways, they had to, to keep in line with poorly written legislation.

[Ink Asylum]

I don't believe that, and don't see any convincing evidence for it. It's also not much of an excuse even if it were the case. Safely dealing with subrpime loans might have dinged the bottom line for these big companies, but they would have continued to flourish. They did not have to deal out as many extremely risky subprime loans as they did, and they certainly didn't have to overleverage them to absurd levels. That was all their doing, not the government's.

[rifter]

Ok, here is what I am curious about.

I am a white guy, that makes less than that $68k, they listed. Now, I have had two loans through Wells Fargo. The first one, they did push on me, was a sub-prime. BUT, it had a few strings tied to it. It was fixed for 2 years. It was also FREE to refinance within two years. The ENTIRE reason of that first loan, was to get my credit together, to get a MUCH better prime loan, and get out from under the sub-prime.

Taking into consideration of what Ox said, Making $68k, doesn't MEAN you have good credit. I know I didn't. That is why I went sub-prime. Now, I was vigilant in my spending, and as soon as I could, I dumped the old loan, for a new one. My credit jumped, and it worked very well.

I am more than just a little curious if any of these programs, were like the one I had been given. Now... calling them mud people... that is kind of just flat-out racism. As for my loan, I can totally understand calling it a ghetto loan.

[Ox]

I normally would agree, but the article mentioned that black people that qualified for and could've gotten better loans were pushed into taking subprime loans by Wells Fargo. (I realize that during the subprime boom everyone was pushed into taking the crap loans.) Coupled with the obviously racially prejudiced language used by the loan officers, it's tough for me to chalk this up to business as usual.
I'm not saying there weren't racists in Wells Fargo. I'm not even saying Wells Fargo didn't use racist stereotypes in designing and selling its loans. I'm saying that even a saintly bank would have done a lot of the same things. And frankly, who cares if my bank calls me a 'mud person' behind my back?

The article kind of plays fast and loose with who did what to whom. Take this:
Loan officers employed other methods to steer clients into subprime loans, according to the affidavits. Some officers told the underwriting department that their clients, even those with good credit scores, had not wanted to provide income documentation.

“By doing this, the loan flipped from prime to subprime,” Ms. Jacobson said. “But there was no need for that; many of these clients had W2 forms.”
Sure, maybe they would have qualified for a regular loan. And maybe not. And maybe a subprime loan was a lot quicker and easier than trying to find your old W2. A regular loan would probably have been the smarter choice, and if you believe a bank has to treat a customer like a child, the bank should have stopped the borrower from choosing a subprime loan if he didn't have to. But we should be clear and honest: we're saying we don't think poor people can make their own decisions.

Government encouragement is no excuse for huge companies supposedly run by highly intelligent people to engage in self-destructive behavior.
You're conflating two things here. Subprime lending is a fine practice for the bank, provided it's done in moderation. The problem was that (a) there was an unsustainably large amount of subprime lending, (b) there was a great deal of systemic risk because every institution was insured by every other institution, and (c) by all being exposed to a single aspect of the economy, a shock to that market would trigger a catastrophe. I'm not talking about the macro issues here, just trying to dispel the notion that "subprime" is equivalent to "predatory."

This is why I place a good portion of blame of the current crisis on the Clinton administration.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Clinton wanted to see poor people owning homes. Homeownership is associated with a lot of salutary social effects, from the building of wealth to a reduction in neighborhood crime. It's the poor who most desperately need the salutary effects associated with homeownership, and obviously it's the poor who have the toughest time securing credit. Pushing homeownership probably played a role in leading to the current crisis, but it seemed like a very good idea and maybe it still is. "Blame" isn't a word I'll use with regard to Clinton and the present issue. It implies a level of stupidity or cupidity that, in this instance at least, the Clinton Administration did not display.

I don't believe that, and don't see any convincing evidence for it. It's also not much of an excuse even if it were the case. Safely dealing with subrpime loans might have dinged the bottom line for these big companies, but they would have continued to flourish. They did not have to deal out as many extremely risky subprime loans as they did, and they certainly didn't have to overleverage them to absurd levels. That was all their doing, not the government's.
This is an interesting point, which highlights the problem with lending. In a typical market, supply and demand set the price and quantity of the good. As we all know, if the government sets a maximum price that's lower than what the market price would be, demand outstrips supply and you get rationing -- think Soviet bread lines.

