bank of america

Mackinac Island is Cool. Countrywide is Not.

I had BIG PLANS last week! And BIG news that I was going to report from a BIG rocking chair on the porch of the Island House hotel, over looking BIG MACK and Lake Huron. But my plans to gloat over the BIG burn suffered by BIG banks that played a BIG hand in the housing crisis were thwarted. By LITTLE 4th graders. BIG bummer.

As it turned out, chaperoning the school trip to Mackinac Island pretty much means that no needs of your own will be met as you scurry to make sure that the children in your charge are making curfew, eating properly, maintaining some level of hygeine, attending all the mandatory activities, finding the items on the scavenger hunt, and not falling ass over tea cup over handle bars riding a bike down the steep hill clearly marked “bike riding prohibited, too dangerous, must walk.”

Can I say “ass over teacup here?” It’s a saying, I’m not really cursing. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, let’s just say, there was no time or energy to rock on the porch, blogging & sipping iced tea like I imagined there would be. BUT after a day of recovery from 3 days of bike riding up hill, a night of $3 margaritas at Bar Louie, and by chance catching Comedy Central’s bleeped out presentation of IDIOCRACY – I am reminded and jazzed all over again by the goings on with the mortgage artists formerly known as COUNTRYWIDE.

Let me start by saying that Countrywide Home Lending has always cheezed me, and I didn’t always even know why.  Every time that dude came on running his mouth in the commercials, making all those promises I literally yelled at the TV, such is how severly the whole operation rubbed me the wrong way. Things didn’t add up, but it was impossible to convince buyers of that fact once Countrywide got a hold of them. When I heard that Countrywide was facing bankruptcy a few years back, I wasn’t surprised at all. I didn’t really think “Aha!” I wasn’t bitter yet at that point and out for blood. We didn’t really know what hit us yet… or that we had even been hit really. So Bank of America scooped them up and this seemed like a good thing. SINCE THEN plenty of crap has hit the fan. In the name of our own good, we’ve been forced to bail out those whose blood we sought, the very heads we wanted served up on a silver platter. Or maybe a paper plate would be more fitting, economy considered. No need to rehash the whole ugly last few years but I think we can all agree that have sat back, feeling helpless, as BIG business got away with it all. Those fools are still taking lavish trips and ridiculous bonuses. Us fools are still losing our homes.

WELL! The fiddler is finally getting paid – to the tune of $108,000,000! Woohoo! 

Now this is different than the $600,000,000 that Bank of America settled to pay out to investors a while back. This latest stipend goes right to “us the people.” Those of us that got directly burned by Countrywide, that is. I. LOVE. THIS. Here’s why.

I’m not vengeful. I won’t see any of this money, nor will anyone that I know, that I know of.  This 108m will not fix the economy, nor likely the problems of the people receiving it since it is probably only based on the money snatched from them and not the damages they suffered over the years since.  But it does send a message and regardless of who plugs their ears, everyone up and down MAINSTREET (haven’t heard that in a while have we?) can sigh a little “I told you so” and raise their heads up a bit thanks to FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz.

Liebowitz announced that Countrywide mortgage DECEIVED its customers, behaved callously and charged astronomical and illegal fees to consumers already in trouble – well this was not news to us of course, but it sure is satisfying to hear it verified by the Federal Trade Commission.

Oh sure there were silly home buyers who over bought and deliberately set out to get all they could, but most were just excited to be home owners. And there are those who will continue to try and lay blame for the housing crisis on that scenario, but the fact is, banks like Countrywide intentionally and calculatedly made a ton of money giving out risky loans, then double dipped and made even more when the loans went bad. THEN said it was our own fault for being stupid. Well, we may have been the first to go down, but with lawsuits on banks continuing to be won, and bank BIG wigs facing their days in court, it’s good to see justice being served as the consequences of the collected stupidity are reaching out to all who had a hand in this mess.

Come to think of it, we’re all really ass over teacup in this together right now aren’t we?