How Far Is Your Family From Homelessness? (AlterNet)

[OneGrassRoot]

This is an especially good piece, with excellent links, imho.


Much can be said about the spot-on documentary “ Two American Families” which aired recently on PBS. My dream: a mandatory screening for policymakers across the land so they could witness the deterioration of the American Dream. At the very least, I urge you to watch it.

Of particular value and interest is the rare look at the same families, Terry and Tony Neumann, Jackie and Claude Stanley, and their children over a period of 22 years. It’s a treasure trove of examples of what happens when poverty seeps in like water in the basement, gradually undermining the family foundation.

Milwaukee, a perfect choice—mid-sized All American City. Not Detroit, Los Angeles or New York. Middle-of-the-road Milwaukee, home of “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” Old Milwaukee Beer, the proud city of brewskies, brats and once a bushel of union wage jobs.

The subject of abject poverty and its incessant side effects rarely gets a thorough, personal treatment. Watching the steady deterioration of the Stanley and Neumann families as their economic security dwindled was, to those of us who’ve worked in this “field” for too long, painfully predictable but worth the agony because it validated the true cost of our cheapskate economy where average wages have plunged since 1973.

FULL POST: http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/diane-nilan/how-far-your-family-homelessness#

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Anyone paying on a mortgage is one step from homelessness if PATH bill passes.

House Republican bill would make all the illegal mortgage tricks ...legal.

This bill would create a MERS like entity that pre-empts all state/Federal laws on foreclosure.
"States have always controlled property law, and this Republican bill would wrest away that state control,
putting it not in the hands of the federal government, but a private entity. "

And it is being introduced by Jeb Hensarling, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee.
Hensarling has already gotten into trouble this year for taking a ski vacation/fundraiser with Wall Street lobbyists, including an official from the American Securitization Forum, just six weeks after getting the Financial Services Committee gavel.
Financial interests donated over $1 million to Hensarling in the last election cycle.
more here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023263052

[toby jo]

2. Poverty is a soul-sucker, nothing gentle about it.

[Hestia]

3. What got me is, the one story of the woman who divorced and finely had to turn the house

over for foreclosure - she had paid on her mortgage for 24 years and still owed $96,000! WTFH? How? Why is the balance still so much? She & the film crew went back to the house and the couple got it in a foreclosure sale for $36k (ish). She stated why can't she get the discount after paying all those years? Why does she have to leave? She's more than paid for that house.

It's a very compelling documentary. Both families did everything right, played by the "rules," and still they get screwed over. The only thing that would have been best is for them to move back in the 1980s for work, but who wants to do that? It's the latch key kids you really feel for, in their struggle for money, both parents were gone when the kids got home from school (of course, it seems there weren't any after school programs) and pretty much raised themselves - a lot of times the parents would be gone in the morning and they had to get themselves ready. All of the kids had diminished expectations. Oh so very freakin' sad!