Most of the time, Western governments are smart enough not to set obvious maximum prices because even average people can see what happens. But the rental price of money (i.e., the interest rate) has a hidden maximum price: by defaulting on the loan or declaring bankruptcy, the borrower can escape most or all of the terms of the loan. Obviously, as the interest rate (and therefore the carrying cost of the debt) rises, borrowers are more likely to default. So there's a secret maximum interest rate for each borrower, above which he'll default on the loan. What's worse, that maximum price fluctuates with the economy and can be hard to predict in the future. And if you try to pool these risks and insure them, you get... well, exactly what we're seeing now.

There are only two ways to deal with a maximum price. The first is rationing. That's what Ink proposes: some people get credit, some people do not. You can set up the Soviet bread line however you like and line people up by niceness, photogenics, or something else, but you still are going to have a bread line. Or you can get rid of the maximum price. I once (tongue-in-cheek) proposed to my economics professor that the government should permit lending contracts to be secured by the value of your organs. Can't pay your mortgage? The bank gets a kidney. If you have a second mortgage, both kidneys.

[J Arcane]

And frankly, who cares if my bank calls me a 'mud person' behind my back?

Call me strange, but I have a certain aversion to giving money to someone who treats me with utter contempt.

[Ink Asylum]

I don't believe I'm proposing rationing. First of all, by who? By the goverment deciding who gets a loan and who doesn't? Or by companies deciding not to loan money to poor people? Can you call the latter rationing?

If the latter is rationing, then we always had it and still do, but the bar was lower than it probably should have been. Although there are some surprising stories about people who definitely should not have gotten mortgages getting one anyway, it was never possible for absolutely anyone to do so. Businesses were not oligated to lend money to anyone who walked in off the street, nor did they do that on their own.

What I mostly object to is someone saying "If only the government hadn't pushed for lending to poor people we wouldn't be in this mess!" I call bullshit on that. There has been a gigantic bubble building for over a decade, fueled largely by overly inflated housing prices and the derivatives market. Subprime mortgages did not inflate that bubble, they just popped it. It had to pop eventually, and if government encouraged subprime mortgages hadn't been around to do so something else would have.

[Telefrog]

But we should be clear and honest: we're saying we don't think poor people can make their own decisions.

I'm pretty sure that's what Wells Fargo was "banking" on.

[alienmastermind]

Hey Arcane, have you ever called tech support for the cable company? I'm just saying, man, there are people who treat you with contempt behind your back at just about every location where a guy has to work for the money he gets and has to interact with other people. :)

The racism of saying 'mud people' is horrible, and awful, but how is Wells Fargo going to ever defend against that? You can't prove they're not racist. But the reporting here seems like muckraking that's all too common with the NY Times, being a proponent of 'dog-whistle racism' for a long time. I often will talk about right-wing sources as being biased, and the Times is often socially liberal, and will take things out of context to make opponents seem more demonic, especially in regards to race, sex, and gender identity. Banks also refer to deadbeats, and people who default, as shitheads. No lie.

As to the race/income level thing, I think that if you believe people need assistance from day one out of the womb to get ahead of past horrible racism, you don't believe in the innate freedom and strength of people in general.

I can only take from my own experience and from that of my famliy. We'd be considered whites by everyone who doesn't know our own history, but my father and mother were dirt ass poor when they had me right after being married in their teens.

But, after joining the military and working his ass off, my father made a life for his family. We almost never had the nicest things, but we were ALWAYS fed, and always had a roof over our heads. We started from 0 and made it, ostensibly, to a comfortable life, and once on my own, I did the same thing. I put myself through school, and gained everything I wanted in life, including home ownership. Being considered 'white', to whom could I turn for the blame that my family was poor? No one held down my family, so it would have to be individual faults or random circumstance that brought about my situation.

Which is what is the hardest part of the 'poverty' in this country. If I even postulate that the poor in this country are possibly there on their own accord, I'm called insensitive or a racist (in the case of African-Americans) by my more liberal friends. Yes, it's harder for children of poverty to succeed, but only a person controls their own will.

