If your name is Nicklaus Skaggs of Vacaville California, you are one of tens of thousands of homeowners who are walking away from your homes and their mortgage burdens.
Reported the San Francisco Chronicle:
“As their home values tumble and their mortgages rise, these "walk away” homeowners" decide to cede their houses to their lenders.
"It's throwing good money away after bad" to pay an escalating mortgage on a home that's plunging in value, said Army Sgt. 1st Class Nicklaus Skaggs.. He and his wife, Tishara, stopped paying their mortgage in February. They signed up with a new company called You Walk Away to help guide them through the multi-month foreclosure process.”
Other homeowners are so angry that they trashing or burning their own homes. Still others are moving into tent cities springing up near Los Angeles. It took a British media outlet, the BBC, to report on that.
Has our media prepared us for this disaster? Yes, there are headlines now since these developments can’t be ignored. But where were the TV networks and the press when all these practices which we now hear denounced were first taking place and building steam?
Where were the warnings and the outcry against the engineered dropping of the dollar and the likelihood that the interest rate cuts would drive up prices and lead to the stagflation we are now experiencing. Unfortunately this was not a celebrity sex scandal. Those worries were buried.
The business press told us about the ups and downs of the market, not how the underlying debt burden and all the subcrime game playing could destroy our economy. Concludes Dean Starkman in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Today, as the credit crisis unravels, the business press can be fairly blamed for inattentiveness to the growing strains on middle-income borrowers. Maybe that’s why so many middle-income people don’t read it.”
If they had, they would have seen the chorus of complementary coverage of Alan Greenspan who was lionized as a genius. Now critics point to how his policies created the housing bubble. Today, he says the economy is at its “worst points since WW2.” One blogger dismisses him as “Mr. Obvious.”
I met him—and have less amusing words to describe him with.
But what are we seeing in the rest of the press and TV media? More and more ads selling us deceptive mortgages and credit cards. The media is always more about selling (and buying) than telling the truth. Their failure as watchdogs helped bring about this economic failure not to mention the Iraq War now marking its fifth year. And they make money on the misery.
Even today, it’s hard to get a critical narrative out on these issues. Some months ago, the Independent Film Channel told me they would broadcast In Debt We Trust (Indebtwetrust.com), the documentary I made warning of the crisis. Late last week, they killed it. No real reason given. On the same day, John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committed had staffers meet with me to schedule a screening on the Hill. He thinks members of Congress should see it urgently.
This is part of the media-reality disconnect we have to confront. You can’t trust the financiers or the media that gave them a pass. We have to arm ourselves with information and prepare for the possible catastrophe to come.
News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He is looking for a publisher for WE ARE SCREWED, a new book he’s written about the crisis. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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