If a parent purchases televisions instead of paying bills, or purchases luxuries instead of paying bills, then right there is the issue, not the systemic and endemic racism that has existed in our country.

[Ox]

I don't believe I'm proposing rationing. First of all, by who? By the goverment deciding who gets a loan and who doesn't? Or by companies deciding not to loan money to poor people? Can you call the latter rationing?
That is how economists typically describe it, yes. Examples of rationing include stuff like people having to wait on long lines to pick up a new console on the first day of availability, rather than the price being high enough on the first day to exactly match the number of people who want to buy it with the number of units available. It's nongovernmental, but from an economic standpoint, it's called 'rationing.'

If the latter is rationing, then we always had it and still do
Oh sure.

What I mostly object to is someone saying "If only the government hadn't pushed for lending to poor people we wouldn't be in this mess!"
Okay. And if and when I say something like that, you can take me to task for it.

There has been a gigantic bubble building for over a decade, fueled largely by overly inflated housing prices and the derivatives market. Subprime mortgages did not inflate that bubble, they just popped it.
This is just obviously wrong. The bubble was created by growing demand for real estate. As we've discussed, the growth in subprime lending brought an entire population of people (poor people with poor credit) into the housing market as buyers who previously were not participants. How can you say that they "did not inflate that bubble", or that they "just popped it"? I don't blame the current crisis on the existence of subprime lending, nor do I begrudge the individual purchasers their own rational decisions. But you can't seriously suggest that (a) the problem was the housing bubble, and (b) the corresponding influx of new consumers into the market was unrelated to the bubble. There were other factors at work as well, but bringing in more consumers usually drives prices up, not down.

As to the race/income level thing, I think that if you believe people need assistance from day one out of the womb to get ahead of past horrible racism, you don't believe in the innate freedom and strength of people in general... If a parent purchases televisions instead of paying bills, or purchases luxuries instead of paying bills, then right there is the issue, not the systemic and endemic racism that has existed in our country.
I don't entirely disagree. But would you mind if I play devil's advocate for a moment and point out something? Your family did not have a lot of physical transferrable assets when you were born, so you conceive yourself to have been born in poverty. But you had tremendous accumulated human capital -- something which, although difficult to sell, is very important in getting ahead. For starters, your father believed that, if he worked hard, good things would happen. That faith was indispensible, and it came from your family's folklore traditions stretching back several generations. If your father had not learned from his father that hard work pays off, your life might be very different. Understandably, many African Americans for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not believe hard work brought them much reward. This folklore has, to an extent, been passed down even today, and it is disadvantageous for their descendants.

There are other factors as well. Your father was literate, capable of performing basic mathematical functions, and aware of the subtle social rules required of a successful man. When traveling abroad, I'm always struck by how easy it is for even a clever and interested person to inadvertantly put his foot in his mouth on a regular basis. The unwritten social code -- which covers everything from chewing with your mouth closed to knowing how to have a relaxed and respectful conversation with a superior -- is a lot more critical to success than we give it credit for. It's not something that's easy to teach explicitly, it's a matter of unconscious training from your parents from birth. When I'm stumbling to the bathroom at 3am and stub my toe, I mutter "I beg your pardon" to my chair. It's silly, but someone not raised with social grace can't simply read an Emily Post book and internalize it. And even in our meritocracy, the importance of the ingrained ability to get along with people in a relaxed and confident manner cannot be overestimated.

Then there's more obvious stuff. Your father was there when you were growing up. 69% of black kids are born out of wedlock.

[Ink Asylum]

This is just obviously wrong. The bubble was created by growing demand for real estate. As we've discussed, the growth in subprime lending brought an entire population of people (poor people with poor credit) into the housing market as buyers who previously were not participants. How can you say that they "did not inflate that bubble", or that they "just popped it"? I don't blame the current crisis on the existence of subprime lending, nor do I begrudge the individual purchasers their own rational decisions. But you can't seriously suggest that (a) the problem was the housing bubble, and (b) the corresponding influx of new consumers into the market was unrelated to the bubble. There were other factors at work as well, but bringing in more consumers usually drives prices up, not down.

It had an effect, but even absent their contribution the bubble would still have been huge and, combined with the derivatives market, just as big a danger to our economy. The sub-prime loans tested an inherently flawed system and revealed how broken it was. That's why I say if it weren't sub-prime loans it would have been something else. The moment we had an economic downturn large enough to cause a series of failed mortgages, or some other shock to the financial system, the same thing would have happened.

But you're right, Ox, I was far too dismissive of sub-prime loans in general when my main goal entering the discussion was to dispute the notion that government action is primarily responsible for causing this problem. I never implied you said so, it was Vector's post ("I thought the govt encouraged this sort of practice and that's how we got into this whole housing crisis to begin with."). The government may have encouraged sub-prime lending but not to the degree that the banks took it. Uncle Sam is not responsible for pushing any and all sub-prime loans, far from it.

[Ultima Thulian]

Looks it's time for mud...err, black people to stand up and fight. Their leader?

http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o110/ultima13/boss_nigger.jpg

Whitey is getting his shit ruined.

edit: Photobucket is really pissing me off. The image I posted was the poster for the black exploitation movie, "Boss Nigger". I guess it's just too much for ole photobucket, but half-naked 14 year old Japanese girls dressed like maids? No problem! Grr...

[Matthias]

I don't entirely disagree. But would you mind if I play devil's advocate for a moment and point out something? Your family did not have a lot of physical transferrable assets when you were born, so you conceive yourself to have been born in poverty. But you had tremendous accumulated human capital -- something which, although difficult to sell, is very important in getting ahead. For starters, your father believed that, if he worked hard, good things would happen. That faith was indispensible, and it came from your family's folklore traditions stretching back several generations. If your father had not learned from his father that hard work pays off, your life might be very different. Understandably, many African Americans for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not believe hard work brought them much reward. This folklore has, to an extent, been passed down even today, and it is disadvantageous for their descendants.

There are other factors as well. Your father was literate, capable of performing basic mathematical functions, and aware of the subtle social rules required of a successful man. When traveling abroad, I'm always struck by how easy it is for even a clever and interested person to inadvertantly put his foot in his mouth on a regular basis. The unwritten social code -- which covers everything from chewing with your mouth closed to knowing how to have a relaxed and respectful conversation with a superior -- is a lot more critical to success than we give it credit for. It's not something that's easy to teach explicitly, it's a matter of unconscious training from your parents from birth. When I'm stumbling to the bathroom at 3am and stub my toe, I mutter "I beg your pardon" to my chair. It's silly, but someone not raised with social grace can't simply read an Emily Post book and internalize it. And even in our meritocracy, the importance of the ingrained ability to get along with people in a relaxed and confident manner cannot be overestimated.

Then there's more obvious stuff. Your father was there when you were growing up. 69% of black kids are born out of wedlock.

I had a similar childhood to alienmastermind, and I have to disagree on your assumption about my familiy's inherited folklore. My dad grew up in Reno, with parents who put minimal effort into their careers and even less into raising their kids. His older siblings would routinely tie him up in the garage and leave him there for hours. The majority of his school teachers told him he would never amount to anything and should just give up on anything past deep-frying tacos at Taco John's. He did nearly every type of drug available at the time, and had slept with a number of girls before leaving middle school. He was removed from high school and placed in a punitive-style alternative school because he had no one motivating him to learn. After getting his GED, he enlisted in the Navy because he had nowhere else to turn. He was eventually removed from service because he failed to pass a drug test (he was still smoking pot at this point), and at the time the military had no mechanism for dragging people out of such things (I hear they do now).

Thankfully, a bit before getting discharged from the Navy, he met my eventual mother at a squadron picnic, and married her within three months. They had me two years later. At that point we were in poverty, on food stamps, on WIC, and living with my grandparents.

My dad figured out *at that point* that he needed to start providing for his family, and had to work his butt off to do so. Besides the tenacity this realization gave him, all he had to work with was a decent intelligence he didn't know he had, and enough muscle to do construction. He built houses, car washes, was a maid at a Holiday Inn, you name it. Eventually he started working at a small computer shop, and figured out that was his best opportunity to learn enough to get off of food stamps. He hated food stamps and hated relying on the government, and the second he made enough to afford rent and enough beans to keep us alive month to month, he got us off the program. He then spent the next 18 years of my life climbing his way up the the job ladder, taking jobs he knew little about at first, learning as much as he could and working like a dog to make up the difference. Eventually IBM noticed him and he got hired on as a contractor. It was a traveling job and he spent 3-5 days out of town EVERY week, often even through whole weekends. We hardly saw him for several years there. Since then he's been laid off multiple times, gone 3 months without any work whatsoever, lost our entire savings and gone into major debt to pay our taxes (that year he was a freelance contractor and had to withhold his own taxes... we had been keeping up with it fine, then spent all our money to go see his dying dad one last time). Now he's a network security specialist with Hewlett-Packard, and one of the most respected men within his field. He only has his GED and an associates from ITT (which was a horrible waste of time and money according to him... I think he might *still* have those loans, or has rolled them into something else), but has earned elite certifications only a handful of people worldwide can achieve. He's being trained to be a manager now, and really the main thing that's kept him back this long is that he doesn't have a bachelor's degree. He still travels quite a bit, but he's hoping to minimize that soon

Meanwhile, I don't qualify for ANY financial aid because he now makes a semi-decent salary and the FAFSA doesn't take history into account at all (or even debt for that matter). This is even though I'm actually hispanic (my mother is full-blooded Mexican-American). We're still fighting to make ends meet, and he still works like a dog to provide for us. he's the only one of his 4 siblings to make more than $40k a year, the only one who's had a successful marriage, the only one who's moved farther from home than Las Vegas, the only one who doesn't do drugs on a regular basis, and the only one who actually tries to take care of his widowed mother- we even moved her out to Houston because the other three siblings were basically ignoring her.

In summary, my dad had very little guidance or "folklore" passed down to him from his parents. He was never taught that hard work paid off, he was never even taught to chew with his mouth closed- he was raised by rednecks whose idea of respect was to be seen and not heard. They didn't even pass down faith or religion to him- they were technically Mormon, but rarely attended church and exhibited no aspects of any faith. At the age of 10 the pastor told my dad never to step foot in an LDS church again because he was playing hide-and-seek with friends after cub scouts and accidentally went into an elders' meeting. Yet now my dad is a respectful and respected businessman with a strong Christian faith (strong enough to accept my decision to follow Catholicism even as my mom freaks out about it) and a work ethic no one else in his family exhibits.

He may be a rare case, but I doubt that it's because he's some kind of anomaly, and rather that he somehow managed to pick up on a sense of pride that doesn't exist very much anymore- he simply would NOT stay on food stamps any longer than he had to, even though food stamps allowed us to buy steak and ship, and leaving the program doomed us to powdered milk and lots of beans and rice. I know there are LOTS of people who can't pull themselves up by the bootstraps the way my father did, but I also know there are plenty of people who could and lack the motivation because food stamps and a life of escapism behind a 50" TV they can't afford is easier than working too hard.

sorry for the rant...

[amberella]

This is why I place a good portion of blame of the current crisis on the Clinton administration.

Don't forget that the bill to which you're referring Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, was passed in the Senate by 53 Republicans and 1 Democrat. That Clinton signed it, well, yeah.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=106&session=1&vote=00105

Small addendum - I interviewed at Avenue Capital last week (which went really well but probably not well enough) and was pretty excited about that. That fund, which kind of looks like an Organization of Evil from their investment history, is where Chelsea Clinton works. Man, I hope it works out.

[torrefaction]

Don't forget that the bill to which you're referring Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, was passed in the Senate by 53 Republicans and 1 Democrat. That Clinton signed it, well, yeah.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=106&session=1&vote=00105

Small addendum - I interviewed at Avenue Capital last week (which went really well but probably not well enough) and was pretty excited about that. That fund, which kind of looks like an Organization of Evil from their investment history, is where Chelsea Clinton works. Man, I hope it works out.

Wasn't actually referring to the Glass-Steagall act. I've kind of backed off of that, since organizations worked around it anyway. I still think it offered some protection to the markets, but should've never been around in the first place. I was more referring to the loosening of restrictions of Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac in order to push the affordable housing for the poor policy. I think that whole thing just blew up in our face. It may not have been so bad w/o Bush's policies too. This is one big bipartisan fuckup.